Own this! Platform co-ops for the gig economy

Own this! Project brings 1 billion co-op members online, giving birth to genuine sharing economy, reclaiming trust, voice, & prosperity

The Problems
Independent contract workers toil on platforms they do not control. In 2016, Pew announced that 24% of Americans reported earning money from the platform economy. They face lower wages, unpredictable schedules, & stalled worker rights. In the care sector specifically, jobs are predominantly filled by women & minority workers. Agencies overcharge families & underpay workers while the demand increases with aging & growing disability. Internationally, more and more workers join the extractive gig economy.

The Idea
Building on the successes of the open-source software movement, “platform cooperatives” adapt the proven business model of cooperatives to bring democratic governance, self-determination, transparency, the prospect of data democracy and ownership to the digital economy, helping to reduce disparity.

We are combining the best of two proven systems: co-ops & platforms. Co-ops are a 200-year proven economic model. Online platforms have a quarter-century-long economic track record. This combination will address both, the weaknesses of extractive online platforms (power concentration, privacy invasions, and exploitation) and of cooperatives (upscaling and finance).  In the U.S. alone, “over 70% of all co-op employees in the are female, two-thirds are non-white and Latinos are a near majority (45%). Platforms allow co-ops to aggregate demand, reduce fragmentation, supports governance and training, resilience, help organize workers, harness data and automation to assist workers, and shape worker identity.

Currently, there are over 240 companies in the platform co-op eco system (see: http://platform.coop). The concept of platform cooperativism was developed by Trebor Scholz in 2014.

Scholz, Trebor.  Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. New York City: Polity. 2016  

Scholz, Trebor; Schneider, Nathan. eds. Ours to Hack and to Own. The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. New York City: OR Books, 2016.

The Solution
We are proposing to build a “platform co-op” (a fair, replicable, and sustainable online labor brokerage) with and for the Federation of 103 co-ops of Poor Self-Employed Women of India. Beyond India, the project can be upscaled in many countries and sectors. One billion people in 96 countries are members of cooperatives.

The project will employ a “virtuous tornado” process, iteratively expanding the number of challenges to enable agile response to risks.

Change Metrics

• Globally, the project will have impact on the following metrics:

• Contract workers globally earning a “living wage” and having a voice in how businesses are run

• Workers who face barriers to employment (e.g., refugees, family care requirements, remote location) gaining employment;

• 70% of people with disabilities that can work are unemployed

• Seniors receiving the safe, quality elder care they require so they can age in place (many nations are moving toward demographics where the old outnumber the young);

• Children receiving the safe, quality child care they need so their mothers can work confidently;

• Reduction in migrant care workers who are forced into modern-day slavery by corrupt recruiters (e.g., ~ 2.2 million Filipino care workers are working abroad);

• And many more.

Combining the time-proven cooperative model with emerging (mobile-ready) platform technology, bringing the power of online labor markets to those facing vicious cycles of poverty, the cooperative platform economy does not only offer an innovative techno-economic model, it has become an entirely new area of research.

The project will advance innovative processes, that engage the implementing community from the start as co-designers. We will iteratively add more users & functions. This reverses the dominant pattern of excluding marginal groups, which contributes to disparity.The project initially addresses a labor market in India but will be transferable to other labor domains.

The cooperative digital economy is an entirely new field for genuine innovation. How to build technology that is accommodates the needs of users and workers alike? We will deploy iterative full-cycle co-design processes that allow the project to grow organically & continuously accommodate new implementations. All tools & resources will be designed to be customizable with open APIs & transparent open communities that welcome new members and orchestrate the sharing, pooling, refinement & expansion of tested tools & resources. The demand for this is evidenced by the overwhelming number of requests that come to PC on a continuous basis.    

• Form Advisory Board for the project

• Several co-design meetings with the women of SEWA in Ahmedabad

• Prototyping based on needs of women at SEWA

• Assist training of 25, then 50 women to offer beauty services through the gig economy/platform co-op

• Implementation and evaluation of early prototype: trained women use platform

• First iteration of solution and cycle of implementation

• Early results and making it public and considering transfer to more promising scenarios

See earlier response on metrics.

+ IMAGINE:  

3,000 babysitters in Illinois joining a platform co-op to reduce isolation, upgrade skills and share resources.

Trash pickers in Cairo, Egypt and Recife, Brazil who form a platform co-op to schedule collections.

An online labor market for ex-inmates who are struggling to re-integrate into a job market that often shuns them. In the US, this affects 650,000 people each year.

A labor platform that can offer fair conditions for the thousands of Filipino women who are lured into North America by shady agencies to then live in modern day slavery.

Embedding technologies is an essential part of this project. The co-op advantage plays out especially in that domain because the social organization and management of contract workers is already a given within a cooperative. People know each other. They are friends. There is staff. All of these factors make the cooperative form distinctly stand out in the gig economy. Between the tense poles of platform capitalism -- employment and contract work-- platform co-ops offer a third way. Even the 13,000 members of SEWA alone would be a good initial customer base.

The platform co-op is not realized yet but we are working with the international platform co-op movement to co-design and implement this solution.  

There are 240 businesses and projects in our eco system-- from Australia to Berlin, London, and Paris, to Tokyo, and Hong Kong (where the next platform cooperativism conference will take place September 28-29, 2018). 

The initial implementation starts small, with 25 women. From there, we will upscale to 50 women, and up from there. The labor platform co-op could be used by tens of thousands of co-op members in India and worldwide within 3 years. Ultimately, it could be adapted by millions of workers in sectors as diverse as child care, elder care, social care, as well as all home services.

• Product management

• 25 years of experience in open source programming
  

• Theoretically-grounded action research

• Design of contextually best practices

• International network to propagate the project and distribute it successfully

• Global community

• Advocacy skills -- policy analysis

The basic technical infrastructure for this project is already supported by  Google.org. They committed $1,000,000. We are in discussion also with several other foundations. One possibility for sustainability is also an investment model if the number of women reaches at least 2000. 

MIT is a leader in the filed of technology. The Sloan School at MIT also hosts core faculty who are deeply supportive of the economical, cultural, and political model of cooperatives. Therefore, MIT is uniquely positioned to support this work.

MIT SOLVE could advise on the overall end result of the project, and its scaling. 

Key challenges are marketing, visibility, and the creation of a cooperative data commons based on shared principles and data standards, globally. Such shared standards if combined with peer production licenses would allow cooperatives to be true to one of the seven cooperative principles, namely CO-OPS SHARE WITH OTHER CO-OPS. A commitment to open source and open data allows our project to be replicated worldwide.