hello everyone welcome and thank you so much for tuning in. my name is audrey stewart. i'm so pleased to welcome you to the forum with juliet schor discussing "after the gig". she joined in conversation by luana devol. she is also a member of the macarthur foundation connected learning search network.

she has written and edited many books on the economy and sustainability. she is a former guggenheim she is a former guggenheim she is doing today by veena devol. her writing has been published in the la times she is currently working on a book today they are discussing "after the gig" based on a decade of meticulous research. i will leave you with this quote. the team has done something extraordinary. they have let them understand what the sharing economy

really feels like to its participants. in addition they provide a workable plan for how to fulfill the promise of a gig work. i will redefine the field. the virtual stage is now yours. >> thank you so much for having me. i'm deeply honored to be in the conversation with you. you heard julie's introduction. but what is not articulated is that she is really not a book bulky myth in this particular field thinking about the sharing or gig economy but also about work more broadly. and she has been a central

public intellectual and an incredible scholar for people across disciplines and thinking about the problems with the work for a very long time. i think any one of your students or young mentees can listen to that. this is an honor. and an amazing book. it will change the conversation and i'm delighted to be here to talk to you about it. >> i am thrilled that you are willing to come. i think we're in a mutual admiration society. let me just talk for a few minutes about the book and the findings. where we ended up. and then we will have a

conversation. the gig economy or the sharing economy. i think we can see a direction for where we might go to reorient this sector which has really gotten off track. uber was founded in 20082009. and they launched with what we call in the book. is the idealist. they have a win-win slightly impossible when when a discourse. that was thought to lead to environmental benefits.

if you can use spare rooms and set up hotels you want to have to many hotels if people could share cars. a lot of people would think that they wouldn't need to buy cars. those were the are the ideas of efficiency. it also promised opportunity for people. the platforms were places that people could easily hop onto. these are the kind of things that we found when we interviewed people. because the platforms are hosting stranger sharing or person-to-person interaction you hop in a lift.

he find you have a connection. you host someone on air b&b. and you become friends. all of those things were promised. one thing i haven't been recognized enough. when we look at those traditions we can see the two possible paths that the shared economy might be taking. online community. they bring people together and non- hierarchal flat spaces. they bypassed established structures of power. and this was a really prominent idea in silicon valley in the early days of but but it has continued

through. couch surfing starting. time banks. but also some of the four profits used the same sort of a cyber utopian discourse. we might think of as a free market text. the corporations are good. unfettered corporations and bring bring freedom, prosperity, liberty and that of course is the uber philosophy. there was a right wing helicon -- silicon valley and then a more left wing one.

i just mentioned the nonprofit. they had been important. they remain quite important in other parts of the world. the true sharing initiatives at the community level that were really get to help people who were in economic distress. we began i assembled a team i want to shout out. i don't know if any of the team members are here.

i wrote this book with a team of people who were all phd students. all of them had graduated. we did 13 case studies through sharing initiatives. we turned the attention to the for-profits. i'm still working on my issues. that one went for almost ten years. with a group of colleagues from northeastern.

also some phd students. if you are from the team and you're here. let us know in the q&a. things had not turned out as expected. i guess the question let me just tell you what about the nonprofits. i wasn't planning to talk too much about them today. happy to go into in the q&a there. the nonprofits we studied are in the boston area. we can go into detail.

i guess the easiest way to talk about what happened with the nonprofits one of them actually failed. one of them thrived in a lot of ways but not others. in the dynamics of social inclusion. they hold some important lessons.

in the early days. although. making a full-time living on the platforms. and it was true for a couple of reasons. in the very earliest days. they were a lot more than minimum wage. and a lot more that people could get from the kinds of skills that they were engaged in on the platform. even on the really high wage platform. as a general kind of errands and work platform. both in the home and out.

it's hard to get a decent income on that work. people who are dependent workers generally earned up too or below the poverty line. of course, some people could. in general. that's what we found. what we call supplemental workers people who are adding on this gig work. in most cases a full-time job.

those folks had really positive experiences. they could discriminate more of the task they took. a lot more flexibility in their schedule. and many of the gigs market demand is very variable over the day and week. they also have a lot more autonomy and how they did the work much less worried about their ratings and reputation. this would presented to us. what would happen if your rating went down. they just wouldn't do it anymore. it was interesting the extent to which the supplement to all workers did things in the way they wanted rather than the way the platform wanted. one of the big issues is how

much autonomy the workers really had. and we found big differences between the dependent workers are what you might think up as the full-time workers even though it's not exactly the same thing. over time more and more workers on the platforms. right healing and delivery were dependent workers. it came to be a more and more dependent workforce. that's part of why things had gone south on the poor prop --dash mike for-profits to think of it that way. >> in some ways the model never made a lot of sense. if you take uber the biggest of all the platforms has the most workers. it priced it's rides far below

cost. it meant they were always losing money they were always pressuring the drivers and they were only going to be able to have a viable model if they could come to dominate the market. and raise the prices high enough so they could make a profit on each ride. the hype about uber said the low prices are big and to how they were sustainable. to a certain extent i think also not sustainable at current levels on delivery. these platforms are depending on the exploitation exploitation of the workers and the failure to obey employment laws. we will talk about that. but what the bad model to begin with meant.

eventually, a lot of pressure from investors. because there is a point at which they want to see profitability and that was important in the downward trajectory of wages. if you look at a high wage platform like task grab it. it's the opposite. the wages are high. but that restricts the demand. and there is a kind of basic contradiction there. a sign of economic conflict there. it was a very simple obvious thing. the lower the prices it you get more customers but you have to squeeze the workers. and what they be profitable at a small fraction of its size. they don't want to find out. they want to wipe out public transportation. then they could just not only exploit the workers but the customers also.

what could we do. can we get this economy back on track. and do we even want too. we want to move to a full-time secure employment system. and this whole experiment of gig economy should be stopped. one of the things to recognize about the platform. is that they're very different than conventional businesses. they generally operate with open access for earners and consumers also. almost anybody can join the platforms. there are a few qualifications around background checks and so forth. for the most part these are really easy apps to get on and try to earn on. one of the things it does is

it gives chronic access supply. that's a were seen in the post covid environment. tons of people streaming onto these apps. you can see that in the data as the general unemployment rate moves. there is a lot of entry and exit on the apps over the course of the year. very flexible. you can see it in the rising numbers of dependent workers on right heel and delivery. the openness of the apps and the flexibility of the apps actually attract a lot of people for whom that flexibility is essential. they may be people who had other responsibilities.

people that we interviewed have a leave to leave full-time jobs because they one woman got a divorce. and have a take to take care of her children. and hours that conform to the school day. so she started working on multiple platforms as a way of doing that. catherine hill has done it really interesting work on disabled workers and their use of the app. if you have them. what it's can be like today or hour to hour. the apps allow that. that's one thing that is really positive. that flexibility. in the second thing about them and this really gets us to the last form about platform co-ops. the technology of the apps eliminate a lot of management functions. so hr, quality control.

matching consumers with earners many of these things are done by algorithms. if you have looked at the sector don't you know of these companies particularly in the early days did not hire many people at their corporate headquarters. they were very lean in that way. a big complaint of workers in drivers especially. a lot of the functions of management are now automated. they are done through algorithmic management. that means that workers don't really need that much managerial supervision. they don't need managers as much as they did. and this becomes an argument for why the co- operative structure. which is owned by the workers is so much more efficient. then in these kinds of

platforms. they also scale really rapidly. if you get the right technology. you can build out a workers co-op. and you get the right rules and governance. you can build out out workers co-op pretty quickly. the workers co-op turns out to be a really efficient way to organize platforms and that's why our last case as i mentioned was a workers cooperative. it was a very successful case. in which they owned and governed the platform. they got much more of the money back from the photographs that they sold. and were really happy about the whole enterprise. i think that is one possible future for the gig economy that would solve the corporate owned platforms. and could really make it work for workers in ways that

doesn't take advantage of what this technology has to offer. i will stop there and i will turn it over. >> think you so much julie. again, this book is really fascinating. i read it with the first draft and then the latest finished profit --dash mike product. something that you didn't get a chance to reflect on in our short time. i want to hear you talk more about. in many ways this research project walked the walk. it was a collaborative research project across with many students in the book was collaboratively written. and as we have looked at not just the prototypical platform and capitalists. you are really talking to in

the post recession in the shadows of the great recession who were trained to reimagine their world. could you talk a little bit more about those folks, and what their trajectory was. in talking about the current moment and how we can use the current recession that were in may be differently than those folks did and how to learn from the mistakes of that moment. >> let me just start with the research process. in the team process which you raised. it was a privilege. and a really wonderful experience i do want to think the macarthur thank the macarthur foundation who funded the research and they funded it in the most wonderful way because

basically rather than the typical process of having to write a draft that such a says you have to do what you said. they gave us month and money. and go where the research took us. we were constantly evolving and that was wonderful. you gave me a comment on the early version of the book which is something i hadn't realized. what we were able to do because we started when the sector was just beginning. we were able to take a trip through. and that was really a privilege. it meant as things started happening. we could just follow that. and we were stuck with something that we had designed in year one that really wasn't as interesting in your three or four.

having done this ever quite a few years. we also started out and talk about the idealist discourse. we were also an idealist team and that we had hoped for many of these things that were beginning. we were interested in them because we thought they could make meaningful change and solve the problems that were so obvious in the dysfunctionality of global capitalism. in the time in 2008. still, things had really crashed at that time. even if we ended up becoming disillusioned. if we have seen to see many of

the problems and things going and the directions that we would not had hoped they would. the second part of your question is really interesting about the people. and that we talked to at the beginning. and one thing that was interesting. in the early days. on both the for-profits and the nonprofits people were really believing in the idealist discourse. people were going on tour in the air b&b for cars in order to rent out environmentally officially cars. like hybrids. they wanted to teach other people about hybrids. where they were making friends on air b&b. they were trying to create a different kind of economy. so people believed that these platforms would create a person-to-person economy that was substantially different from what they saw as the dehumanizing and depersonalized or impersonal corporate economy.

so whether it was the economic benefits or the environmental. there were a lot of true believers in those early days across the whole range of shared economy. i have an interesting question from the audience that tales into one of my questions. in your last chapter you talk about how scholars really think about where we go from here in three ways. either that platform capitalist way. and we enshrine their model into law and regulation and just live with it. then there is the democratic scenario. in all of these places were in a particular moment.

they asked. whether you could comment on public municipal ownership a platform and businesses. talk to us a little bit more about what that might look like in comparison to co-op models. what are the possibilities in this realm. and what are the things that we need to do to make one or either of those things possible. the three paths that i talked about. the first one which is just corporate dominant platforms one of my co-authors and friends a dutch scholar named kuhn franken. wrote a really interesting piece in which that he made a

point. we can see it we can see with what is happening with covid. the likely trajectory we just let the platforms do what they want. they will come to dominate. that sort of model and in which so many industries we really basically had two to three dominant firms. they had worked so much on misclassification and the economy. and we have seen real change in this. when i argue in the book is beginning in 2018. you start to see the tide turning on regulation.

it had been very hard to get any regulation through. most of the regulation was in the way a more leeway and freedom for the company. it was operating at really high levels. and then they got regulators to change those laws to make it legal. starting in 2018. regulators at some of the biggest cities start to clampdown. uc and new york. you get a vehicle cap. you see it in different areas. they now consider the serious ride hail legislation. i now have a data base in the

ten biggest cities. it's really going in the regulatory dimension. will talk about what's going on in california now. and whether things had that momentum. that is one way. no question that they need to obey the laws that we have and they need to create some new laws and regulations for the new kinds of problems that they have created. do we stop there. that gets us to the third we

talk about the worker co-ops. and the questioners in the possibility. they do provide some really interesting opportunities there are pros and cons for the worker co-op model. i think it is a little bit easier. you have to have that municipally owned core. you have the state in its own interests coming in there. and will it really be run in the interests of the workers or the citizens in the consumers. you would have a multi- stakeholder.

you might want to set it up as a more independent kind of entity. the worker co-op model. where particularly with the you missed municipal model. these would probably be run at a city level. most of which are face-to-face. there are other kinds of platforms which are global. the digital labor for example. where we are clock calling on a global labor force. the consumer services. where you have a municipal

entity it could do more to shape the market. then you have the question of is it can be the only actor in the market. i will just mention one thing that happened while i was doing the research. i was approached by someone who was setting up a municipal labor market in a city in britain. it was good to be gonna be a general services labor market. anybody could come on to try to get those jobs. have failed almost instantly. many more people needed the work then there was work available. with the worker co-ops they have an easier time because unlike most of the platforms

they tend not to be open access. they restrict the number of workers that can be on the platform at any one time. they try to basically match supply and demand. i think both models are interesting i would like to see some experimentation. you probably know more about that. you mentioned, in great

britain where they were considering. katie wells is in the audience. and she has a really great question think i think it is you do such a great job of thinking about it's been so prolific. and really understanding how the platform economy has rolled out in different places. if you could talk a little bit about what you found in the u.s. that is alongside the platform economy. this tremendous variation and how it operates across countries in europe, and many of them are highly regulated.

in the countries of europe where the labor unions and waivers are stronger the platforms had to do more to treat workers better. it is sending ride hail in many global cities. kind of all of that familiar tactics that we are seeing there. it's very contextual can i ask you a question which relates.

i really want to make sure we have enough time to talk about what's going on in california it says i'm a freelance professional. they have done pioneering work on what led them support the california law that reclassifies it. when you think about that. it's a really hard question. there was a result of a lot of misinformation about what's been going on in california.

they are here yes listening. i think part of the reason is why is there so much attention being paid to worker classification here. in the nine states as you all know. the main pathway to security because we don't have another kind social safety net. it is through employment. the only weight you get healthcare unless you're paying for it yourself all of these safety nets that we all really need. is through employment status. the reason that the companies came in and capitalized off of

the law. and try to widen them. and tried to make it seem like they're workers were actually independent contractors. it was so much cheaper for them. and easier for them to keep labor costs down. like people that are in work of cooperatives. who are really building client lists. who are hustling to be small business owners. and workers in these economies are highly controlled through the business model and through our grant algorithms. it is not true across the platform. it is true in the u.s. they get the most attention. that employ the most workers.

i think to your question. that is why there is so much attention being placed on the worker classification. and my senses that regulators see this as as the biggest pressure point for these companies. and what they're hearing is that they are not earning a minimum wage. that their sleeping in their cars. there is a sense that we still have in the united states. there is some real conflict between the innovation and promise that julie talks about in the book.

in the shadows of occupy. they wanted real help for true ownership of their labor. of their everyday life. in my work. i see a trajectory and how they felt about the work itself. i've written a lot about this. how taxi workers actually across the board were pretty happy as independent contractors. for much of the '90s and early 2000's. part of the reason they were true independent contractors. in many cases they could start and stop when they wanted to.

also because they were working in a highly regulated environment in which fairs were regulated. they were in many places getting workmen's comp. they were getting the best of both worlds. because of fair regulation. they were able to feel that. on workers in this economy do not feel this way. it shifted over the last years. they were being controlled by the algorithms. much longer hours to make the same amount of money. and that as is the existing pressure point that we have.

in california that led the supreme court to looking at an off-line delivery company to adopt this test which essentially says for those of you that are familiar. that there is a presumption of employment and the hiring entity wants to treat their workers like independent contractors. as the workers themselves. the workers our transportation workers. and there can't be employees. and that was later codified and applied to all california law. while the test really attempts

to capture the issues that industry has caused. all of this misclassification of people who are very clearly employees because we live in the international economy. it is meant that some businesses had been able to take their work and put it elsewhere. one of the ways to address this is to nationalize the abc tests. i think the other way and this is really important and brings us back to julie's work is to start thinking about how we make platform cooperatives

more broadly a real part of our economy and what are the necessary regulations that need to be passed to sit facilitate this. what are the barriers and what kind of real innovation whether technological or regulatory innovation can we push ourselves towards. to enable this. and the possibilities. and failures i wonder turning it back to you if you could talk more about that. what do we need to do to make this possible. to get people of the freedom they want.

the feeling of self ownership. and simultaneously author offering them in creating ways to have real safety net protections. solve all of our problems for us in the next seven minutes. there was one other things i wanted to say about the employment classification. i had have the privilege of being able to study a company that switched all of its workers. it switched it all to employees in anticipation. i had been able to in this new project i'm doing. we've talked with managers. and what has been really interesting as. and this validates the point that they made quite a few times.

they retained a lot of flexibility under the employment status. there is nothing in the law that says that has to happen. they were able to maintain at. but a really high level number one. in the managers we talked to have basically said they prefer this model. the rub on it is that it's more expensive. this is the biggest reason why they don't want to do it. i think what we can say from that is that we don't want businesses that can only exist by exploiting people were basically pricing and doing the predatory pricing which is pricing below what a service should cost. consumers may not love it

because the ride hails will become more expensive. but the idea that you should have really cheap private cars at your disposal anytime. is not only kind of ecological disaster. it undermines the public transportation system. it basically meets people's needs. and going in the private cars is something that is more of an occasional occurrence rather than every day i can get to where i need to go by having a private driver. i think one of the things about the cooperative model. it is these kinds of these are almost all individual contribution kind of

activities so a driver, a housecleaner. at really answer. it's more than 35,000 members. it's all kinds of freelancers. people get paid for what they do unlike a plywood cooperative people are making a common product. one of the things this means is that the revenue distribution is can be very different. a small number of people earn a lot. the high fraction. they also invest a lot more and what they're doing and they are like the dependent workers. then you have a lot of people who pop in and out and have a more genuine relationship to it.

that's one of the things is different about the co-op i wonder julie if you could i don't know if you have thought about this. whether you talk about this in your book. in the platform context. unless those workers are considered employees of the platform there can have the same sort of precarious problems with their regard to injury on their job. i wonder the extent to which you think that employment status and platforms are mutually beneficial or possible to exist simultaneously. or the other option that we never had in the u.s. or at

least not in real policy circles where were actually making policy is how do we disentangle the employment from the safety net. and make it possible for people to really be freelancers or small business people or be members of a cooperative. >> this is so important. i think that tied everything to employment status it did a lot of wonderful things but it's have a lot of unintended impacts for example. people having to say in jobs for health insurance. i think this is a disaster. it's really important to an issue that i've studied for most of my career. because an employer gives

health insurance to someone they want them to work long hours. the more we can delink safety net issues and dimensions from employment the better. the vision that i have with my previous book and this one. is thinking about ways that make it possible for people to live without that dependence on employers to get their basic needs. so whether it is providing more at the municipal level or the federal level. there are many ways to do this. but i do think especially in a world where employment is becoming less and less secure. where ai is going to eliminate a lot of jobs. we we need to power down our economy not revved up.

for ecological reasons. with people working less it's a lot better. and the escalate. all of those things suggest the more we can do outside of it. the other. and then that opened up a lot more space for people to be active in the flexible ways. in ways that meet their needs and are not oppressive. otherwise if they get sick. they don't have a way to be taken care of. we had two more minutes. i want to say one more thing about your book. and then i want to give you the floor to end. i want to encourage all of those in the audience who haven't already purchased a book to purchase it or get it from the library. i think what it does is in a

very accessible way talks to an audience about how we got to this conversation and why we are so fixated on it. why the platform economy despite the fact that it's a small percentage of the economy in the united states. at least. why we talk so much about it. and why it has touched 70 different people's lives. why those promises have more or less not been met and how i think from the voices of the people that had experienced it. they re- produce the same inequalities that they were attempting to solve or move past. the fact that you had answers for us.

i think it is so incredibly hopeful and promising. not just for academics or policymakers or for people in everyday people who are living their lives i think this book has a lot to offer. i think you for your decade of leadership and collaboration. in the culmination of all of that. very groundbreaking and important book. i want to spend my last minute answering the question about what should a chapter in a blue state due to emulate this. we already have an effort here in massachusetts from our attorney general.

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