How platform cooperatives deal with the size-identity tradeoff?

The first presenter was Jovana Karanovic. She is precisely the founder of Reshaping Work, and researcher at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation at VU Amsterdam. Following Carmelo Cenammo, the starting point of her talk was a trade-off that platforms face: the one of the platform size that leverages on growth of network effects (the winner-takes-all logic of Uber, Airbnb, and Deliveroo), and the other being the platform identity, which leverages on market positioning, platform quality and distinct content. The examples Jovana pointed out for the later were Grab and Careem, which beat big platforms by attending the particular preferences of Southeast Asia and Middle East users, respectively.

Her research question, along with her colleagues Hans Berends and Yuval Engel, is the following: how do platform cooperatives deal with the tradeoff between platform size and identity?

To tackle this question, they are comparing four case studies of platform cooperatives across four different industries: Wehelpen (care), Partago (car rental), Stocksy (stock photography), and Fairbnb (vacation rentals). Wehelpen and Partago look for “local” network effects (market segments); Stocksy and Fairbnb look for “global” network effects (entire market).

The key here, in my opinion, is to think if the specific strategic management of the local/global tradeoffs by platform cooperatives helps them to compete with platforms that leverage on ridiculously large financial resources to lower prices and “buy” clients to boost the network effect. These are the insights she presented:

– In terms of control mechanisms, Wehelpen and Partagon bet for an identity-driven market positioning through communication, set different rules for each community they serve, and use the cost of platform affiliation as a mean of control as well. On their “global side”, Stocksy and Fairbnb establish the following control mechanisms: quality base selection (e.g Stocky selects only top photographers) and selection based on adherence to values/principles (e.g. Fairbnb has 1 host 1 house policy).

– In terms of differentiation strategies, Wehelpen and Partago enforce a strong identity and adapts the offer to local particularities. If I understand this correctly, the alternative organization flavor (and its potential impact in terms of purpose and sustainability) can be a distinctive factor in terms of identity. They also stress (of course) the importance of local adaptation and market-segment specialization (which can leverage in their connections and social ties with existing local communities). Stocksy and Fairbnb, restrict market access on the supply side, which leads to offering more consistency. Also, platform architectures can support the identity, attracting a specific type of user (again, e.g., sustainability-driven).

I think that these insights support something that I wrote elsewhere: the fact that they can design a business model not-investor-centered can suppose a greater value proposition to patrons (and other stakeholders). Also, there is the fact that being alternative forms of organization helps them to differentiate their identity in terms of competitive advantage, which is something I was not sure it would happen.

What couriers think about platform cooperatives in Barcelona?

Ricard Espelt, from Dimmons research group at Open University of Catalonia, showed preliminary results of their research on platform couriers working in Barcelona: they are isolated from the perspective of law and they had to rely on emergent or alternative unions. Nor them nor the stakeholders have reached an agreement on how to solve their problems. They are themselves divided in between those that favor the creation of alternative- more coop-oriented-platforms, while others rather prefer to fight for labor rights in the current platforms.

The good news is, therefore, that there are couriers open to alternative forms of organization such as platform cooperatives. I do not think that it is crucial to know how many are they, but their existence, for that fact changes completely the feasibility of their existence. That is important, particularly in those countries in which legislation is leaning towards profit-oriented platforms.

Do algorithms contribute to shape the legal status of platform workers?

Anna Ginès i Fabrellas, professor and researcher at ESADE Business School, took a fascinating look at platform algorithms in terms of how they actually intervene/shape the legal status of workers:

• In terms of the debate “platforms as technological firms that just mediate between offer and demand”, vs “platforms as service providers” (algorithmic management), Anna convincingly argued that the role of the algorithm is so crucial in managing the delivery of services that this platforms cannot escape from the fact that they are service providers. And by the same token, platforms are a relevant productive infrastructure.
• When looking at algorithms as subordination, she showed that the massive data collected by geolocalization systems turns out to be a very effective form of control/management.
• Finally, the nature of platform algorithms (or at least the current ones) kills any dimension of workers entrepreneurship, for they adopt the most relevant decisions.

Anna paid attention as well to the new forms of worker’s precarity, and the different approaches to battle them. Being platform cooperatives one of them, she also pointed to the French regulation of platform worker’s rights, or the proposal of an entirely new legal regime for them.

As I see it, platform cooperatives are the straight-forward solution, because it not requires legal changes on their side.

Would a UBI help a transition to platform cooperatives?

Finally, Melisa Renau, also from Dimmons at UOC, presented her analytical model for conflict social relationships, applied to the courier’s case. Her research question is “How and if UBI could affect power relations between employers and workers by increasing and improving workers’ exit and voice options in the platform economy. Her elegant model, that draws from the Hirschman’s triangle and the Birnbaum and Wispelaere exit options models, showed that UBI is not a silver bullet:

• the empowering potential of a UBI depends on endogenous and exogenous variables.
• Providing economic independence does not mean ensuring equality,

While there is a hype around UBI, I see much more desirable the platform cooperative option, based on workers ownership and multistakeholder governance, (or open value networks, for that matter).

Finally, some of the best outcomes of the event came from the intervention of platform workers. I participated in a walk with two women that founded a union for cleaning ladies like them that deserved a dissertation at UAB. They showed outstanding intelligence, courage, and dignity in front of the abuses of the platform business model. And I could not help to tell them that I will contact them to talk about cooperative platforms.

New Reshaping Work regional events are on the way at Amsterdam, Novi Sad and Stockholm. They will equally stress the importance of research-based knowledge. Keep your eye on the growing list… or organize one in your city!

The post Prospective future of platform cooperatives: my takeaways from Reshaping Work Barcelona 2019 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Michelle Chen

Can good values be good business, too? For generations, the cooperative movement has been answering with a resounding “Yes!”

After a surge of entrepreneurial fervor following the 2007 economic collapse, cooperative ventures are even getting a nod from our divided government: In August, Congress passed the Main Street Employee Ownership Act. The measure aims to help launch the next crop of worker-ownership ventures by directing the Small Business Administration to take proactive steps to increase technical and financial assistance for budding worker-owned cooperatives. Although the law does not provide major new funding, advocates hope it broadens avenues for securing seed financing, and for conducting community-outreach programs through local SBA offices.

Although the law offers just a small boost to the sector, according to Melissa Hoover, executive director of the Democracy at Work Institute, “It’s a start. It’s the very first time that anyone ever said worker coops matter in federal legislation.”

Often the main barrier to launching a coop is simply lack of knowledge—worker cooperatives aren’t just a fluffy hippie social experiment, they’re viable businesses with a track record of promoting civic-minded sustainable enterprises. What worker-owned cooperatives offer is simply this: a stake for each worker in the future. Based on a structure centered on shared equity and worker autonomy, the business model, which hews to a principle of “one-member-one-vote” workplace governance, intrinsically guarantees that each worker profits in tandem with their labor. The key difference from the conventional corporate model is that workers share in the equity and direct how funds are reinvested, be it in pay raises and pensions, new hires, or investing in tech upgrades and staff training.

According to surveys of the roughly 300 to 400 cooperatives nationwide, more than a third were launched since 2000. Their trades range from craft breweries to cab companies. The median coop workforce has nine to 10 people (that’s basically the equivalent number of co-owners), and a total workforce of more than 6,800. Far from the penurious, tree-hugging stereotype, coops run on average a yearly profit margin of some 3 percent, yielding about $150,000 in profits. Compared to the precarious, low-wage jobs that are driving the fastest-growing industries, coop workers earn considerably more, about $15.80 per hour, and work just over 30 hours per week. Median tenure for employee-owners is also about 50 percent higher.

The foundation of the cooperative is an idea for a business that produces material and social good together, which in turn also does good for workers’ communities. This principle, reflecting an ethical framework known as the “solidarity economy,” is put to practice in ventures like the Queens-based eco-friendly cleaning company Pa’lante, which is cooperatively run by a group of housekeepers who merge environmental concern with labor empowerment. Or the driver-led Union Taxi coop of Denver, which also mobilizes against the expansion of exploitative ride-sharing apps.

Though worker-ownership doesn’t necessarily mesh with the traditional unionization model, the Oakland-based Design Action Collective has joined a unique cadre of unionized coops, represented by Pacific Media Guild, in order to fully embody the movement culture that the enterprise serves. On a larger scale, Cooperative Home Care Association has established a 2,000-strong presence in New York City’s home health-care sector, with a fully unionized staff of care workers, who also mobilize with labor-led campaigns for health-care funding.

The equity principle of worker-owned cooperatives could be especially crucial for communities of color, as a path toward expanding community investment and closing the abysmal racial wealth gap. A community-based cooperative can be a vital economic on-ramp for women, immigrants, and people of color historically excluded from entrepreneurship. So far, the cooperative sector is roughly 63 percent people of color, up from 59 percent in 2015.

While many coops are start-ups, conversion of conventional businesses to cooperatives can be a vital investment in marginalized communities, and also widen accessibility to credit, since start-up capital can be pooled collectively. Of the 15 new cooperatives that launched in 2016, 11 were conversions.

As struggling communities lose the mom-and-pop shops that have long been a bulwark of economic opportunity, Hoover says,“It’s really dangerous for our small-business ecosystem for [systematic sell-offs and closures, instead of conversion to coops] to happen.… What’s happening to those businesses as their owners are getting older is that they’re getting shut down or consolidated, it really changes that landscape.”

But conversions to more democratic ownership can preserve local assets, and in less-diverse economic landscapes, cooperatives can actively diversify historically white-male dominated sectors. “Who owns businesses in this country,” Hoover says, “are white men.… And who works in most businesses in this country are not white men.” When a retiring boss passes ownership onto workers, “you’re effectively making a racial wealth transfer from an aging white man to a much more diverse set of business owners.” Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives, a coalition of worker-owned firms, has tried to expand its sector by launching a new Fund for Employee Ownership to finance fresh conversions of old local businesses.

When coops rescue a local family business, it could inject not just a capital infusion but an inspired redevelopment vision. Unlike your average big-box retailer, cooperatives tend to stick with their democratic ethos over the long run. Many coop enterprises actively partner with civic-minded financial institutions, like community credit unions. And while a single business won’t radically change the country’s dysfunctional social and economic policies, a network of cooperatives can foster progressive programs such as promoting workers’ healththrough providing comprehensive benefits, expanding access to affordable childcare, and cultivating more balanced schedule systems and labor-directed workplace-safety programs.

Now that the cooperative sector is entering a more complex economic horizon, it can push for more supportive public policies—like pro-cooperative labor laws that help worker-owners organize, city-based development programs like New York’s Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative, and opening Workforce Development funding for coops.

“More and more, people who are developing coops to solve social problems are thinking at a bigger scale, and with more ambition,” Hoover says. “They’re thinking about…how do we leverage all the things that traditional businesses do, but for good?”

And since worker-owners practice and produce what they preach, the budding world of cooperatives is in a perfect position to make the change they want, and to pay it forward.

Image: Glut collective member Fiifi Andoh tends to a customer in 2015. Glut is a worker-owned cooperative store that serves the community in in Mount Rainier, Maryland. (USDA / Lance Cheung)

Originally published on The Nation, 8th March 2019: https://www.thenation.com/article/worker-cooperatives-economy-business/

The post What if Workers Owned Their Workplaces? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Steven Tufts: The so-called gig-economy is celebrated, maligned, fetishized, and qualified by analysts. Whether it is called the collaborative, platform, crowd-sourcing, or sharing-economy, the rise of peer-to-peer exchanges does raise important questions for workers. Do emerging ‘sharing-economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb mark a significant shift in production and distribution systems? Are they emancipatory or exploitive? How can they be regulated across multiple jurisdictions and multiple platforms (e.g., Airbnb, Homestay, Uber, Lyft)? These and other questions have been raised by those emphasizing the platforms as a growing source of employment for contingent workers and their power to transform waged work into different relationships such as dependent contracts.¹ Kim Moody recently offered that these platforms are simply advanced ways for workers to ‘moonlight’ in an age characterized by depressed wage growth and the majority of new employment being in low wage, precarious jobs.² Despite the success of these services with consumers, there are contradictions for the future of work and implications for organized labour that unions are only starting to address – albeit in contradictory ways.

In mid-July 2016, the interim report on Ontario’s Changing Workplaces Review was released. The 300 plus page report said very little specifically about the gig-economy with the exception of a few sparse mentions on the role technology plays in changing employment relations.³ The Review is interested in how to extend workplace protection to workers using platforms such as Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb to supplement their incomes.⁴ Indeed, much of the report focusses on the general challenges of misclassification of workers as contractors.⁵ Here, the options presented to deal with gig-economy work are to either: maintain the status quo and exclude many of these workers as independent contractors; recognize these workers as ‘dependent contractors’⁶ (e.g. Uber drivers) and extend employment standards to them; or develop new regulations and standards that are specific to dependent contractors with exemptions for some sectors and workers.

Gaps and Exemptions

The narrow framing of the options misses some important points. First, regulation of ‘dependent contractors’ in the gig-economy will be subject to exemptions for specific sectors and workers just as other sectors managed to be exempt from the Employment Standards Act (ESA) in the past. Exemptions in the present ESA have been documented, such as the exclusion of a disproportionate numbers of women, young people, and racialized workers in sectors such as agriculture and hospitality.⁷ Second, there is an ‘enforcement gap’ that persists even when innovative and appropriate standards are established and applied to broad sectors.⁸If employers in small workplaces cannot be held accountable to the ESA, then how can the state ever enforce standards in a hyper-fissured gig-economy with private platforms organizing thousands of contractors? There are legal challenges to classifications, but the courts are inefficient in finding timely resolutions through litigation over classification and enforcement.⁹ Third, and perhaps most important, is the fact that new platforms continue to erode traditional employment relationships and threaten unionized jobs in existing sectors. Taxi drivers are replaced by Uber drivers and unionized hotel labour is replaced by Airbnb hosts and subcontracted cleaners. The platforms effectively download risk and investment to individuals as personal assets (i.e., cars and homes) are more deeply integrated into processes of accumulation. Workers earning substandard income in precarious employment are trapped in a vicious circle where they are forced to moonlight using Uber or rent out their homes via Airbnb to make ends meet.

At same time, capital is also able to use the platforms to create new types of operations. For example, property owners with multiple housing units can now rent out their properties on a short term basis at a daily rate much higher than longer term rentals with minimal transaction costs. These economic activities, mistakenly all lumped together as ‘home-sharing’, undermine unionized jobs and employment in sectors such as accommodation and have wide ranging impacts on rental housing markets.

The Rise of Airbnb

While the social costs of Uber were the first to be discussed at length,¹⁰ there is also the case of Airbnb and smaller short-term rental platforms. The rapid expansion of the Airbnb platform in Toronto is astounding. There are currently over 12,000 listings for Toronto on the Airbnb platform as the number of listings doubled in 2016 from 2015.¹¹ Airbnb’s recruitment and marketing image as an opportunity for individual ‘hosts’ to share their rooms or their homes to earn money for vacations and holidays is challenged by the data.¹² First, a majority of rentals and revenues are ‘entire homes’ not extra room rentals or shared accommodations. Second, over 50 per cent of revenues from Airbnb are generated by ‘multi-unit hosts’. These are professional operations holding multiple units – sometimes in the same condo facility – using the platform to enter the short-term rental accommodation sector.¹³

The result is the rise of ‘ghost hotels’, buildings or properties in close proximity with one another owned by a single operator renting out multiple units as short-term rentals on platforms such as Airbnb. The impact on the hotel sector is not insignificant. Airbnb has grown from almost nothing in 2010 to over 12,000 listings in the Greater Toronto Area and it is estimated to have already captured over 5% of the market share in Toronto and Vancouver. With over 1,000 rooms booked through Airbnb each night in Toronto, it is the equivalent of Toronto’s Chelsea hotel, the largest hotel in Canada, being rented to almost full capacity. There have been relatively few new net rooms added to the city’s hotel room supply over the last 15 years. Development has largely been restricted to smaller co-developments which include hotels and condos. At the same time, the owners of the Chelsea and other hotels are seeking to convert their properties to condominiums, further removing significant hotel room supply from the market. Conversions not only threaten unionized hotel jobs, but also diminish the city’s capacity to attract and host large conventions and events.

Even more significant than the employment effects is the removal of units from the rental housing stock. The shift of entire units from long term to short rentals has implications for Toronto’s housing supply. Research from David Wachsmuth and colleagues at McGill University has found that Airbnb alone removed 13,700 units from the housings stocks of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.¹⁴ The bulk of these listings are in high demand neighbourhoods. The expanding short-term rental units do not pay commercial property taxes (which are double that of residential property taxes) or any special hotel taxes, reducing the municipal revenues that are needed to pay for public housing and tourism promotion.

Other impacts have also been reported in the media. The disruption of Toronto neighbourhoods by ‘party Airbnbs’ where multiple unit hosts operate are a concern.¹⁵ Even more disruptive and contentious is the explosion of Airbnb rental units in condominiums, some of which have bylaws prohibiting short-term rentals. In a recent twist, Airbnb is now partnering with condo developments, engaging in one-on-one agreements with condo boards over issues such as security and complaints and agreeing to revenue sharing with the boards themselves.¹⁶ This privatized regulation allows the Airbnb platform sole access to condos that might otherwise pass bylaws to restrict ghost-hotels in the property or allow competing platforms to operate. Airbnb is also used by hosts to secure mortgages for homes they might not get financing for without the additional short-term rental revenue stream. It is hardly surprising that Airbnb has even floated the idea of building its own brick and mortar properties.

Airbnb is currently valued at $31-billion and growing rapidly in major urban areas. The company aggressively lobbies municipalities seeking to regulate its operations and does not hesitate to litigate.¹⁷Currently, there are multiple battles to regulate short-term rentals and Airbnb as the largest platform. There are a number of issues at play, ranging from restricting short-term rentals to in-home units, forbidding multiple listings by ghost hotel owners, and platform accountability. Unions have engaged with the rise of short-term rental platforms in different ways, with UNITEHERE taking the lead in Canada with the formation of the Fairbnb.ca coalition to fight against Airbnb’s unregulated expansion in Canada’s largest urban markets.

Union Response to Airbnb

Fairbnb.ca is a coalition founded by UNITEHERE Local 75 in July 2016. The coalition includes some tenants’ rights organizations, neighborhood groups, condo owners’ associations, hotel ownership groups, and sympathetic academics (including the author). It is best described as what Amanda Tattersall and David Reynolds term a ‘support’ coalition.¹⁸ Such coalitions are initiated by a union and largely resourced and administered by a single organization with some input from supporters. The coalition can operate at multiple scales, but in this case focuses on municipal bylaws. Fairbnb.ca is organizationally driven by UNITEHERE Local 75 representing 7,000 hospitality workers in Toronto. The coalition is entirely union-financed with in-kind contributions from coalition partners. The motivations for supporters range from primary concerns with lack of affordable housing in the city, to neighbourhood disruption, to the loss of hotel jobs. Further, there is a cross-class component to the coalition with the union partnering with some hotel employers fearing the loss of market share to short-term rentals.

Despite the structural limits of support coalitions, Fairbnb.ca has had significant success in raising the issues related to short-term rentals in Canada’s large cities. It has also been successful in getting municipalities to consider the impacts of short-term rentals seriously and regulate online platforms through municipal bylaws. This has been achieved primarily through media campaigns and lobbying efforts countering the superior communications and lobbying resources of Airbnb. In Toronto, proposed legislation will establish a licensing and registration system and restrict ‘multiple listings’ from a single host. Still contentious is the issue of allowing home owners to list ‘secondary suites’ (self-contained units in homes) which can potentially be used as long-term rentals. There also remains a lack of clarity over how accountable platforms such as Airbnb will be in reporting violations and sharing data with the city.¹⁹

Though UNITEHERE has had significant success in engaging Airbnb through its coalition strategy, other unions have chosen a quite different path of engagement with the platform. Unifor in particular has publicly supported Airbnb as ‘progressive’ capital given the company’s support for a higher minimum wage, partnerships with settlement agencies housing refugees, and alleged openness to fair regulation. In a statement submitted to Toronto city council, Unifor President Jerry Dias argues that:

“Airbnb is setting an example for a path forward that couples the potential of the digital economy with the reality of working people across the country, and has demonstrated its willingness to operate in a manner consistent with the goals of broader society. Because of Airbnb’s progressive approach, Unifor is exploring ways to work together with them. We will continue to explore areas of mutual interest to improve the public good, and if possible work toward a national partnership.”²⁰

This ‘partnership’ is indeed politically useful for Airbnb as it conveniently gives the company some progressive legitimacy and provides councillors who wish to side with Airbnb against Fairbnb.ca some political cover. Less clear is what Unifor has to gain through such a social ‘partnership’. In the USA, SEIU did attempt to undermine UNITEHERE with a similar partnership with Airbnb that promised the union access to organizing short-term rental room cleaners. But this deal collapsed after SEIU faced public criticism (and perhaps also recognized how difficult it would be to organize workers in ghost hotels).²¹ Unifor may be seeking a similar arrangement or even an understanding that would allow the union to represent brick and mortar hotels being planned by Airbnb.²² Here, we see echoes of the union’s controversial strategy to form a partnership with Magna with its ‘Framework for Fairness’ agreement a decade ago.²³ Yet short-term rentals employ far less workers than the auto parts sector. In a recent report released by The Hotel Association of Canada, it is estimated that the hotel sector in Canada generates 191,600 full-time equivalent jobs, while Airbnb generates only 1,037.²⁴ At this time, evidence indicates that short-term rentals simply do not generate nearly the same number of jobs as the traditional hotel sector which provides a full range of hospitality services. It is difficult to see how large numbers of new members might be organized through this strategy and whether any partnership with Airbnb will give Unifor any leverage in reaching these precarious workers.

It may be that Unifor’s involvement with Airbnb is more related to recent conflicts among unions. In July 2016, Airbnb made a great deal of fanfare of its hiring of Alex Dagg as its Canadian Policy Lead to head-up its municipal lobbying efforts. Dagg, once heralded as a promising and innovative labour organizer in Toronto was a leader of UNITE when it merged with HERE in the mid-2000s. Following an intense internal fight, the UNITE portion of the UNITEHERE merger left the union to form Workers United and joined SEIU. The relationship between Dagg and what now constitutes UNITEHERE Local 75 might be charitably described as ‘strained’. Dagg soon left SEIU to become Director of Operations for the National Hockey League Players Association. The hiring of Dagg to counter Fairbnb.ca would appear to be more than coincidence and quite strategic on the company’s part. Airbnb in its press release announcing Dagg’s appointment focused – in keeping with its progressive capital image – on Dagg’s career experience ‘championing social justice’ in the union movement.²⁵

Unifor established a presence in the accommodation sector decades ago with its merger with railway workers in the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Transport and General Workers, which also represented the workers employed at the grand railway hotels. UNITEHERE has historically defended itself against raiding from a number of large unions operating in Canada. As part of this experience, it is not unexpected that UNITEHERE endorsed a letter to the CLC from a number of its affiliates harshly criticizing Unifor’s disastrous attempt to take over the Amalgamated Transit Union Local in 2016. In short, the opposing forms of union engagement with Airbnb may be inseparable from patterns of divisive labour movement internal conflicts which the company is trying to exploit to its advantage.

Beyond Cross-Class Coalitions

As a support coalition, Fairbnb.ca is not primarily designed to build a movement for affordable housing or broader regulation of the gig-economy. Fairbnb.ca’s success to date as a specific issue public campaign lies with a single organization setting strategic goals and partners deciding how best they can provide support (e.g., joint-lobbying, deputations). Admittedly, it is an effective structure for this type of campaign. In the case of short-term rentals, it can be argued that UNITEHERE’s and Unifor’s strategic choices engaging the gig-economy are also shaped by the persistent sectarianism that continues to plague the labour movement in Canada.

UNITEHERE, a small union relative to large general unions in Canada, is understandably cautious about working closely with other unions given that it has been targeted for raiding in the past. Also important is the fact that Fairbnb.ca is a cross-class coalition that does include hotel employers. While the few employers formally in Fairbnb.ca do not provide anything beyond in-kind support, the inclusion of capital from the outset structures the aims of the coalition in a very specific manner. The decision to not initially build a larger class-based coalition with multiple unions and a more expansive list of community groups limits Fairbnb.ca primarily to a media campaign and lobbying effort.

Unifor’s opposing strategy of embracing cross-class ‘progressive capital’ is as cynical as it is short-sighted. Partnership with Airbnb is unlikely to yield many new members from ‘ghost hotels’ and it remains unclear how Dias will explain partnership with a company undermining traditional hotels to his members working in the sector. Dias will also have to explain to activist members why their union is supporting a multinational firm that is removing thousands of rental units from the housing stock of large cities. While it is difficult to imagine that Unifor has embraced the partnership deal solely in response to a political difference with a smaller union, this cannot be easily dismissed as a partial explanation.

No single union is able to take on such immense and growing sectors of the economy alone. Central labour bodies and local labour councils do not have the capacities (or the affiliate support) to coordinate sectoral responses and strategies, so new formations are needed. In the case of short-term rentals, a local sector council of unions representing hotel workers may be useful. UNITEHERE represents the majority of unionized hotel workers in Toronto, but there are other large and well-resourced unions representing hotel workers in large cities. A common sectoral strategy and approach is what concern for workers in the sector demands. On this front, UNITEHERE has begun the process of re-establishing relations with the CSN fighting against short-term rentals in Quebec. At the same time, Unifor has participated in informal local sector councils such as the Toronto Airport Workers’ Council (TAWC) as it counters efforts to privatize Pearson International Airport.²⁶

New spaces of solidarity such as local sector councils where local unions representing workers in the same sector can talk to each other about common shop-floor issues are important. Further, local united fronts will more effectively confront large gig-economy firms lobbying against progressive municipal regulation – an increasingly important arena of engagement for labour, capital, and the state.²⁷ While unions require an urban strategy, local sector councils do not need to abandon the arenas of provincial or national regulation or fail to engage with the Changing Workplaces Review and its implications for gig-economy work. Successful local sector councils with an urban focus will have a multi-scalar sensibility as all social movements do. Local level formations can, however, address common concerns free from national and international leadership and start to overcome destructive sectarianism. If organized labour fragmented, workers will continue to suffer in – or be displaced from – regressive gig-economy workplaces. •

Endnotes

1. Ursula Huws is a leading voice of critical gig-economy analysis in this respect. See: “Platform labour: Sharing Economy or Virtual Wild West?,” Journal for a Progressive Economy, January, 2016, 24-27.
2. C. Brooks, “Interview with Kim Moody: Busting the Myths of a Workerless Future,” Labor Notes, July 26, 2016.
3. C.M. Mitchell and J.C. Murray, Changing Workplaces Review – Special Advisors’ Interim Report. Prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Labour to support the Changing Workplaces Review, 2016. The review does briefly mention the gig economy on p. 146.
4. The Changing Workplaces Review comments: “The growth of ‘the sharing economy’ continues to challenge business, lawmakers and regulators,” p. 19.
5. The Changing Workplaces Review acknowledges that for labour advocates:“Their concern about misclassification was not limited to one business or sector, but was expressed as likely more prevalent in certain segments of the economy including: the “gig” or “sharing” economy, cleaning, trucking, food delivery and information technology – to name but a few.” p. 146.
6. “Dependent Contractor” is the ‘common law compromise between standard employment relationship and independent contractor. See also G. White, “When will labour laws catch up with the gig economy?,” The Atlantic, December 9, 2015; D. Doorey, The Law of Work: Common Law and the Regulation of Work. Emond Publishing, Toronto, 2016.
7. L. Vosko, A.M. Noack, M.P. Thomas, How Far Does the Employment Standards Act, 2000 Extend and What Are the Gaps in Coverage, Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Labour, (Submission prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Labour to support the Changing Workplaces Review) 2015.
8. L. Vosko and M. Thomas, ‘Confronting the employment standards enforcement gap: Exploring the potential for union engagement with employment law in Ontario, Canada’ Journal of Industrial Relations 56 (5), 2014, 631-652.
9. M.A. Cherry, ‘Beyond Misclassification: The Digital Transformation of Work’, Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 37(3), 2016, 544-577.
10. See for example B. Rogers, “The Social Costs of Uber,” University of Chicago Law Review Dialogue, 82(1), 2015, 85-102.
11. For a thorough report on the impact of Airbnb on Toronto’s housing market see T. Wieditz, Squeezed Out: Airbnb’s Commercialization of Home-Sharing in Toronto. Toronto: Fairbnb.ca, 2017. The report and other data can be found at fairbnb.ca
12. M. Lecuyer, M. Tucker, and A. Chaintreau, “Improving the Transparency of the Sharing Economy.” International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2), April 3–7, 2017, Perth, Australia published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License WWW 2017 Companion, 2017.
13. Recent data has found that 84% of Airbnb revenues in the GTA come from entire home rentals and 57% of revenues from multi-unit hosts. See HLT Advisory, AirBnB… & the Impact on the Canadian Hotel Industry, Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto. June, 2016.
14. D. Wachsmuth, D. Kerrigan, D. Chaney, and A. Shillolo Short-term cities: Airbnb’s impact on Canadian housing markets. A report from the Urban Politics and Governance research group School of Urban Planning McGill University. McGill University, Montreal, August 10, 2017.
15. Bleecker Street in Cabbagetown is one such case. T. Kalinkowski, “Bleecker St. residents say ‘ghost hotels’ ruining neighbourhood,” Toronto Star, August 5, 2016.
16. L. Xing, “Toronto condo signs on to 1st agreement in Canada to regulate Airbnb rentals,” CBC News, October 25, 2017.
17. In 2016, Airbnb sued both New York and San Francisco over its regulations of short-term rentals. K. Benner, “Airbnb in Disputes with New York and San Francisco,” New York Times, June 28, 2016.
18. A. Tattersall, and D. Reynolds, ‘The Shifting Power of labor-community coalitions: identifying common elements of powerful coalitions in Australia and the US’, WorkingUSA, 10, 2007, 77–102.
19. Toronto City Council is scheduled to vote of AirBnB bylaws in early December 2017.
20. J. Dias, Letter to Mayor John Tory and the Executive Committee EX26.3.29, June 16, 2017. A similar letter was submitted to Vancouver’s Mayor and City Council on October 24, 2017 as the city debates a short-term rental policy.
21. S. Levin, “Airbnb’s controversial deal with labor union falls apart after intense backlash,” The Guardian, April 21, 2016.
22. The company is hesitant to call these ‘hotels’ and prefers ‘branded home-sharing units’ or ‘community centres’.
23. On the Magna deal see S. Gindin, “The CAW and Magna: What if Magna Builds an Assembly Plant?,” The Bullet, Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 71, November 3, 2007.
24. CBRE, An Overview of the AirBnB and the Hotel Sector in Canada, Hotel Association of Canada, Ottawa, 2017.
25. Airbnb, ‘Airbnb names new Canadian Executive’, Press release posted on CNW, July 25, 2016.
26. See T. Heffernan, “Mobilizing Workers at the Toronto Airport: Interview with Sean Smith,” The Bullet, Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 1260, May 24, 2016.
27. On this point see the recent books: I. MacDonald (ed), Unions and the City: Negotiating Urban Change. ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2017; M. Greenberg and P. Lewis (eds). The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2017.

Steven Tufts is an Associate Professor in Geography at York University.

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Nearly one in three working Americans is an independent worker. That’s 53 million people – and growing. We’re lawyers and nannies. We’re graphic designers and temps. We’re the future of the economy. And we’re stronger together than we are alone.

Freelancers Union is the largest and fast-growing organization representing the 57 million independent workers across the country. We give our 375,000+ members a powerful voice through policy advocacy, benefits, and community.

Membership is free and open to freelancers of all kinds, from graphic designers to contractors to entrepreneurs to moonlighters. Freelancers Union offers:

• Benefits such as health, dental, term life, disability, and liability insurance
• Community, including SPARK, local freelance hubs in nearly 25 major cities
• Advocacy for policy change, such as the annual Freelancing in America survey and the Freelance Isn’t Free campaign
• Resources, including the #1 blog for freelancers

Freelancers Union was founded by Sara Horowitz in 1995. In 2008, we launched Freelancers Insurance Company, the first portable benefits model for freelancers, providing independent workers with high-quality, affordable, and portable health insurance. The union’s National Benefits Platform, launched in 2014, helps freelancers across America access benefits, including retirement, life, liability, dental and disability insurance.

Since its founding, Freelancers Union has fought for and won protections for freelance workers, including Unincorporated Business Tax reform and successfully advocating for new models for health care. In 2016, Freelancers Union led a victorious campaign to enact first-of-its kind legislation in New York City giving freelancers unprecedented protections from nonpayment.

For more information, and to join us: https://www.freelancersunion.org/

The post The Work Revolution: How Freelancers Got a Union appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Platform Co-op Development Kit is a multi-year project that advances the cooperative digital economy. The Kit is a project by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, homed at The New School in New York City, in collaboration with the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University in Toronto, and platform co-op communities worldwide.

The motivation behind this project is that we are approached, almost daily with the question of how to start a platform co-op. The work of the Kit is two-fold. First, we provide a range of resources that make it easier to start a platform co-op. Second, we will offer tools not simply by building coop technology but technology that will allow the platform co-op ecosystem to grow. We started the co-design process by engaging five pilot platform co-ops in Brazil, Germany, Australia, the United States, and India. The pilot groups:

• 3,000 babysitters in Illinois organized by the Service Workers Union looking for an onboarding, labor, and purchasing platform;

• young urban women in Ahmedabad, India who are part of the SEWA Federation of co-ops bringing beauty services to people’s homes through an app;

• trash pickers currently operating in Sao Paolo and Recife, Brazil, whose work recycling trash makes up more than 90 percent of Brazil’s entire recycling capacity;

• refugee women in Germany, starting in Hamburg with Syrian, Albanian, and Iranian women, who plan to offer a platform co-op for child care services and elder care;

• homecare workers in Australia, the only worker co-op in social care in Australia, that is seeking to build a governance tool for its remote rural members.

All open source tools that we will design with these groups will be customizable for a range of platform co-ops in various sectors and countries.

Initiated with a $1,000,000 grant from Google.org, this project seeks to raise a total of $10,000,000.

By building a broad coalition, our team will engage people around the globe who are seeking to learn about and then build platform co-ops with their communities.

By working with pilot groups in various sectors — from home services, garbage-recycling and beauty services, to child and elder care — we will demonstrate how the cooperative approach plays out in the digital economy. We will work with co-ops, technologists, policy facilitators, researchers, and freelancers to advance the movement for a cooperative digital economy. Watch an video introduction about this work here.

Read the press releases about the Kit from the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, The New School, and OCAD University. Explore how this work connects with Google.org’s “Future of Work” Initiative here. Read media coverage about the project with recent articles from Fast Company (also discussing the question of accepting Google funding), Shareable, and Philanthropy News Digest.

Goals of the Kit

Over the next two years, with the support of the platform co-op community, we will develop open source tools for use worldwide; and provide various resources such as essential legal, intellectual, and entrepreneurial resources that make it easier to start a platform co-op. This work depends on collaborations with cooperators around the world coming together to support one another and advance this movement.

These goals will be met through the following deliverables:

• Creation of open source labor platforms and online governance tools through co-design processes with five pilot groups, tailored to be extensible and customizable for other platform co-ops with similar needs;

• Development of an online wikipedia-style learning commons, activated by informal as well as institutional online learning groups in several countries;

• Development of a curriculum about the cooperative digital economy to be distributed with undergraduate and graduate programs in business schools and law schools as well as acceleratorator programs;

• Creation of a data-rich, interactive map of platform co-ops, and supporting organizations and individuals;

• Development of an international network of lawyers to provide legal resources to assist the launch of (platform) co-ops;

• Development of a global narrative co-written by co-op workers, researchers, unionistas, technologists, and policymakers.

• Ongoing reports and analysis about work in progress made available to the public online, and regular calls for community engagement and input

Strategy for Achieving Goals

The design and development of the tools will be guided by the platform co-op communities themselves. Full cycles of co-design, prototyping, implementation & evaluation will ensure that the tools fulfill the needs of the community. Additionally, by working with diverse pilot organizations and populations, our team will provide essential assistance to platform coops of all stripes, and to workers with many socioeconomic backgrounds. This reverses the dominant pattern of platform development which typically excludes marginalized groups, contributing to greater economic and social inequities. The project places vulnerable and marginalized workers at the center.

Creating a supporting infrastructure for platform co-ops through a learning commons, interactive map, cooperative curriculum development, and legal resources will launch simultaneously with pilot group work. Website development will be lead by the IDRC team, and we continue to engage with a number of collaborators to generate the various components that will eventually make up the online ecosystem. To achieve both goals, time and resources will be split over the next two years, with 70% of efforts going towards the pilot groups, and 30% towards the projects’s online learning components.

Finally, the project will run as an open and transparent community. All resources and updates will be available online to any prospective or existing co-op, and all interested persons. Explore recent updates, for example, from the IDRC on the Kit and our work with the pilot groups thus far. And review our blog updates documenting recent visits with our Hamburg and SEWA pilot groups.

Through collaboration with pilot groups and by engaging individuals committed to the movement, the toolkit grows from small successes. As our work progresses, we will engage other cooperative ventures, organizations, and individuals who can contribute different resources and services to advance this critical project. Stay up to date on our work so that now or in the near future, we can draw on the expertise of the community and find ways of collaborating.

How We Will Measure Success

Grant activities started on July 1, 2018 and will conclude with Google on July 2020. Iterations of the deliverables and prototypes will be freely available and open to critique and input as our work advances. A broader measurement of the project’s impact, however, will not be available until completion.

We will consider the project a success if the Kit was implemented by low income workers in at least three pilot groups & successfully transferred to at least one other labor market. Success would be based on the evidence of higher wages, better working conditions, democratic governance within the enterprise, & potential for scaling this work to more workers. Due to the nature of this work, these metrics can only be measured upon the completion of the project. In the same way a highway’s efficacy cannot be measured while it is still under construction, so too can the pilot groups’ effects not be known until full completion and implementation.

During the project, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium will provide qualitative research investigations and progress reports on the pilot groups. Written reports will provide big-picture analysis, and highlight successes, failures, best practices, and other findings from the pilot groups. These reports will also discuss the feasibility of these models applying to other industries or regions, and when applicable, offer policy recommendations.

For strengthening the platform co-op economic movement and building an online infrastructure of support, we will fulfill these objectives:

• Engage a variety of unique platform co-ops in distinct countries to facilitate the scaling of our labor platform and distributed governance tools

•Establish active learning groups engaged with our content online in at various countries

• Deliver high profile talks and media publications about Kit work

• Create a global narrative co-written by stakeholders and make it available for translation in different languages.

• Create and distribute a curriculum to shared with business schools, law schools, undergraduate or graduate programs at universities.

• Develop policy briefs and engage different political parties to consider

• Develop and share platform co-op worker testimonials to be hosted online

• Generate traffic to the platform.coop website with blogs and a new site design

We will also use non-parametric methodologies of measurement so that we do not impose a particular notion of success onto groups that are marginalized and have already suffered from the effects of traditional “successful” interventions.

The outcomes of the Kit will be diverse and variable, but collectively the change will be significant. We hope to reach the most marginalized of platform workers and build our work from their perspective. To achieve this we need to look beyond predetermined measures of success. If we only concern ourselves with measuring success through quantitative metrics, then we would be forced to develop quick interventions that scale quickly. We would be merely recreating the platforms of the past that have contributed to existing economic and social inequities and further marginalization. That is a strategy of the exploitative, extractive companies we hope not to emulate.

Instead, the project will demonstrate that we have only scratched the surface of imagining the possibilities for the cooperative digital economy. While our work over the next two years can begin to address the urgent needs for more organized research and infrastructure to support platform co-ops, more importantly, it will lay the foundation for future researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, co-op workers, technologists, and many others to pick-up this work and carry it forward in new directions.

Please consider joining us in this critical work. We need the time and energy of many people for this work to succeed. If you think you can help, please write to us at [email protected] and we can share more on how to get involved.

The post ​Strengthening the Movement for a Cooperative Digital Economy Through The Platform Co-op Development Kit appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Forty years later, we are facing a convergence of crises: militarism andnuclear weapons, climate chaos and the destruction of jobs by new technologies and automation. These crises mean we have to start thinking about technology as political, as the Lucas Aerospace workers did, and reopen the debate about industrial conversion and economic democracy.

Democratic egalitarianism

What so inspires me about the Lucas Plan is the democratic egalitarianism which runs through its every part – the work processes, the products and even the very technology they propose.

This egalitarian ethic inspired Laurence Hall to make ‘The Lucas Plan’ the focus of a regular gathering of Young Quakers in Lancaster, up the line from the Trident nuclear submarine yards in Barrow.

Eurig Scandrett from the Scottish Green Party made it the theme for Green Party trade unionists because ‘it is the most inspiring example of workers on the shop floor who get self-organised and demand to make what humanity needs.’

The fact that the plan was defeated has not diluted its capacity to inspire. For Scandrett, its defeat demonstrated that ‘it is the vested interests of the military-industrial machine which is the problem, and that workers liberating their collective brain is where the solution lies.’

The broad outline of the Lucas Aerospace workers’ story was familiar enough in the mid-1970s. Workers faced redundancies, got organised, resisted and insisted that their skills and machinery were not redundant. But here they went further. They drew together alternative ideas with those of supportive academics and, with the encouragement of Tony Benn (then industry secretary in the Labour government), produced their ‘Alternative Corporate Plan for Socially Useful Production’, illustrated with prototypes. Management refused to negotiate. The government, under pressure from the CBI and the City, made gestures of a willingness to talk, but would not move against management. The plan was never implemented, or even seriously considered, although commercial companies elsewhere picked up some of the ideas.

So what are the lessons we can draw from this past experience of ‘ordinary’ people organising and sharing their practical knowledge and skills to illustrate in the present the changes of which we dream? Some of the main ones are discussed below.

Lesson 1: Find common ground

A first condition for this group of fairly conventional, mainly middle-aged, male trade unionists to create what became a beacon of an alternative economics was building the organisation that eventually provided the means by which many individual intelligences became what Eurig Scandrett refers to as ‘collective’. Corporate ‘rationalisation’ meant groups of workers were being bought, discarded and the best sold on or used till they fell apart, like sacks of old clothes.

The shop stewards at the different Lucas Aerospace sites forged collective strength by taking action over basic common issues such as wages and conditions. This served to unite groups of workers with very different traditions and interests.

Lesson 2: Build democracy

Immense care and collective self-reflectiveness was needed to bring such diverse groups into a more or less united organisation.

All 35 (or so) delegates had the right to speak at meetings of the multi-union Combine shop stewards committee but decisions on recommendations to be taken back to the workforce were on the basis of ‘one site, one vote’. The decisions were binding on the delegates, who were expected to campaign for them at their local sites, although the sites were free to accept or reject them as they saw fit. This sensitive and consciously protected relationship between the Combine and the sites made it feel as though the members and local shop steward on the office and factory floor were ‘absent friends’, whose presence was palpable.

Lesson 3: Build alliances and look ahead

Although the Combine won victories, they felt as though they were engaged in a labour of Sisyphus – getting national agreement to halt job losses, only to find jobs were being slashed in different places and not because of decisions of local management.

The problem was Lucas’s restructuring towards longer production runs and more computer-controlled machinery, and its shifting investment into other European countries and the United States. The traditional approach of the trade union movement proved inadequate; instead the Combine produced its own experts and made use of outside help to educate and prepare itself.

Lesson 4: Building collective strategic intelligence.

‘We’re in a situation where politics is unavoidable,’ the Combine executive argued, in Combine News, in response to rumours of nationalisation of part of the aerospace industry. ‘Though there have been problems with nationalisation, we could, with the full involvement of all our members, insist on adequate safeguards against many of these. The advantages would be considerable, we would finally be working for our ultimate employers.’

They went on to sow the seeds of the alternative plan: ‘We could insist that the skill and talents of our members could be used to the full to engage in socially useful products like monorails and hovercraft, and that these skills are used in a much truer sense in the interests of the nation as a whole.’

This led to the presentation of the case for the nationalisation of Lucas Aerospace to Tony Benn, then secretary of state for industry. He was impressed: ‘Here was a group who had done the work to anticipate the problem. Others had come to me at the last minute saying their firm had gone bust and what could I do.’

For all his enthusiasm, he did not have the power to agree to nationalisation, but he suggested that the Combine should draw up an alternative corporate strategy for the company.

At first there was some scepticism. But the necessity of finding a new solution drove them on, and beyond management’s framework.

‘The only way that we could be involved in a corporate plan would be if we drew it up in a way which challenged the profit motive of the company and talked in terms of social profit,’ argued Combine delegate Mike Cooley, a designer who chaired the local branch of the technical trade union TASS.

The plan for socially useful production was a carefully phased process. Another Combine delegate, Mick Cooney, a fitter from Burnley, described the challenge: ‘The Combine wanted to know what machine tools we had. To do the Corporate Plan we were having to think as if we were planning. It really made the shop stewards sit up.’ The Combine asked site committees questions aimed to stimulate workers’ imagination: ‘How could the plant be run by the workforce? Are there any socially useful products which your plant could design and manufacture?’

Experiences of all kinds and knowledge of the company’s capacities led to 150 product ideas in six categories: medical equipment, transport vehicles, improved braking systems, energy conservation, oceanics, and telechiric machines.

Lesson 5: Know the limits

The idea inspired workers throughout the defence-related engineering industry, including the vast yards building nuclear submarines in Barrow, where designers worked with Mary Kaldor to submit alternatives to the Labour party defence policy committee. In the 1970’s the yards were owned by Vickers which also made tanks at the Elswick works on the Tyne in Newcastle. In Vickers a strong Combine Committee had been built in response to very similar pressures of rationalisation, acquisitions and closures that had stimulated the growth of the Lucas Aerospace Combine Commitee. Both Combine Committees had links with the Institute for Workers Control (IWC) and through the conferences and political connections organised by the IWC they found common cause in the idea of alternative plans for socially useful production. The shop stewards in the Elswick and Scotwood works responded to threats of reduncancies by drawing up such plans and gaining the support of Tony Benn and his close ally Stuart Holland. They made contact with shop stewards at Barrow, especially in the design office who were already doing their own work on alternatives. There had, in Barrow, been an earlier initiative towards diversification coming from Vickers management, led by an innovative engineer, George Henson, whose Quaker principles led him to refuse to work on the TSR2 at Vickers Weybridge plant and led to his move to Barrow where management wanted to diversify away from total dependence on government defence contracts.

However, Vickers responded to subsequent government nationalisation plans by keeping the profitable diversified section, making submersibles for deep sea oil exploration and handing over the yards to the government. The separation was a major blow to any longer-term diversification programme, but it’s success was a powerful memory for the designers who were still working on nuclear submarines and they were responsive to the contacts from across the country in Newcastle to collaborate on alternative plans to submit to the Labour party’s diversification committee. Labour’s defeat in 1979 closed down these possibilities. Later however, in the 1980s, some of those designers helped to create the Barrow Alternative Employment Committee (BAEC) to produce proposals for alternatives to Trident. By this time the Barrow yards were owned by British Aerospace, which rejected the strategy of civil diversification to keep skilled teams together. BAe concentrated entirely on its ‘core business’ whatever the cost in terms of loss of jobs.The only exception was war ships, the manufacture of which dominated the yards until the recent renewal of Trident.

Terry McSorley, a member of the now defunct BAEC, says: ‘The lesson I learnt is that site-based diversification won’t work’. Instead he now argues for an approach that integrates defence conversion with industrial strategy.

Steve Schofield, who was a researcher for the BAEC, draws a similar conclusion: ‘The Labour movement needs a much more ambitious arms conversion programme to challenge the embedded power of the military-industrial-complex.’ He argues for a change in security policy towards UN peacekeeping and peace building and suggests a combination of publicly-funded, national and regional investment banks for industries such as offshore wind and wave power to ensure an equitable distribution that benefits the small group of arms-dependent communities, including Barrow-in-Furness, Glasgow, Preston, Aldermaston and Plymouth.

Drawing on Lucas and his own more problematic experience in Barrow, he is certain that trade union and community participation is essential to guaranteeing that the skills of working people are maintained and enhanced.

We are in new times for trade union organisation but interest in democratic economics is increasing with the spread of green and solidarity economies, commons-based peer-to-peer production, and grassroots fabrication in ‘hackerspaces’ and ‘fab labs’. All of which has deepened ideas about connecting tacit knowledge and participatory prototyping to the political economy of technology development, as was the case with Lucas.

The lessons from the Lucas plan provide Labour’s proposed arms conversion agency with elements of a methodology for a network of organisations with an understanding of technological development not as a value-neutral process, autonomous from society, but shaped by social choices over its development – choices that the Lucas stewards showed need to become democratic.

This ‘ordinary’ group of workers demonstrated how it was possible to create a democratic economy. It is they, after all, who have the practical know how on which that technological development depends.

Originally published in Open Democracy

Photo by TheLeadSA

The post When the workers nearly took control: five lessons from the Lucas Plan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Megan Hafner and Elizabeth Ramaccia:  Far too many young people in the United States today are growing up without tangible examples of people impacted by a problem having the opportunity to shape their own reality. A teenager in a rural community could feel this absence after the town’s lone employer, which long provided the power and leadership to look after the basic needs of most people, shutters its doors, and no one knows quite how to fill its shoes. For a teenager growing up in an urban Rust Belt neighborhood, it could be because for decades her community was redlined, and power was, and still is, systematically denied.

We believe that knowing how to shape your own reality—be it individually in professional or personal matters, or together as communities—should be a core part of young people’s education. With that knowledge, they will be better equipped to navigate their own futures as well as participate in shaping the future of the place they call home. This belief, however, begs the questions: What does it look like for a community to own its own future? What do the people who make up a community need to know and be able to do?

In 2014, we founded Why We Work Here (WWWH) and embarked on a year of research to observe, record, and analyze what it looks like when various place-based groups seek not just to “fix” problems head on but also to make problem solving an inclusive, community-driven process, wherein power and leadership are shared. We selected six groups to look at across the country, representing a range of sectors (nonprofit, private, and philanthropic) and issue areas (economic development, environmental sustainability, education, housing). Each group distinguished itself in how it saw its role in and relationship to its community, and the degree to which it controlled decision-making processes. All saw measurable, positive, equitable change ensue from their efforts. We wanted to know: How do they do what they do? What do they believe? And, technical skills aside, what do they know how to do?

We discovered that, despite hailing from different sectors and geographical locations, the approaches used by these organizations have strong common threads, including:

• Leadership development and capacity building. The groups recognize that supporting self-aware, empathetic, and action-oriented residents capable of working collaboratively across differences is critical for change to be transformative and enduring. Specific projects or efforts are vehicles for ongoing capacity building as much as they are about project-specific outcomes.
• Building a foundation of trust. The groups prioritize the development and sustenance of trusting relationships, both between them and the greater community and among community members. They do this through supporting diverse constituencies by identifying common values, being transparent in their own decision making and operations, and delivering on their word.
• Shared vision. The groups recognize the value of “looking at the same picture,” and work to ensure that stakeholders are a part of the development and execution of a shared vision.

These tenets, along with the specific skills and mindsets we identified through our research as essential to the groups’ effectiveness, are the inspiration and underpinnings for WWWH’s current work with educators and high school students. Through real, project-based experiences that are contextualized in the community, we support young people to recognize their own agency in shaping both individual and community-wide outcomes, and equip them with the skills to act with courage. We work closely with educators so that they can lead these programs and integrate skill-building activities into the regular school day.

We would like to share the stories of three of the groups we researched in the hope that tangible examples can help others imagine how their own actions could support alternative futures for their own communities.¹ 

Incourage Community Foundation

Gus (left) was a high school principal in 2000, when Consolidated Papers, Inc. and the regional economy collapsed. Today, he and his teammates (Corey, center, and Heather, right) facilitate resident engagement efforts at Incourage and focus on building strong relationships and networks founded on trust. Their goal is to move people from a place of “They will take care of it,” to “I have a responsibility to be involved,” and eventually to “We can have shared stewardship of this place.”

Incourage is a community foundation that’s fostering a participatory culture whereby residents are shaping a renewed, inclusive economy in south Wood County, Wisconsin.

For much of the twentieth century, the regional economy of south Wood County was dominated by the paper industry and flush with stable jobs that allowed most people to live comfortably. In 1999, however, Consolidated Papers, Inc.—a Fortune 500 company headquartered there—announced that it was cutting seven hundred jobs, and the following year it was sold to a foreign company. By 2005, total employment in the county had been cut by 40 percent.² The sudden loss of this economic anchor heightened social divisions and the sense of hopelessness throughout the community, and resulted in the loss of a shared identity.³

The collapse was a wake-up call for Incourage—then the Community Foundation of Greater South Wood County—which at the time operated the same way as many community foundations: it reacted to the needs of the community. Its board and staff began reexamining the foundation’s role toward helping the region heal and regenerate a local economy. Their belief was that upward, lasting change would be possible if residents could develop the enduring confidence and competencies to envision and implement community-wide transformation.

In the past decade, Incourage has invested in efforts that are laying the groundwork for a new culture of collective self-determination locally, including their most ambitious project yet—the community-led redevelopment of the Tribune Building, once the home of the local newspaper. Incourage purchased the abandoned building in 2012, and since then it has facilitated a process for the community to direct the building’s redevelopment and programming.⁴

As anyone involved will tell you, this was about more than a building. At its core, the Tribune is a vehicle for building relationships based on mutual interests and hopes, for establishing new skills and ways to collaborate constructively, and for rebuilding a collective sense of confidence to act proactively. Regular meetings begin with a discussion of what progress has been made to date and how the current evening’s activities will influence the development process. Community members—usually several hundred in attendance—work in groups around a programmatic component of shared interest: the microbrewery, the kitchen incubator, the children’s spaces. Groups are led by community members who are trained facilitators.

While the Tribune process itself encourages new expectations, behaviors, and mindsets in participants, it also builds off of previous efforts investing in adaptive leadership skill development and building partnerships to support a stronger local economy. “What we’re seeing now wouldn’t have been possible previously,” an Incourage staff member explained, referencing the way participants are coming together to hear one another and collaborate and recognizing the value and potential of their own ideas.

Saint Paul Federation of Teachers

When her undergraduate advisor encouraged her to do her internship with SPFT, Zuki said, “Are you crazy?!” She felt like she’d been burned by teachers as she tried, and failed, to get answers and support during the first few years of her oldest son’s schooling. She reluctantly took the internship, however, and found herself a part of the pre-contract-negotiation listening sessions SPFT was facilitating. She saw how many teachers had both the same desires and frustrations as she did. Today, she’s a huge advocate for teachers, and she wants more parents and teachers to have control over how their schools are run. She’s a trainer for Parent Teacher Home Visits, a PTO chair, and she was elected to the school board in late 2015.

The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers (SPFT)⁵ is a teachers union that has evolved its priorities and built stronger relationships with parents in order to support the development of “the school system Saint Paul students deserve” (one of SPFT’s main rallying cries). Nationally, the dialogue about the problems with U.S. schools often focuses on the deficits of teachers and the ineffectiveness of teachers unions. This story was playing out in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as well, and many teachers felt deeply discouraged by the divisive climate and narrative that excluded the voices of the people at the heart of the matter: teachers, parents, and students.

SPFT functioned for many years like a traditional union: members paid dues, and contract negotiations centered on pay and benefits. In 2005, in light of the heightened debate about education and teachers, the union’s new leadership saw an urgent need to rethink the role and strategy of the union in order to better support teachers and respond to the real needs of schools and students.

Since then, SPFT has transformed its organization in a number of ways—including, most emblematically, its approach to contract negotiations. Arguably one of the biggest tools a union has to turn a vision into reality, SPFT uses the process of developing its negotiation document as an opportunity to build a shared vision for the district that’s grounded in the needs of students, parents, and teachers.

SPFT functioned for many years like a traditional union: members paid dues, and contract negotiations centered on pay and benefits. In 2005, in light of the heightened debate about education and teachers, the union’s new leadership saw an urgent need to rethink the role and strategy of the union in order to better support teachers and respond to the real needs of schools and students.

Since then, SPFT has transformed its organization in a number of ways—including, most emblematically, its approach to contract negotiations. Arguably one of the biggest tools a union has to turn a vision into reality, SPFT uses the process of developing its negotiation document as an opportunity to build a shared vision for the district that’s grounded in the needs of students, parents, and teachers.

During this process leading up to its 2013 negotiations, SPFT engaged teachers and parents in a series of listening sessions. They discussed three questions: “What are the schools Saint Paul children deserve?”; “Who are the teachers Saint Paul children deserve?”; and “What is the profession those teachers deserve?”⁶ What they came up with was a bold, constructive vision that became a guide for the union’s negotiations. Just as important, teachers and parents saw each other as allies who ultimately wanted the same opportunities and outcomes for children and wanted to support one another to achieve their shared goals.

While most collective bargaining sessions remain closed, SPFT opened its sessions to the public. Because of SPFT’s consistent and deep investment in teachers and parents up to this point, throngs of people filled the negotiating room as conversations heated up. Union members and parents went door to door and rallied outside in the depth of winter. Parents created their own Facebook pages to better organize themselves in support of their students’ schools and teachers. Ultimately, the school board agreed to negotiate on every point they presented, which included smaller class sizes, less standardized testing, and the hiring of additional librarians, nurses, social workers, and counselors.

Today, more teachers are joining the union and more parents are getting involved in ways ranging from running for the school board to becoming trainers for the Parent Teacher Home Visits.⁷ In a move to support leadership development for both teachers and parents, SPFT employs two full-time organizers, who support long-term constructive strategies and focus on matching people’s interests and availability with opportunities to get involved.

People United for Sustainable Housing

Often referred to colloquially as “the mayor of the West Side,” David “Saint” Rodriguez is a leader, activist, and prominent personality in the neighborhood. A lifelong resident there, Saint struggled for much of his life and was imprisoned for several years. He had a hard time finding work after his release, but noticed a construction crew rehabbing a house nearby and started showing up every day as a volunteer. “I treated it like a job,” he recalls. Soon, it became one. His basic needs met, Saint was able to look beyond the paycheck from PUSH and see the holistic way the organization facilitates neighborhood-led local development. Today, he carries a strong sense of neighborhood responsibility with him and is an active member of PUSH’s board.

People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) in Buffalo, New York, is a member-driven organization that combines community development and organizing to address Buffalo’s West Side residents’ needs and build greater community control of resources.

Buffalo’s West Side is a poor neighborhood in one of the nation’s poorest cities, and has suffered from decades of disinvestment. Yet the neighborhood has a rich cultural legacy, and today it’s more diverse than ever. Its affordability allows many to build new lives—including refugees from Burma, Somalia, and other countries beset by conflict—yet because it borders a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the West Side’s affordability is being jeopardized as property values rise.

PUSH began, humbly, in 2005, when its cofounders went door-to-door listening to issues voiced by residents. Jennifer Mecozzi, PUSH’s organizing director (now its logistics coordinator), was one such resident. “[One of the founders] came to my house one day and asked all these questions…. He didn’t write anything down, but he must have really written a book after he left. He came back about three months later…and he brought up everything I had talked about. I was totally impressed…so I thought, ‘Well, you took the time to do this, so I’ll go to a meeting.’”⁸

Based on what the founders heard—that vacant and substandard housing was a major problem for many—they began rehabbing a house in the neighborhood. Many service providers had previously entered and exited the neighborhood, and many residents had grown accustomed to and skeptical of newcomers promising support and solutions. PUSH quickly set itself apart from its predecessors by being action oriented, responsive, and accountable to the conversations staff had with residents.

Today, PUSH is building a self-supporting ecosystem in the West Side neighborhood: it builds housing for sale and rent; provides energy-efficiency retrofits; develops urban gardens and storm-water management infrastructures; manages green economy and construction crews who hire locally and pay living wages; and runs an afterschool program for neighborhood youth. The ideas that become campaigns or programs come from residents through many avenues, including annual community congresses, regularly convening working groups, and conversations community members and PUSH staff have that happen organically.⁹

PUSH’s focus on building human capital every step of the way gives this ecosystem durability and power. The success of its capacity building and leadership-development efforts relies on first addressing the most basic, unmet needs of residents (housing, employment) and then supporting individuals to participate more deeply in actions that support their community’s shared future.

These groups recognize that making inclusive, community-driven processes the norm and sharing power and leadership calls for a cultural transformation that takes a long time to evolve, necessitates immense patience and thoughtfulness, and requires an appetite for risk and for practices atypical of their sector. Their investments are paying off, however, and we hope that their pioneering efforts will serve as examples that will help other organizations, regardless of sector, issue area, or geography, to facilitate deep cultural transformation in their own communities.

Notes

1. The stories are from interviews conducted by the authors over a four-month period in 2015, and from the organization’s websites and/or other supplemental materials.
2. Judith Millesen and Kelly Ryan, “Community Foundation Leadership in the Second Century: Adaptive and Agile,” from Here For Good: Community Foundations and the Challenges of the 21st Century, Terry Mazany and David C. Perr (New York: Routledge, 2014).
3. Ibid.
4. “Tribune: Our Community Accelerator,” Incourage Community Foundation website, August 31, 2015.
5. All information in this section was taken from Eric S. Fought, Power of Community: Organizing for the schools St. Paul children deserve (St. Paul, MN: Federation of Teachers, 2014).
6. Fought, Power of Community, 11.
7. “Parent Teacher Home Visits,” Saint Paul Federation of Teachers website, accessed November 7, 2015.
8. From an interview with the authors, October 2014.
9. “About Us,” PUSH Buffalo website, accessed November 7, 2015.

Megan Hafner is one of the cofounders of Why We Work Here, a community stewardship development program for high school youth. Previously, she worked with Elizabeth Ramaccia on the strategy team at Purpose, a social impact consultancy and incubator in New York City. Megan has a background in media, storytelling, education, and community organizing. At Purpose, she focused on projects connected to public education and sustainable food systems. She has also worked with the independent global TV/radio news hour “Democracy Now!,” in New York City.

Elizabeth Ramaccia is one of the cofounders of Why We Work Here, a community stewardship development program for high school youth. Previously, she worked with Megan Hafner on the strategy team at Purpose, a social impact consultancy and incubator in New York City. Elizabeth has a background in community development and civic participation. Prior to Purpose, she led community-based design projects at a housing nonprofit in rural Alabama. Her prior research focused on the role of design thinking in community leadership development in underresourced American communities.

Photo by Johnny Silvercloud

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Hello y’all, I’m representing the Tech Workers Coalition.

The TWC is a network of progressive and left-wing workers throughout the tech industry who are trying to organize and bring the labor movement into Silicon Valley, particularly parts of it that have not been grounds for labor organizing thus far. You can consider us to be a kind of workers center, that facilitates the building of new communities and new networks that are separate and in opposition to the business interests of the tech industry.

We’re mostly made up of people in various white-collar occupations in the industry: programmers, engineers, product managers, and so forth. But it’s important to note that we really want to help organize the entire industry, across all occupations and stratas: everybody from cafeteria workers, to customer service reps, to data scientists. In fact, TWC originally started as a group whose main purpose was to help unionization campaigns among service workers, and to enlist the support of the skilled technical workers at various sites. But since then, our ambitions have grown, especially as the experience of being in solidarity with service workers has lead to more of us thinking of ourselves as workers as well, as part of the same struggle.

So with regards to labor organizing in and against platform capitalism, we’re very excited and enthusiastic about considering the possibilities for leveraging the strategic position of skilled technical workers in the tech industry, in conjunction with the ongoing movements of what we could call “platform workers”. In other words, we’d like to think seriously about the potential to build a class alliance between the workers that build platforms and the workers that use – or are used by – platforms.

For example, imagine if Amazon warehouse workers were able to coordinate with Amazon engineers. Or if Deliveroo workers could organize with Deliveroo programmers. Bringing in the skilled technical layers of platform capitalism into the labor movement opens up a whole realm of possibilities for what we can accomplish.

Of course, right now, we’re a bit of a ways off from any of that. There has been a lot of spontaneous organizing and unrest happening in the industry in the past couple of years, but still the key task right now for us is to start with the basics of agitation and organizing. This is where “workers’ inquiry” comes in.

Our use of workers’ inquiry is a bit different than what’s been discussed before. We’re not academics or researchers, we the workers are ourselves doing the inquiry – on ourselves!

Our premise is that getting workers to talk to each other about problems that they have in the workplace is a powerful way to agitate, and build toward organizing; and that for would-be organizers like the core of TWC, there is no way in hell that you can have an effective campaign if you don’t know what your coworkers are actually thinking about and care about. It’s also an effective way to better understand what we can call the “class composition” of the tech industry; or in other words, where are people coming from in terms of backgrounds and occupations, where are they specifically located in the industry, what supply chains they’re a part of, and so on.

The reason that these kinds of discussion sessions can be effective is because oftentimes, especially in tech, workers feel like their gripes and grievances are their own problems. But once you start hearing other workers openly complaining and being angry about certain aspects of the industry, you start to realize that these aren’t, in fact, individual problems, but systemic problems. You also might start to realize that maybe you’re not some kind of “entrepreneur” or a temporarily-embarrassed founder or startup CEO, but that you are in fact a worker, who is under surveillance and managed and exploited. You are a cog in capitalism, just like everybody else.

And so for the Tech Workers Coalition, a lot of what we’ve been doing is grounding our organizing around creating space to simply hang out and talk, and discuss our gripes and grievances with the industry, and help our fellow workers develop some class consciousness. Or at least a bad attitude about work. And in this way we can start to build the foundation on which an alliance between skilled technical workers and platform workers and other segments of the working class can be developed.

So how do we go about doing inquiries?

Mostly, we’ve done the straightforward thing of having an event for a couple of hours where people show up, break off into groups of 2-4, and go through a questionnaire. And then maybe have a big group discussion.

The questions inquire into different aspects of working in tech, ranging from the details on specific occupations and the commodities and services that are produced, to general grievances that people have, or have seen expressed around them. So questions can be pretty simple conversational topics, like “Where do you work? What’s your job title? What tools do you use?”, and they can also be somewhat agitating, like “what do you dislike most about your workplace? How many hours do you work every week? What’s the stupidest thing you’ve seen management do?”

This stuff may seem pretty basic, which it is. This isn’t really complicated or advanced stuff here. Again, it’s worth emphasizing that a key objective right now is to simply get people to talk to each other in a critical manner and engage in some mutual and collective agitation.

To this end, the general inquiry sessions have been relatively effective and there’s been some good positive feedback. Some people have appreciated just having a space where people can openly vent frustrations and gripes about the tech industry, as opposed to more mainstream networking spaces where the expectation is that you are very cheerful and optimistic and enthusiastic. So in our spaces, instead of having to spin working 80 hours a week as “oh the work is so challenging and I’m learning so much”, you can admit “yeah this actually really sucks, I’d rather have an actual life outside of the workplace”.

For others, it has been useful to have a space to ground themselves into local concrete issues, as opposed to the big-picture macro-political stuff that they are used to thinking about. A lot of us are already very politicized, but we tend to think about politics in a very abstract and global way; so it’s really helpful to have discussions that force us to think about our own lives and how politics and political economy is impacting us on a day-to-day basis and how the workplace can be a node through which you can make a difference both for yourself and for others.

There has even been at least one case where a fellow worker, who is now a very enthusiastic member of TWC, explicitly pinned a workers inquiry session as being a pivotal moment when he recognized himself as a worker rather than a professional or an entrepreneur and how suddenly all this pressure was lifted from him. I’m not special! I’m just a fucking cog! Who cares!

All in all, we’re definitely going to continue to use workers inquiry as a strategy to facilitate conversations and reflections, as well as genuine relationships.

So inquiries have been a great tool to help build relationships between workers, but it’s also been effective at helping us understand what kinds of grievances and gripes that people around us have, that are driving them into organizing spaces. Or in other words, it helps shine a light on why the hell we techies are getting all worked up even though we supposedly have it really good with nice salaries and ping pong tables.

We can generally categorize tech worker grievances into three areas.

The first is standard workplace issues: things like bad management, long working hours, salary disparities, etc. I think it’s noteworthy that tech workers can still be riled up about basic workplace issues despite being relatively privileged and economically secure. We still may be working 60-80 hours a week, with an abusive manager, and heavy surveillance at work, and so on. Long working hours is definitely one of the popular grievances. Another is transparency around salaries; this is especially relevant when it comes to patterns of women and people of color getting underpaid, but not having a good way to figure this out with hard numbers. All in all, with regards to organizing, the fact that basic workplace issues are still a source of unrest means that we can apply a lot of the old lessons of union organizing to the tech industry.

The second category is issues of what we could call the “social composition” of the workplace, specifically issues of diversity (or lack thereof), and racism and sexism. Sexual harassment is a particularly key point of contention in the tech industry, and a lot of workers are really keen on figuring out ways to deal with it. And the general lack of management interest in dealing with these types of issues can be a big source of disillusionment and anger. So a key goal moving forward is going to be crafting strategies for rank-and-file solutions to issues of racism and sexism. We’ve actually already had some level of organizing success in certain workplaces where people were able to put collective pressure on serial harassers and get them disciplined or kicked out.

The third category is ethical and political issues. This is mainly with respect to how a company generally fits into the larger political context. For example, a company’s management trying to smooch up Donald Trump can be a serious source of anger for a workforce which is largely anti-Trump. It’s worth noting that this kind of grievance has actually been a very visible source of unrest for some time now; for example, workers at big companies like Google and Comcast had walkouts to protest Trump’s immigration policies. The ethics of technology are also a hot-button topic right now; for example, people working for various kinds of data companies are getting increasingly uneasy with the realization that actually, they’re working for surveillance companies. Shortly after the 2016 US election, a whole bunch of tech workers signed on to a petition pledging to never work on tech that could be used for the surveillance and targeting of minority groups. There’s also a disconnect between workers and companies on issues of privacy and security; a lot of workers take seriously the importance of privacy, but of course this runs against the very reason why a lot of tech companies exist in the first place.

So, those are the three general categories of grievances among tech workers. Hopefully it’s a little more clear now why TWC is optimistic about the prospects for bringing skilled technical workers into a larger working class movement. And one more thing I would note about this is that among all those grievances, by far, the most prevalent motivation for people who are agitated and want to organize is around issues of solidarity, either with underrepresented minority groups, or with tech workers who are not in relative positions of privilege, like contract workers and temporary workers. And it’s worth repeating that TWC originally started as a group that wanted to get skilled technical workers to be in solidarity with service workers on tech campuses.

So with this in mind, maybe it’s not such a crazy idea to think that we could organize tech workers to disrupt the disruption of the labor market, and resist right alongside platform workers.

And just a couple of notes about our actual organizing. I’d like to say that in general, it’s been going really well. And actually it’s going a lot better than a lot of us expected. Late last year we set some goals for the organization for 2018, and already we’re hitting those goals or surpassing them. In addition, there’s a lot of spontaneous organizing that’s happening independently of each other. At one big workplace where we have a presence, we’re discovering that there are a bunch of other informal groups who are also organizing to pressure management or subvert the company or whatever. And this gets at the concept of “invisible organization” that some people mentioned earlier today. So TWC in no way has a monopoly on tech worker organizing, which is great. It means there is a lot of energy around this stuff. Although we’re definitely the coolest.

There was also a really interesting recent case where the engineers at a tech startup ran a really successful unionization campaign, and all 15 or so engineers and programmers were on board. But then, after about a week after they told the company, they all got fired. Which is kind of hilarious; a tech startup fired all their tech workers. But in any case it’s a great example of the contradictions that we’re talking about here, and last week TWC helped organize a rally and a picket outside the company and we had about 70 people show up. And one thing to keep in mind about this kind of stuff is that even if initial attempts at organizing are met with retaliation like this, at the end of the day, that’s just going to increase the gap between management and workers in the tech industry.

So yeah. Things are going good. And we’re excited for 2018.

Photo by Berliner.Gazette

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Alice Casey and Peter Baeck: 2016 was the year the collaborative economy established itself as the big disruptor of everything, how we travel, shop and manage our money; 2017 was the year the tide began to turn and the sector came under increased scrutiny. 2018 will be the year of construction – collective action that will create new forms of collaborative economy models for a wider benefit.

In recent years we have seen rising opposition and campaigns against gig work. This was initially led by incumbents worried about disruption to their businesses and by gig economy workers themselves who felt they got a poor deal from the platform giants. Consumers, citizens, and politicians soon followed suit – and all increasingly began asking questions about workers’ rights, regulation, local impact and the sustainability of many of the business models in play, in particular how power and profit was shared between platform and workers powering the collaborative economy.

Creative construction

While most criticism of the platform giants has so far been focused on whether or not their business models treat workers fairly; in 2018 we predict that those workers who power large parts of the collaborative economy will take constructive, collective action. Inspired by the disruptive nature of the platforms they work through, they will create services and organisations that themselves disrupt and evolve the marketplace, rebalancing power and distributing revenue differently.

This will be driven by a number of factors including: access to ever cheaper and customisable organising technology; maturity and size of the collaborative economy; and an increase in peer networks of those trialling new forms of ownership and organising. It will be fuelled by the continued dominance of centralised collaborative platforms and their drawn-out legal battles, giving workers an incentive to rapidly create their own solutions.

We think that two parts of the collaborative economy will be reinvented in 2018 –  the organisation and the union.

The new organisations: platform cooperatives

Platform cooperatives connect dispersed resources and workers through the web, offering a collectively governed alternative to the centrally-owned platforms. This affects how revenue flows to workers, and beyond into communities. Workers share ownership, and take a role in governance and allocation of any surplus income generated. Instead of focusing on creating profit for shareholders, a cooperative model focuses on distributing income generated in line with members’ wishes. These innovative organisations are increasing in numbers and testing a range of operating models.

Platform coops offer the following features in contrast to dominant centralised platforms:

Surplus

Surplus funds generated above the operating cost of the organisation are voted on by members – and often shared among them. They may be reinvested in the organisation’s development or in some cases to support agreed causes. There is no one size fits all approach to allocating revenue surplus. Stocksy paid out $200,000 in dividends to its photographer members and offers high royalty rates, turning over $7.9 million. Open technology makes it easier to allocate and distribute income generated in various ways that were previously impractical; digital agency Outlandish uses cobudget to allocate openly; Fairbnb intends to donate surplus to improve the neighbourhoods where rental properties are located.

Collective governance

Membership models mean that workers can have a say in an organisation’s governance, and multi-stakeholder models such as Fairshares also give others, such as buyers or beneficiaries, a say too. Enabling meaningful members’ input at scale may be tackled in part through using collaborative technology such as Liquid Democracy and Loomio. This could help focus on quality and accountability.

Alternative growth

Federated coops offer a way for technology to be owned centrally, but governed by groups of coops or social value organisations. The marketplace Fairmondo creates units within countries, currently powered by Sharetribe technology. Networks such as Enspiral offer digitally-enabled ways to grow organisations, currently numbering 300 contributors. Decentralised organising offers another way to distribute governance and finance at scale, exploiting blockchain to verify transactions. Commune and Arcade City are experimenting with this in transportation. Resonate music offers a ‘stream to own’ model, which charges you a price per play until you’ve paid for the track.

Social impact

There is a need to support further experimentation in joining coops with platform technology to address social challenges differently. Increased worker involvement and platform tech offers some promise for social challenges such as adult social care. Inspiration is offered by Buurtzog, a non-profit foundation – though not a coop – it empowers care workers to manage their own workload, focus on quality and take decisions using tech to support this way of working, turning over €280 million. Pioneers include Care and Share Associates, a coop model of social care, and icare, a platform created to manage care data.

The new unions: worker networks

Just as digital platforms have allowed companies to coordinate large, dispersed groups of individual workers to perform coordinated gigs and tasks without them connecting to each other, workers are now using the same technology to connect, support each other and take collective action for themselves, rebalancing power in favour of the worker.

In 2018, this way of organising workers in the collaborative economy will move into the mainstream and operate alongside, in partnership with, and perhaps even in some cases replacing, traditional unions. The call in the Taylor Review for A WorkerTech Catalyst and the pioneering work done by tech for good accelerator Bethnal Green Ventures, in partnership with Resolution Trust, on incubating startups that support low-wage workers is likely to lend further momentum to this.

The growth in worker tech has been characterised by solutions focusing on:

Rights

The US-based Coworker platform is one of the most established examples of organised worker rights campaigning. The platform came to fame when Starbucks decided to end ‘Clopenings’ (where people work back-to-back shifts) after more than 10,000 Starbucks employees signed a petition against this. Ten per cent of Starbucks staff have joined Coworker.

Accountability

More recently an Etsy employee launched a Coworker campaign to mobilise employees (and sellers and customers) to ‘ensure the company doesn’t stray from its values’, and Uber drivers used the platform to lobby for changes to the app, such as a tipping function, which was subsequently followed up by the company.

Ratings

In Germany, faircrowd.work has been set up to allow workers in the collaborative economy to share and access information and reviews of platforms including ratings of working conditions, including a guide to the different established and new unions that can help workers.

Dispute resolution

In a further evolution, eight European crowdsourcing platforms, the German Crowdsourcing Association, and the German Metalworkers’ Union established a joint Ombuds Office in 2017, tasked with resolving disputes between crowdworkers, clients, and crowdsourcing platforms.

Peer support

Closer to home, Welsh cooperative Indycube provides a voice for freelancers, carrying out invoice chasing and legal freelancer support services as well as operating a coworking space. Cotech offers support to its 29 technology cooperative members, running a network turning over £9 million and a workspace in London.

Insurance

As the setup of the work has changed so has the need for insurance. Some commercial operators like Zego provide ‘pay as you go insurance’ for riders in the gig economy. Others are experimenting with setting up insurance and mutual support between peers of workers. One example of this is Breadfunds. Now being trialled in the UK, but originally a concept developed in the Netherlands, bread funds are groups of 25 to 50 people who contribute money each month into a fund to support any of its members who become unable to work through illness or injury.

Disrupting the disruptors: Why now?

These developments represent growing demand for disruption and redistribution of power and profit in the collaborative economy.

The initial rapid growth of the giants in the collaborative platform economy was powered by billions in venture investment and enabled by regulatory environments that helped the disruptors to grow. Imagine what the models above would be like if they had received even a fraction of the billions in investment that have supported companies like Uber, Task Rabbit or AirBnB.

However, supporting this new wave of innovation is not just about investment in individual companies, it is about creating conditions for wider, distributed participation in the collaborative economy. We also need to ensure that regulatory frameworks anticipate such models, and that open licensing and a free and open web is maintained to allow the new wave of disruptors to grow and thrive, unfettered by incumbent interests.

In 2018, this new wave of disruptors is set to leapfrog the first wave of collaborative economy innovations to produce new socially and financially sustainable alternatives.

The rapid increase in demand for worker-led platform services, and the digital, open and decentralised nature of worker tech and platform coops means that they have an easy and flexible route to create new ways of working.

Photo by Tsahi Levent-Levi

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With 7.1 million workers engaged in ‘precarious’ employment and 77 per cent of the self-employed living in poverty, the report ‘Working Together: Trade Union and Co-operative Innovations for Precarious Work’ calls for increased protection for those operating in the so-called gig economy.  

“Not only do they have almost no security, but while the average employed worker is losing out year by year in real terms, the self-employed are doing even worse, earning less each year in cash terms,” said co-author Alex Bird. “1.7 million of those in precarious employment are earning less than the national minimum wage, with no real enforcement of the law, and the self-employed are not even covered by the existing legislation.”

There are solutions according to Working Together. The report, commissioned by Co-operatives UK and The Co-operative College, and supported by the Network for Social Change, Wales Co-operative Centre and the Institute for Solidarity Economics, identifies ‘co-operative solutions’ as well as partnerships with trade unions as a way of ensuring a fair deal for workers in an expanding gig economy.

It calls for the UK to replicate the ‘umbrella co-operative model’ for supporting freelancers and other precarious workers and points to Belgium-based SMart. The non-profit organisation enables precarious workers operating in the arts sector to obtain a range of welfare benefits – including unemployment benefit.

SMart also provides its 70,000 plus members with tax support and advice. Sarah de Heusch Ribassin, Project Officer for the Development Strategy Unit at Smart, said:

“Many of those who were self-employed found the legislation around taxes to be so complex and were afraid to do things wrong. SMart offered an alternative that meant they no longer had to worry about making errors that would affect their income.”

Working Together also identifies Indycube as a blueprint for how partnerships between trade union and co-operatives can flourish. Indycube is a rapidly growing network for freelancers and the self-employed and offers access to workspace in more than 30 locations, predominantly across Wales.

The not-for-profit co-operative works with the trade union Community to offer a range of benefits including advice on tax, insurance, pensions and employment law.

Mark Hooper, Founder of Indycube, sums up how the relationship with Community has developed. He said:

“We see this as the way to grow with Community’s resources, capacity and knowledge, and the plan provides an opportunity for third party representation of our self-employed members.

“On a practical level, freelancers often find themselves presented with complex contracts full of legal jargon, which can result in problematic agreements and issues with payment.

“Community’s legal team are able to advise on these sorts of documents which many independent workers wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. Likewise, Invoice Factoring is a service which is generally only available to bigger companies and organisations, but banding independent workers’ voices together and working in partnership with Community has allowed Indycube to secure access to Invoice Factoring services, effectively putting an end to late payments for our members.

“Fifty-one per cent of invoices are paid late, a figure we think is far too high, and Community’s support has enabled us to make progress in this area. Thanks to Community’s status as an established union, Indycube has been able to cement itself in the minds of policy-makers and others as a voice for the fast-growing group of independent workers.

“The more members we have, the stronger our collective voice, and the more work we can all do to make our futures better.”

Les Bayliss, National Officer and Head of Special Projects for Community, said: “Our partnership with Indycube is one of a number of newly developed initiatives where, as a trade union, we are reaching out to new workers in today’s world of work.

“We will continue to listen to and understand what they need from a trade union, providing support, representation, mediation and settlement. Working together we hope to develop a ‘one voice’ approach to the needs of self-employed, freelance workers, speaking out and campaigning on the issues that affect them most.

“As a trade union we will continue to learn from our new initiatives and our new members, building new alliances with others in the private, co-operative and not for profit sectors. We will reach out to workers by being relevant to them and their needs.”

The rise in the gig economy means businesses, trade unions and government must do more to protect workers according to Ed Mayo, secretary general of Co-operatives UK, the trade body that works to promote develop and unite co-operative enterprises. He said:

“The number of zero hours workers has increased by over 800,000 within the past decade. Some 77% of self-employed workers are living in poverty…

“These are incredible numbers. With increased precariousness comes the need for increased protection and support and we know that co-operatives and trade unions can be part of the solution to this growing need.”

Cilla Ross, Co-operative College Vice Principal and co-author of the report said,

“The experience of growing numbers of workers in education, from teachers in the compulsory (pre-16) sector through to further, higher and adult education, is one of casualisation and precarity. This report pulls together examples of how unions and co-ops are successfully working together and offers real solutions on how precarious work can be challenged.”

The full Working Together report can be viewed and downloaded here.

Additional Notes 

The Working Together report profiles a number of examples where trade unions and co-operatives are working together including:

Musicians Union (MU) and Musicians co-ops: Local Authority music service closure in 1998 led to the launch of Swindon Music Co-operative. The MU was an active supporter of the co-operative which is now the main provider of instrumental and vocal tuition in over 70 local schools. The co-op and trade union partnership has set up seven other musicians’ co-ops across England and Wales.

Actor Co-ops: There are 30 actors’ co-ops in England and Wales. Their development and success has been through a close working partnership over many years with the actors union, Equity. The partnership has secured workers’ rights through negotiated industry agreements.

Community Lives Consortium: This social care organisation has operated as a co-op since 2001. It provides housing and social care services for severely disabled adults in Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot. Unison has supported the development of the co-operative since 2001 and has a place on the board of directors.

Key findings and recommendations in the report include:

• Co-operative sector share of GDP is 2% in the UK while in Italy and other EU countries it is over 10%. There are only 474 worker co-ops in the UK versus over 23,000 worker and social co-ops in Italy where public policy support (including tax reliefs) and legislative changes in 1985 and 1991 have been transformative.
• A wider partnership with local authorities can make a real difference. Cities in the US are supporting programmes to establish an eco-system of support for co-operative development including legal and technical advice as well as enabling finance. Local government partnerships in Italy have assisted the significant growth of social co-operatives in the fields of social care and jobs for disadvantaged groups in the labour market.
• Platform co-operatives co-developed by trade unions and worker co-ops are emerging in the USA as an alternative to Uber. Other trade unions in the USA are working on Union Co-op platform solutions for childminders and district nurses. Union Co-op solutions like this are needed in the UK.
• Mutual guarantee societies were developed in Italy and considerably reduce the cost of development finance for co-operatives. 19 EU countries have adopted this innovation and the UK should do the same.
• Universal Basic Income could be introduced in the UK in tax neutral ways that would significantly benefit those in precarious work. Trade union interest in this reform is growing as an alternative to the widespread problems with Universal Credit.

About The Co-operative College, Co-operatives UK and Wales Co-operative Centre

The Co-operative College is an educational charity and has been a leading provider of education, training and research for the co-operative sector since 1919. As a membership based organisation, we work across the UK and internationally to promote co-operative values, ideas,  principles and practices. www.co-op.ac.uk

Wales Co-operative Centre is a co-operative development agency, working across Wales to promote social, financial and digital inclusion through a range of projects. For further information visit http://wales.coop.

Co-operatives UK is the network for Britain’s thousands of co-operatives. Together we work to promote, develop and unite member-owned businesses across the economy. From high street retailers to community owned pubs, fan owned football clubs to farmer controlled businesses, co-operatives are everywhere and together they are worth £37 billion to the British economy. www.uk.coop

For further information, please contact:

Dominic Mills:

Tel: 0161 2141767

Email: [email protected]

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