She has written and edited many books on the economy and sustainability including sustainable lifestyles and the quest for lassitude. Shes a former fellow and has won multipleawards for her work and research. She is joined today by dana depaul who is a professor of law at the university of californiahastings. Her work is subsidized by the California Supreme Court and her writing has been published in slate. Shes currently working on a book. Today they are discussing after the gig, this book discusses what the economy could havebeen and what it could still be. Ill leave you with this quote from Bill Mckibben who said juliet schor and her teamhave done something extraordinary. Their intensive research as let them understand what the sharing economy feels like and their storytelling ability lets the rest of us make complete sense of the data. In addition they provide a workable plan for how to fulfill the promise in gig work as part of a useful, fair economy. This book will redefine the field and on that note, ill turn things over toour speakers. Juliet, dena, the virtual stage is yours. Thank you so much for having me and i am just deeply, deeply honored to be in conversation with you, julie and you all just heard julies introduction but perhaps what was not articulated is that she is really not just a behemoth in this particular field thinking about the sharing or gate economy but also thinking about work more broadly and she has been central as a public intellectual and an incredible scholar for people across disciplines in thinking about the problems with work for a very long time. Shes also an amazing mentor in addition to meeting amazing and i think everyone, probably anyone of your students or Young Mentees who are here today can attest to that so this is an honor. Its an amazing book. It will change the conversation and im delighted to be here to talk to youabout. Thank you veena and im thrilled youare willing to come. I think were in a mutual admirationsociety. Let me just talk for a few minutes about our findings, where we ended up and then veena and i will have a conversation. So i think it makes sense to start with the origins of the gig economy or whats also called the sharing economy. Because in those origins i think we could see a direction for where we might go to reorient this sector which has really gotten off track. Uber and lyft were founded in the height of the Great Recession after the financial collapse and the loss was what we call in the book and idealistdiscourse. Its promise economic, social and environmental benefits. It had a winwin, slightly implausible winwin discourse. On the economic side is promise efficiency, using access that were idle a lot of the time more intensively and that was thought to lead environmental benefits. So if you could use the spare room instead of hotels, you wouldnt have to build a string of hotels. If people could share cars a lot of people would thinkthey would need to buy cars. So those were the sort of twin ideas of efficiency and emissions really, reduce emissions. It also promised opportunity for people. Were in the midst of a terrible pandemic like we are today read the platforms where places people can easily latch onto to earn extra money and maybe be able to stay in their house, paid on their student debt and these are the kinds of things we found when we interviewed people. Then there was a social promise about connection, because these platforms were hosting what i call stranger sharing or persontoperson interaction, it was thought they were going to make durable ties so you hop in a lyft, give a fist bump to the driver, you Start Talking and you have a connection you host someone on airbnb or couch surfing in your home, you become friendsso all those things were promised. And one thing i think hasnt been recognized about this is the extent to which the idea of discourse a longer standing traditions within Silicon Valley and when we look at those traditions we can see the two possible paths at the sharing economy mighthave taken. One is whats been called cyber utopianism which is the idea that online connections, online communities lead to a gallery and outcomes. They bring the people together in nonhierarchal kind of flat spaces, but they bypassed established structures of power and this was a really prominent idea in Silicon Valley in the early days but it has continued through this red line gets us to sharing economy platforms. Most, sort of more prominently obviously to the nonprofit platforms of the world were founded at this time and those are important. Couch surfing started as a nonprofit, repair cafcs, tool libraries , sharing spaces but also some of the forprofits use this same sort of cyber utopian discourse but there was another strand within Silicon Valley which was what we might think of as freemarket tech which is the idea the government is bad, the corporations are good. Corporations will give us all this good stuff. Unfettered corporations bring freedom and prosperity, liberty and that of course is the uber philosophy so there was sort of a rightwing Silicon Valley discourse and a more leftwing and you could see both of them in the socalled sharing economy. Now, i just mentioned the nonprofits read they have been important in the founding of the sector. They remain quite important in other parts of the world, europe especially read they were part of the Early Community and thatsactually where my research started. Because the 2008 and nine when i first started thinking about these issues, there was a lot of hope for things like time banks and food slots and repair cafcs, sort of the true sharing initiative at the Community Level that were really going to help people who work in economic distress or were going to build a different kind of egalitarian economy. So we began, i assembled a team and i just want to shout out, im dont know if any of the team members are here. I wrote this book with a team of people who were all phd students in sociology at the time. Eight now pretty much almost all of them have graduated. We did 13 case studies of different sharing initiatives , both the nonprofits, the kind of nonprofits that i just mentioned and then turned our attention to the forprofit like airbnb, task rabbit, touring which is airbnb four cars. Uber and lyft of course and we ended with a platform cooperative founded by the workers. Im still working on these issues. Came for almost 10 years. Still working on these issues with a group of colleagues and also some phd students that were looking at instant heart, and a number of delivery so we can talk about what happened since the book came out. And if you are here, let us know. So things havent turned out as expected and the title of the book ishow the sharing economy hijacked. And i guess the question that i want to address is why, what happened . So lets just say a word about the nonprofits and i want to talk too much about them today, happy to go into it in theq a. And i think the nonprofits we started are the boston area , the boston area audience got interested in these. We can go into detail area we studied a maker space, a food slot and a time back in this rural house and i have to sort of talk about what happened with the nonprofits which would be the term failure to thrive. So one of them actually failed to ring the time we werestudying it. One of them arrived, there were a lot of weight but not in others and in all of these cases there were kind of what we think of as dynamic social exclusion that really undermines the mission and the intentions of the founders and the participants and so forth and i think they learned some important lessons for those of us to build alternativeeconomies and i put myself in that camp. What about theforprofits . They comprise many many more people and have gotten a lot ofattention. So we began studying pretty much in the early days and i would say that in the early days things were pretty good on a lot of these platforms. Earnings were generallyhappy. Although then as now, and its gotten much worse but making a fulltime living on these platforms was hard to do even in the early days and that was true for a couple of reasons. Even the wages were too low so in the very earliest days, wages were good in allthese platforms. There were a lot more than minimum wages, more than people could get for many of the skills that they were engaged in on the platform. But even on the really high wage platforms, tax revenues we studied a lot of is the general errands and platforms both in the home and out. One of the big ones on task rabbit were putting together ikea furniture, housecleaning has a big but also virtual tax and so forth. Taskrabbit tends to have high wages, far above minimum wage and i also had a really highly educated workforce but its hard to get enough work on taskrabbit to have a decent income and one of the things we found was what we called dependent owners, people who were dependent on the platform that paid expenses for their rents, their food, car payments, etc. People who were dependent workers generally earned up to or below the poverty line. It wasvery hard to get out of poverty. Of course, some people put less but in general thats what we found whereas what we call elemental workers, people who are adding on to gig work, to other sources of income in many cases a fulltime job, maybe our students so they dont need to earn a full income or possibly a spousal income or so forth. Those folks have really positive experiences. They got higher wages. A good discriminate more of the tax they took. They had a lot more stability in their schedule because they didnt just have to work when the market demand was there and on many of these gigs market demand is variable over the day and even overthe week. They also had a lot more economy and how they did the work, much less worried about their ratings and reputations , deactivation and so forth. One person said to us when we asked what would happen if your rating went down and the platform asks you todo another orientation andthey were like , no way. They just wouldnt do it anymore. It was interesting the extent to which the supplementary workers did things in the way they wanted. Rather than the way the platform wanted so one of the big issues in the scholarship and also in the public discussion about platforms is sort of how much economy to work, how much algorithmic control we were exercising and we found the differences between independent workers or what you might think of as fulltime workers although thats not exactly the same thing and the supplemental. One of the important things that over time more and more workers on these platforms especiallybelow wage platforms , ride hailing and delivery were dependent workers. It came to be more and more dependent workforce and thats partly why things have gone south on the forprofits if you think of it in that way. So why did they go south . In some ways the model never made a lot of sense for some platforms. If you take uber, the biggest of all the platforms and has the most workers, ubers price is driven far below cost and what that meant was they were always losing money. They were alwayspressuring the drivers. They were only going to be able to have a viable model if they can absolutely come to dominate the market, like it got all the competition and raise the prices high enough so that they can make a profit on each ride. Thats turned out to be a lot more difficult than they expected and more than what uber said. High prices are what drove consumers but theyre not sustainable , certainly not on ride hail, to a certain extent i think also not sustainable at current levels on delivery and to some extent on other tasks. So these platforms are depending on the exploitation of the workers and the failure to make employment law, this isa specialty were going to talk about in a minute. But what that sort of bad models to begin with mens eventually a lot of pressure from investors because theres a point at which they want to see profitability and thats an important in the downward trajectory of wages which has youve seen on ride hails, youve seen on delivery but if you look at high wage platforms like taskrabbit whats happened is the opposite. The wages are high but that restricts the demand and thats the kind of basic contradiction there where a basic sign of Economic Confidence there, its a simple obvious thing. You lower the prices, you get more customers but you have to please the workers. You raise the prices, you have a smaller market and with would uber be profitable anda small fraction of its size and that the question. Theydont want to find out. I want to wipe out Public Transportation, what everybody out and dominate the market and then they can employ a bunch of workers for customers. Lots more to say on that but let me just end with the question of what is possible, what could we do . Can we get this sharing economy back on track and do we even want to and there are many people who think this is terrible, we want to move to a fulltime, secure employment system and this whole experiment in gate economy should be stopped. So one of the things that weve recognized about that platform is theres very different conventional businesses. They generally operate with open access for earners and consumers to. What that means is 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 asked to get on and try to earn on one of the things that just its this chronic supply, particularly when theres a bad labor market and thats what were seeing right now in the post covid environment which is tons of people going onto these, getting harder and harder for people to make money. And the larger labor market is doing bad, more people go on to apps and you see that as the general unemployment moves, you can also see this theres lots of entry andexit on these over the courseof the year. Very very flexible. You can see it in the rising numbers of dependent workers on the lower ride hail and delivery. But the openness and flexibility of the apps also attracts a lot of people for whom that flexibility is essential. They may be people who have other responsibilities. We have people that we interviewed who have to leave fulltime jobs because one woman got a divorce and had to take care of her children and ours had to conform to the school day so she started working on allthese platforms as a way of doing. Catherine hill is an interesting work on these workers and their use of the app because if you have many times a disabilityyou dont know when youre going to be able to work. Even hour to hour and the apps allowed so thats one thing about the app thats positive, applicability and the secondthing about them , this gets us to the last point about coops owned by workers is that the technology of the app eliminate a lot of management function so hr, quality control, matching consumers with earners. Many of these things are done by algorithms. So you probably if you looked at this sector at all you know that hes companies in the early days entire many people at their corporate headquarters, theyre very unique in that way. Delivery workers especially but the point is that a lot of the functions of management are now automated. They are done through algorithm management. That means that workers dont really need that much supervision. They dont need management as much as they did and this becomes an argument for why the cooperative structure which is owned bythe workers is so much more efficient. And in these kinds of platforms. They also scale rapidly to get the right technology, you can build out a workers coop and you get the right rules and governance. You can build that workers coop quickly. So the workers coop turns out to be a really efficient way to organize platforms. And thats why our last case as i mentioned was a workers cooperative, there was a photographers cooperative. Very very successful case in which photographers owned and covered the platform. They got much more of their money back from the grass at a sold and were really happy about the whole enterprise. So i think that is one possible future for they gate economy would solve a lot of the problems in the corporate zone platforms and could really make it worth the workers wage that does take advantage of what the technology has to offer. Let me stop there and im going to turn it over to you. Thank you so much julia again, this book is fascinating. I read it at the first draft and then i read the finished product and its incredibly insightful. I wonder something that maybe you didnt get a chance to reflect on in the short time but i want to hear you talk more about and theaudience possibly would like to you talk more also , in many ways this Research Project walks the walk. This is a collaborative Research Project across with many students. This book, collaboratively written looks at not just the prototypical platform capitalist, youre not just with uber drivers, youre talking about people in the postrecession and Great Recession who are trying to reimagine theirworld. So i wanted to talk a little bit more about those folks and what their trajectory was and you might want to talk about the current moment and how we can use this current recession that we are in maybe differently than those folks did and how it felt to learn from mistakes at that moment yeah, okay. Let me start with the Research Process and the team process you raised and it really was a privilege and it was a wonderful experience. I do want to thank the Macarthur Foundation that funded the research and they funded it in such wonderful ways because basically, rather than the typical process of having to write a grant, that youre going to dothis and you have to do what you said , they gave us money and pretty much allowed us to go where the research took us so we were constantly evolving and that was wonderful and veena, you gave me a comment on the early version of the book which was something i kind of and realized but basically what we were able to do because we started when the sector was just beginning, we were kind of able to take a trip through. We sort of moved the vector and that was really a privilege because it meant as they started happening, we could just follow and we were stuck with something that we had designed in year one that really wasnt as interesting in yearthree or four , having done this over the last two years. So we also started out. I talk in the book about the idea of the district, we were also an idealist team in the sense that we had hoped, we had high hopes for many of these things that were beginning and so we were really interested in them because we thought they could make meaningful change and solve the problems that were so obvious and the different functionality of global capitalism , in a period, 2008 so things that really crack at that time. So even if we end up coming i want to say disillusioned, i dont want to say disillusioned but we saw our research led up to many of the problems and things going in directions that we would not have hoped that they would. And the second part of your question is really interesting aboutthe people , the people that we talked to at the beginning and one thing that was interesting is in the early days on both the forprofit and nonprofit, people were really believing in that idea of discourse. People were going on tomorrow, the area be for cars in order to rent out environmentally efficient cars like hybrids. They wanted to teach other people about hybrids they were making friends on here and be. They were trying to create a different kind of economy so people believed that these platforms would create a persontoperson economy that would substantially different from what they fit to dehumanize, depersonalize or impersonal corporate economy so whether it was the economic benefits, the social or the environmental, there were a lot of true believers in those early days across the whole range of shared sharing economy. An interesting question from the audience that dovetails into one of my questions. So in your last chapter you talk about how scholars really think about where we go from here in three ways. Theres either a platform capitalist way where you sort of enshrine their model into law andregulation. Theres the state regulation way and then there is the democratic shift. Each room cooperative way and in some ways were kind of in all of these spaces in time right now. If we are in a particular moment where things are shifting. And so John Marshall asks, whether you can comment on how ownership of platforms of businesses like rideshare and maybe also talk to us a little bit more about what that might look like in comparison to coop models. What our sort of the possibilities of them and what are the things we need to do to make one for either of those two possible. Thats a great question read one that and talkedabout enough. Me just say a word or two about the three that i talk about in the last chapter that youraise. The first one which is sort of just a corporate dominance platform, one of my coauthors and friends, a dutch father named kuhn franklin wrote a really interesting piece in which he made the point and appoint obvious now, we can see it with whats happening with huber is that the likely trajectory we just kind of let platforms what they want, is going to lead to a couple of super platforms that sort of have all the Different Services they will come to dominate , coke and pepsi, uber and lyft. That sort of model in which insulin industries we really basically have 2 to 3 dominant types so thats one direction. The second is regulation which you mentioned and which dena has worked so much on and you seem real change in this. What i argue in the book at the beginning in 2018, you have start to see that types types from one revelation and until that point its very very hard to get any regulation through. And in fact, most of the regulation that was happening was in the direction of more leeway for the companies. So airbnb was illegal in many places it was operating at high levels and the company got regulators to change those laws to make it legal but starting in 2018, regulators of some of the biggest cities started to clampdown and ride hails, delivery and on shortterm rentals, airbnb and a few of their smaller competitors. You see it in new york where righthanders get a minimum wage. You see it in San Francisco, its really clampdown on airbnb. La, boston, seattle considering different applications and i now have one of the collaborators on the book and i have a database of airbnb regulations in 10 cities and its just beena tremendous change. We really going in the regulatory dimension since 2018 and we will talk about california now but whether or not that, whether things have that moment and is going to be soft in november or whether, whats going to happen so thats one way and i think its essential. Theres no question that these platforms need to obey the laws that we have and they need to, we need to create some new regulations to solve the problems they create. But the question is sort of do we stop there especially in the United States. Can we do enough with regulation where we have a state that is so captured by industry. In the business. And that gets us to the third path which is a, we talked about the work ofcoops. Whats all platform cooperative is real and the questioners. Possibility which is municipally owned coops. Municipally owned platforms. So municipally owned platforms i think to provide some really interesting opportunities. So there pros and cons to the work of coop models, that doesnt mean there school owned, with the coop work i think controlled democraticcontrolled will be easier where you have invisible coops, you get serious and you can have the democraticcontrolled but you always have to make up , you have the state in its own interests come in there and it would really be run in the interest of the workers or the citizens, the consumers. So with a municipal coop youll get ideally a multistakeholder. You might really want to set it up as a more independent kind of entity so that it doesnt just get used for political reasons. So it has been integrity. The worker coop model, youre a little bit more subject to the vagaries of the market where particularly with a municipal model, the city, these would probably run a city level. A lot of this, we studied the consumer services, most of which are facetoface intensity local markets. There are other types of platforms are global, obviously airbnbtheres a global dimension digital labor for example , mechanical and so forth where youre calling more of a local force. Those are some other things, which basically those consumer services, where you have a municipal entity, if you do more to shape the market area then you have the question of is going to be the only accurate market, is it goingto be competing against private and so forth. I will stop on this one, just mentioned one thing that happened while i was doing the research and i was approached by someone who was setting up a municipal labor market in a city in britain at the time of really high unemployment. It was going to be a General Services labor market so consumers would know whatever they needed, they posted anybody could come on to try and get those jobs read and it failed almost instantly because there was such a big imbalance ofsupply and demand. Many more people need the work then there was available this is also was the worker coop, they had an easier time because unlike the most of the platforms, a candidate not the open access so they are membership models. They restrict the number of workers who can be on the platform at any one time. A try and basically match supply demand and theres a department for why he would want to do that because otherwise it becomes hard for people to make money on the platform. So i think both models are interesting. I would like to see some municipal experimentation with municipal models now that we have a decade very close platforms, San Francisco is actually thinking about one and the delivery section. At a serious way i think and veena, you know about that. Not very much actuallybut julie , you mentioned this movement in Great Britain where they were considering. Katie wells is in the audience and she has a great question that i think you do such a good job of thinking about because youve been so prolific in terms of meeting and seem to really understanding how the platform economy has rolled out in differentplaces. I keep wondering if you could talk a little bit about how, what you found it alongside the platform economy in other countries and whether they connect or diverge with those elsewhere. So theres tremendous variation in how the platforms operate in other countries. In europe many are highly regulated so when uber came in and had tooperate like a regular taxi service and pay minimum wages and so forth. So in the countries of europe where the labor markets or labor unions are stronger, the platforms half to do more to treat workers better. On the other hand theres work in that context, Jason Jackson at mit is studying ride hair in the south cities and finding levels of exploitation and abuse through subcontracting, through predatory loans. Kind of all the familiar tactics of uber exploitation that we are seeing their so it is very contextual. And uber has been banned in a number of European Countries because it wont follow the rules. Veena, can i ask you a question . I really want to make sure we have enough time to talk about whats going on in california and this classification and vanessa asks im a freelance professional, many of my colleagues are concerned about regulations and veena has done pioneering work on what so many ride hill drivers support the California Law that reclassifies makes sure they were classified as employees. What do you think . Its a really hard question and i see some of you might know ive become the target of harassment as a result of a lot of misinformation about whats been going on in california and my relationship to it, i see some of the people who are curious to hear what we have to say. I think that part of the reason and then asks this question either so much attention being paid to the issue ofworker classification here. In the United States as you all know, the main pathway to security as we do not have another kind of social safety net the way they do in northern america in particular is through employment so the only way that you get healthcare for yourself, the only way to get access on the point of insurance to Worker Compensation if youre injured on the job, all of these shakiness that we all really need is through employee status that makes employment really different. So the reason that these Platform Companies came in and you know, just really capitalized a lot of these carveout in law and tried to widen them, tried to make it seem like there were actually independent contractors, was because it was so much cheaper for them easy for them to hit scale and easier to make labor costs down. Unlike, so unlike independent contractors like people who are in cooperatives who are really determining whats unfair or their own prices or really building a client list , who are also in to be a Small Business dealer area workers in these economies are highly controlled through the Business Model and through algorithms area this is not true across the platform but its particularly true in the us, the Platform Companies that employ the most workers so i think and to your question, that is why theres been so much attention placed in the issueof worker classification. When we think about regulating the platform more broadly. And my sense is that regulators see this as the most, as the biggest Pressure Point for these companies area that what theyre hearing from their constituents is that people are not earning the minimum wage, their sleeping in their cars and in california its economic inequality is being exacerbated. Is being ameliorated and in a sense i think we still have in the United States but if you work 12 hours aday you should be to put food on the table and pay your rent. In my work i see a trajectory, a shift in how people doing this work for these companies felt about the work itself so one of the things i have written a lot about is how taxi workers actually come across the board, or pretty happy as independent contractors for much of the 90s and early to thousands and part of the reason that was was because they were arguably true independent contractors and could build their own client list and in many cases sort of stop and start when they wanted to and work when they wanted to but also because they were working in a highly regulated environment which fairs were regulated and safety issues were regulated and they were in many places getting workers comp and underlayment so they were getting the best of both worlds and they were had the safety net and independent and because of fair regulation and because of supply regulation they were also able to feel like they were independent and real Small Business people and workers in this economy do not feel that way. Its shifted and shifted over the past eight years as fairs have or as commissions have dropped as workers realize that that they are being controlled by the algorithms and their working much longer hours to make the same amount of money and that is the existing Pressure Point that we have in the laws to Employment Status to address these issues. In california that led the California Supreme Court to looking at an offline Delivery Company to adopt this abc test which essentially says for those of you who arent familiar that there is a presumption of employment and a hiring entity wants to treat their workers like independent contractors so they have to fulfill threepart tests if hiring entities is doing the exact same work as the workers themselves. If uber is a Transportation Company and the workers are transportation workers there cant be any kind of or those cannot be employees or independent contractors under state law. That was later codified and applied to all California Law under 85 and there is a lot of consternation about this because while this has really comes to capture the issues that industry has caused all of this, all of this, you know, massive misclassification of people who are very clearly employees because we live in a national, International Economy has meant that some more unscrupulous businesses have been able to take particularly and in Certain Industries take their work and put them in for that work elsewhere. You know, one of the ways to address this is, of course, to nationalize the abc test so that you cant just move things if you dont want to use a writer in california because its too expensive moved to nevada where its cheaper but i think the other way and i think this is important and brings us back to juliets work is to start thinking about how we mix that from cooperative a or cooperatives more broadly a real part of our economy. What are the necessary regulations that need to be passed to facilitate this and what are the barriers to creating cooperative and what are and what real innovation, whether technological innovation or regulatory innovation, can we, you know, push ourselves towards to enable this and julie studied a last chapter you talk about this platform cooperative and the possibilities and failures and 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 recapture to give people the freedom that they want and the feeling of not being the boss the feeling of self ownership and simultaneously offering them creating ways to have real safetynet protections solve all our problems for us in the next seven minutes. [laughter] but there is one thing i want to say about the employment classification. But let me just finish that conversation. Ive had the privilege of being able to study the company that switched all its California Workers, Platform Company that switched its California Workers to employees in anticipation of a b5. Ive been able to in this new project and doing we talked to both the workers and weve also talked with managers and what has been interesting is in this very much validates the point that vina has made quite a few times these workers retained a lot of flexibility under the Employment Status. The Companies Say they wont necessarily lose lacks ability and there is nothing in the law that says that has to happen in this company was able to maintain, not absolutely as much but a really highlevel number one and the managers we talked to have basically said they prefer this model there are fewer problems in the efficiency is higher, productivity is higher in the rub on it is its more expensive. This is, you know, the biggest reason the companies dont want to do it but i think what we can say from that is that we dont want businesses that can only exist by exploiting people or basically pricing and doing what is predatory pricing which is pricing below what a service should cost. Consumers may not love it because they will become more expensive but the idea that you should have a really cheap private cars at your disposal at any time is not only sort of ecologically a disaster but also really undermines the Public Transportation system which is what we need as a Public Transportation system that basically meets peoples needs and going in those private cars is something that is more of a occasional occurrence rather than every day i can get to wherever i need to go by having a private driver. Okay, the platform coopts. I think one of the things about the cooperative model in these kinds of contacts is that these are almost all individual contributions kinds of activities so a driver, housecleaner, freelancer, theres a wonderful coop in europe called smart more than 35000 members and operates in over 45 countries and all types of freelancers whether graphic design, copy editing, you name it, codeine. Those are individual confusions and so people get paid for what they do on like a cooperative or auto factory that goes cooperative where people are making a common product. One of the things this means is that the Revenue Division is going to be very different than in the coop. We studied a small number of people owning a high fraction and they also invest more in what they are doing and they are like the independent workers in the really full timers and then you have a lot of people who pop in and out and have a much more tenuous relationship. That is one of the things different about the platform cooperative then a sort of oldfashioned workers cooperative. I wonder, juliet, if you could, i dont know if you have thought about, i know you thought about this and cant remember when you talk about this in your book but in the platform context were talking about in the u. S. Unless those workers are considered employees of the platform they will have this precarious problems in regard to injury on the job or on appointment insurance and i wonder if the extent to which you think limit status and platforms are mutually beneficial or possible for just simultaneously or, you know, if the other sort of option or conversation we never have in the u. S. Released not in real policy circles where we are making policy so how do we disentangle the employment from the safetynet and make it possible to for people to really be freelancers or really be, you know, Small Business people for the members of a cooperative and still lead mature lives . This is so important. I think tying everything to Employment Status historically has been very it did a lot of wonderful things but it also had a lot of unintended impacts. For example, people having to stay in jobs for Health Insurance and the connection between Health Insurance and employment i think is a disaster and its really important to an issue of study for most my career which is working hours in a big part of why working hours are so high in this country because of an employer gives Health Insurance to someone and they want them to work long hours. They dont want to have to hire many more people and pay their benefits. The more we can delink safetyn safetynet, a safety net dimensions for employment the better and that is one of the great things about universal income. The vision that i had an in my previous book and in this one thinking about ways that make it possible for people to live without that dependence on the employer to get their basic needs and whether its providing more at the municipal level or the federal level, there are many ways to do this but i do think that especially in a world where employment is becoming less and less secure and where ai is going to eliminate a lot of jobs where we need to power down our economy, not reed it up for ecological reasons and for people working less is a lot better to deescalate all of those things could just, the more we can do outside of employment the better and that opens up a lot more space for people to be active in these flexible ways on these platforms in ways that meet their needs and that are not sort of oppressive and have to do it because otherwise, you know, if they get sick they dont have a way to be taking care of or so forth. So, yes. Juliet, two more minutes and i want to say one more thing about your book and then i will give you the floor to end. I want to encourage all of those in the audience who havent already purchased a book, purchase it or get it from your library or buy it for your library or buy it for school because i think what it does is in a very accessible way talk to us, talk to a very, to an audience about how we got to this conversation and why we are so fixated on it. By the platform economy, despite the fact that such a small percentage of the economy in the United States that why we talk so much about it and why it has touched so many different peoples lives and the promises were and why those promises have more or less, for the most part, not been met and how, i think, from the voices of the people whove experienced it how, in many ways they reproduce the same inequalities that they were attempting to solve or to move past and the fact that this is rare for a social science book or sociology book and the fact that you have answers for us. You had examples for how to move forward and that so incredibly hopeful and promising and so not just for academics and not just for policymakers but for people everyday people who are living their lives and i think this book has a lot to offer. I thank you for your decade of research in collaboration in, you know, the culmination of all of that which is this really very wise, groundbreaking and very important book. Thank you, vina. Thank you so much. I want to spend my last minute answering the question about what should a dsa chapter in a blue state do to emulate californias 85. Get in touch with progressive unions and they will help that. We already have an effort here in massachusetts for our attorney general. Weeknights this month we are featuring book tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight we focus on neuroscience and healthcare beginning with David Eagleman and his book live wired. Catherine and her book bottle of lies and later lisa moscone he and the double x brain. That starts at 8 00 p. M. Easte eastern. Enjoy book tv in this weekend on cspan2. Booktv on cspan2 has top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Saturday at 1 00 p. M. Eastern on the recent virtual southern festival of books authors sarah marsh, Thomas Burton and rayne winkler reflect on life in appalachia and walter lloyd and david pilgrim enjoys the grim jim crow era in the south. 7 45 p. M. New york staff writer discusses his book, joe biden the life, the run and what matters now. On sunday at 1 00 p. M. Eastern from the southern festival of books journalist talks about his book, the belt of justice about the civil rights case which helps to reaffirm the right to a trial by jury in most criminal cases. Author Stephanie Gordon and offer their thoughts on Investigative Journalism and its role in a democracy. Then in 9 00 p. M. Eastern on after words while Professor John talks about his book american contagion epidemics in the law from smallpox two covid19. Hes interviewed by Georgetown University law professor lawrence and watch booktv this weekend on cspan2. Host Reed Hastings and erin meyer are the coauthors of this new book no rules rules. Mr. Hastings is also the ceo of
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