Fabian Wallace-Stephens: Innovative initiatives are emerging to improve the quality of work across the globe. The recently launched Future Work Awards aims to recognise and champion them. What are we looking for? What do we expect to find? And how can you get involved?

A good starting point is the burgeoning WorkerTech scene in the UK. A partnership between The Resolution Trust and Bethnal Green Ventures has spawned initiatives such as Organise, the UK’s first workplace digital campaigning platform. Among their successes, Organise can count helping McDonald’s staff get their biggest pay rise in 10 years.

But traditional trade unions are innovating too. Through a partnership with IndyCube, a network of co-working spaces, Community Union are offering a range of services to self-employed people, including affordable invoice factoring. And the TUC has recently launched WorkSmart, an app to support younger workers who could benefit from union membership.

Even businesses such as Tesco are experimenting with technology to offer workers greater control and flexibility over shift scheduling. While Uber are piloting city-based engagement programs for their drivers.

Previous RSA research has highlighted how across Europe and North America, self-employed workers are banding together to address the challenges they face in the labour market. Based in San Francisco, Loconomics is a platform for booking local services (akin to TaskRabbit), which is cooperatively owned and governed by the service professionals that use it. And in Denver, Colorado, Green Taxi Co-operative has licensed an app which enables them to compete with other platforms.

In the Netherlands, self-employed people can join Breadfunds, a mutual sick pay fund, where members also offer each other practical support in times of ill health. While in France and Belgium, Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs) such as Coopaname act as umbrella organisations for freelancers, enabling them to pool together business administration and other services such as training and workspace.

There is no one future of work

So far, we have only scratched the surface. Our search for the Future Work Awards is global. And our themes are diverse, spanning skills and training, worker voice and economic security (a full list can be found on our website).

However, we expect that in different countries, different innovations will be having the greatest impacts on workers because of the distinct challenges that they face. For example, many good work initiatives in the UK stem from trade union decline or growth in atypical forms of employment. But for parts of the world struggling with high levels of youth unemployment, the priority may be upskilling and/or job creation.

In our previous research we found that differences in economic and legal context can significantly affect the need for initiatives and their attractiveness to users. One of the reasons Breadfunds has over 12,000 members is because income protection insurance is excessively expensive in the Netherlands. But more reasonably priced services may be available in different markets. While BECs are essential in France because of differences in social security. Self-employed people don’t pay into the Government’s unemployment insurance fund but Coopaname enables them to become an ‘employee’ of the co-operative, meaning they are able to access these benefits.

Looking towards the future, trends can also appear more or less distressing in different places. Take the emergence of the gig economy. In the UK, this is often viewed as one whereby businesses are transferring additional risks onto workers. But in parts of the world such as South Asia, where so many are already independent workers, without employment protections to undermine, we should emphasise the opportunities. Economic activity will be better co-ordinated, with algorithms super efficiently matching supply and demand and creating more work in the process. And, as some commentators have pointed out, platforms can offer informal workers a degree of formalisation, by improving access to financial and digital services. Shifting from cash to e-payments, for instance, creates a transactional history that could help when applying for credit in the future.

How you can get involved

Through the awards, we hope to recognise and reward social innovators who are helping to bring about a better world of work. And by showcasing best practice from around the globe we want to encourage others to consider kick starting similar initiatives in their own communities and sectors.

If you run a good work initiative or know of one that deserves attention, you can submit a nomination through a short online form or find out more from our Future Work Awards site.

Nominations are open until mid-September, after which a panel of global judges will review the entries and announce the winners in November.

The Awards are hosted by the RSA Future of Work Centre and sponsored by Barclays. The RSA’s partners in the venture include the Canadian impact investor Social Capital Partners and systems design agency Alt Now Projects.

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Analysis: Many Americans are turning to sustainable farming operations to enrich their communities and personal lives. While these enterprises can be economically precarious, small-scale food production helps foster many cooperative and sustainability-oriented values.

Having committed to such sustainable practices, some would see worker cooperatives as a natural next step for small farm operations. But beginning farmers largely choose traditional business models such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, and LLCs. Rachel Armstrong, founder and executive director of Farm Commons (where I used to work) says this is because “beginning farmers get advice from people they trust, and those people did it the traditional way. They say ‘I did it this way, and it worked.'” They might even see worker cooperatives as “a solution in search of a problem,” Armstrong says, although Farm Commons is one of a few organizations seeking cooperative solutions to the challenges small farms face finding adequate seasonal labor.

Perhaps an even deeper barrier, Armstrong says, is the cultural ideal of the American farmer emphasizing individuality and singular leadership, a sense that “I am doing this myself.” Even young, sustainability-oriented farmers may feel drawn toward traditional ownership models.

Cracks are emerging in that orientation. Luis Sierra, assistant director of the California Center for Cooperative Development (CCCD), says that requests from farmers to help form worker cooperatives are slowly increasing — emerging organically from communities rather than from the evangelism of the cooperative and new economy movement. “People have brought these ideas to us rather than us going out and looking to promote farms as worker co-ops,” he says. “Young farmers who have finished their internships have started to look at farms as possible co-op ventures.” Recently, leading cooperative advocates Democracy at Work and the National Young Farmers Coalition co-created “An Introduction to Worker Cooperatives for Farmers and Start Ups.”

Success stories can help, like the worker-owned CSA whose subscriber base went from 20 to 80 members ($3,000 to $12,000 per month) in just one year. Urban farm operations may be natural places for worker ownership to crop up, and the cities needn’t be huge: Wellspring Harvest, a worker-owned hydroponic greenhouse, serves Springfield, Massachusetts, with a population of just over 150,000.

Beyond their viability as business models, worker-and-farmer-owned cooperatives also give sustainable farmers more room to live and farm their values. Solidarity Farms in Pauma Valley, California, describes itself as “a worker-owned family farm with spunk,” and seeks to address immigrant farmworker exploitation by co-creating “a more equitable model where we share equally in the rewards and struggles of the business.” Perhaps the most striking impact worker-owned and managed farms can have on communities is found in Eugene, Oregon, where Huerto de la Familia (“The Family Garden”) has grown from a six-member women’s community garden project to a nonprofit umbrella for small farm and food businesses throughout the city. They offer business classes and family food sustainability to the economically marginalized.

Worker democracy is also compatible with the reciprocity and balance of ecosystems and community food systems. “The farms we’ve been working with have been very small in scale,” Sierra says, adding that each member-owner is in charge of a venture like greenhouse manager or orchard manager, and all are available to help as needed.

Sierra and Armstrong both say a lot of work still needs to be done developing viable practices for worker-owned farms. The biggest challenge is the long-term economic security of workers. In traditional family farms,security “comes from real estate, the sale of land,” Sierra says. Generating consistent profits is necessary for any business to maintain decent retirement programs, but many farms aren’t profitable year in and year out.

This may be an unavoidable contradiction between cooperation and sustainability on one side and doing business in a capitalist economy on the other, but organizations like CCCD, Farm Commons, and others are working on finding new solutions on issues like retirement security, compensation for equipment, and other investments.

The success of any worker-run farms will spread because it’s easier to be a cooperative entity in places where there are a lot of other cooperative entities, Armstrong points out. As interest grows in both sustainable farming and worker democracy, there is hope for increased synergy between the two movements.

Photo by afagen

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John Boik: It’s not often that a scientist gets to use the words love, creativity, and wisdom in a paper, especially when writing about economics. Perhaps that’s because economics, the dismal science, is obsessed with dismal systems — make that abysmal systems, relative to need.

To be clear, I’m not speaking of the specific policies of the US, the EU, China, the World Bank or others. I’m speaking of dominant economic systems as wholes — especially their underlying conceptual models (macro and micro) and the world views upon which they are based.

A human has only so many minutes in life. Time is the bedrock scarcity. If a person isn’t doing something meaningful in a given moment, he’s doing something less than meaningful. He’s wasting at least some of his potential. By meaningful, I don’t mean productive, in an economic sense. I mean important to the person, to her own wellbeing. The Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef identifies nine categories of human need: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom. Others might make a slightly different list, but the important concept is that meaning stems from addressing real human needs.

It’s not that we should be doing something meaningful with our time, it’s that we want to. We want to express and receive affection, for example, and to fulfill the other eight needs. We want to, that is, unless external pressures so exhaust, distract, distort, or confuse us that we lose touch with who we are.

Current economic systems are dismal-abysmal because they waste our precious time. As a case in point, only 13 percent of workers worldwide are engaged in their jobs. This means, in effect, that 87 percent of workers feel more or less forced to go to work. Short of force, why would someone spend half their waking hours (or more), day after day, doing something that didn’t engage them?

Except for receiving a paycheck, it appears that most workers don’t really care about their jobs. That’s not surprising. Work doesn’t count as a real human need. It’s only a vehicle by which some needs can be (but for most people aren’t) met. Work doesn’t meet our needs because economic systems, as they exist, didn’t evolve to fulfill the real needs of ordinary people. They evolved largely under pressures exerted by powerful people and groups who wanted to maintain and expand their own privileges.

Suppose that we pause to reevaluate. Using insights from psychology, environmental sciences, public health, complex systems science, sociology, and other fields — that is, using as clear and scientifically sound a picture as we can muster of what humans and natural environments actually need in order to thrive — we can ask ourselves the following question: What economic system designs, out of all conceivable ones, might be among the best at helping us meet real needs?

Strange as it might sound, this question is rarely asked in academia, the science and technology sector, or elsewhere. Or if it is asked, the investigation usually lacks imagination. Surely we can move beyond a discussion of capitalism vs. socialism, as if these were the only two possibilities. A wide-open, largely unexplored space of interesting, potentially viable systems exists.

In my recent paper, “Optimality of Social Choice Systems: Complexity, Wisdom, and Wellbeing Centrality,” I call on the academic community, and science and technology sector, to begin a broad exploration in partnership with other segments of society into what optimality means with respect to economic and political system design. I term this nascent program wellbeing centrality, due to the central role that the elevation of wellbeing would play in systems that help us to fulfill real needs.

Viewed abstractly, economic and political systems are problem-solving systems. One could call them technologies of a sort. As such, they are subject to scientific inquiry and engineering innovation aimed at discovering new designs that improve problem-solving capacity. Further, if we seek ideas for new designs, we don’t have to look far. Nature provides a blueprint.

From a complex systems science perspective, the environment is replete with successful problem-solving systems (cells, organisms, immune systems, ecologies, and so on). Although all look different physically, successful systems tend to exhibit similar underlying mathematical properties. That is, nature has hit upon a good problem-solving approach, and repeats it widely. If we wish our problem-solving systems to be successful, to be as good as they can be, we might want to pay close attention to what nature does.

Moreover, we can view the eight needs Max-Neef identifies as gifts of nature, stemming from eons of evolution over countless ancestral species, to help us focus on and solve problems that matter. Our need to express and receive affection, for example, is also responsible, in part, for our tendency to seek cooperation in solving difficult problems.

Engage global, test local, spread viral

In short, “good” economic systems would produce economies of meaning that help us to help one another live meaningful lives — to meet real needs and solve problems that matter.

We don’t have much time to make a transition from current systems to better ones. Mass extinction and other global catastrophes loom on the horizon. We face the unthinkable, not so much because a few CEOs, companies, or politicians have acted greedily (some have), but rather because today’s problem-solving systems didn’t evolve to help us meet real needs. They waste our precious time, as mentioned, rather than focusing our talents and natural drives on things that do matter, such as caring for others and the planet.

But how do we get from here to there? No matter how promising the design of a new system might be, it would be unreasonable to expect that a nation would abruptly drop an existing system in favor of a new one. Nevertheless, a viable, even attractive strategy exists by which new systems could be successfully researched, developed, tested, and implemented. I call it engage global, test local, spread viral.

Engage global means to engage the global academic community and technical sector, in partnership with other segments of society, in a well-defined R&D program aimed at computer simulation and scientific field testing of new systems and benchmarking of results. In this way, the most profound insights of science can be brought into play.

Test local means to scientifically test new designs at the local (e.g., city or community) level, using volunteers (individuals, businesses, non-profits, etc.) organized as civic clubs. This approach allows testing by relatively small teams, at relatively low cost and risk, in coexistence with existing systems, and without legislative action.

Spread viral means that if a system shows clear benefits in one location (elimination of poverty, for example, more meaningful jobs, or less crime) it would likely spread horizontally, even virally, to other local areas. This approach would create a global network of communities and cities that cooperate in trade, education, the setup of new systems, and other matters. Over time, its impact on all segments of society would grow.

Cities, big and small, are the legs upon which all national systems rest. Already cities and their communities are hubs for innovation. With some further encouragement and support, and the right tools and programs, they could become more resilient and robust, and bigger heroes in the coming great transition.

By John Boik, PhD. To learn more about the wellbeing centrality R&D program, the LEDDA economic democracy framework, or to download (free) Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being (2014), visit http://www.PrincipledSocietiesProject.org.

Please share and republish. Originally published at www.principledsocietiesproject.org.

Photo by unconventional_paint

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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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