Comments on: Why unions are necessary in the on-demand, so-called, ‘sharing’ economy

By: Dave Pinsen

Dave Pinsen — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 08:43:48 +0000

Albert Wenger’s idea is to allow on-demand workers to be represented by bots, which, could, in turn, act as unions. So, for example, the bots could coordinate to generate Uber surges, or shift workers between Uber, Lyft, and other ride-share services to get drivers higher pay.

By: Pablo

Pablo — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 20:54:38 +0000

I’m with Kevin, the problem is that this “sharing economy” still relies in centralized “sharing economy corporations”. This companies are bringing some creative destruction, but once they became institucionalized and become big, we will have the same problems as with Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their recentralization related problems.
There are too many “too big” names which are feed by the media: Uber, Airbnb,… I think we have to struggle in orther to make their competitors bigger (as a way for decentralization), or better, promote P2P equivalents to them (which combined with community cooperation, would make unions useless)

By: Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 20:50:31 +0000

Far better than unions is to just kill the bosses — the proprietary, walled-garden platforms — the same way file-sharing is killing the music industry. We need open, local, ground-up alternatives to the corporate sharing operations — and to hell with their “intellectual property.”