Todays form with juliet schor with her book after the gig. She is doing today conversation by vina. Julia sure is a professor of sociology at boston college. She is also a member of the Macarthur Foundation connected learning research network. She has written and edited many books on the economy and sustainability including sustainable life sales and a quest for platitudes. She is a fellow meant former guggenheim fellow and has won multiple awards for her work and research. She is joined today by vina, who is a professor of law at the university of california hastings. Her work has been cited by the California Supreme Court in her writing has been published in the los angeles times. The sharing economy what it is what it couldve been what it could still be. I will leave you with this quote from bill himself, juliet schor and her team have done something extraordinary. Extensive research has let them understand what the economy feels like to its participants and their storytelling ability. It lets the rest of us makes complete sense of the data. In addition, they provide a workable plan, perhaps to fulfill the promise of gig work as part of a supportive useful they are economy. This book will redefine the fields and on that note of praise, i will turn things over to our speaker, juliet, the virtual stage is now yours. Thank you so much for having me. We are deeply honored to be in conversation we just heard julies introduction but will he is not just on a behemoth in this particular field also thinking about work more broadl broadly. Incredible scholar for people across discipline. For a very long time. Shes an amazing thinker so any one of your students or Young Mentees this is an honor, and amazing, it will change the conversation im delighted to be here to talk to about im thrilled you were willing to come. I think we are in a mutual admiration society. Talk about the book the findings for them are going to have a conversation. To start with the origins of the gig economy or the sharing economy. In those origins i think we can see a direction for where we might go to reorient this sector which is really gotten off trac track. Uber and lift were founded in 2008 and nine. At the height of the Great Recession on this sector and idealist discourse. Promised economic social and environmental benefits and a slightly plausible when one discourse. Been on the economic side it promised efficiency using assets that were idle a lot of the time were intensively. And that was thought to lead to environmental benefits. So if you could use p rooms instead of hotels, you would not have to build as many hotels. If people could share cars, a lot of people would think they would not need to buy cars. So those were the sort of twin ideas of efficiency and omissions really reduced emissions. Also promised opportunity for people. The platforms were places could easily hop onto, to earn extra money to maybe be able to stay in their house, pay down the student debt. These are the kind of things we found them interviewed people. Then there is a social promise about connection. That because these platforms were hosting what i call strangers sharing for persontoperson interactions, it was thought that they were going to make durable ties. You host someone on airbnb couch surfing in your home, you become friends. So all of those things were promised. And one thing that has not been recognized enough is the extent to which the idealists discourse threat of longer standing traditions within Silicon Valley. Emily look at those traditions we can see the two possible paths that the shared economy might have taken. One is what has been cyber utopianism. Online communities lead to outcomes. The flat spaces they bypass the established structures of power. In Silicon Valley in its early days. But it has continued through, there is a thread line that gets us to sharing economy platforms. Sort of more prominently obviously to the nonprofit platforms that were also founded at this time. And those are important. Couch surfing started as a nonprofit, you dont pay money, repair cafes, tool i braced make or spaces. But also some of the forprofits use the same sort of cyber utopian discourse. But there was a another strand within Silicon Valley which is what we might think of free market text which is the idea that the government is bad, the corporations are good, corporations are going to get us all this good stuff. Unfettered corporations bring freedom, prosperity, liberty. And that of course is the uber alessa fee. So there is a sort of right wing Silicon Valley discourse and a more leftwing one. And you could see both of them socalled sharing economy. I just mention the nonprofits import in the founding of the sector europe especially. Theyre part of the earlier community. That is actually where my Research Team started. Because in 2008 921st started thinking about these issues, there was a lot of hope for things like maker spaces and timebased food swaps and repair cafes. Kind of true sharing initiatives at the Community Level that are really going to help people who were in economic distress. Or were going to build different kinds of economy. We began. I assembled a team and i just want to shout out. I dont know if any of the team members are here, i wrote this book with 18 of people who were all phd students in sociology of the time. They involve premuch now all graduated. We did 13 case studies of different sharing initiatives. Both the nonprofits which is the kinds of nonprofits that i just mentioned. And then we turned our attention to the forprofits like air bmp, past rabbits, a lot of work with past graphic touro which airbnb for cars, delivery platforms, uber lift of course, and we ended with a platform cooperative owned by the worker workers. I am still working on these issues. That came for almost ten years. I am still working on these issues with a group of colleagues from northeastern. And also some bc phd students. Were looking into crime shoppers and delivery apps. You are from the team here let us on the q a. So, things have not turned out as expected. So the title of the book is how the shared economy got hijacked. I guess the question i want to address is why . What happened . Let me just say a word about the nonprofits. And, i was not planning on talking too much about them today, happy to go into it into the q a there. I think they are really in the boston area folks are interested in these studied makers space in a time bank easiest way to talk about what happened with these nonprofits would be the term failure to thrive. One of them actually failed during the time we were studying it. One of them thrived in a lot of ways but not in others. That really undermined intention of the founders participants and so forth those trying to build alternative economies and put myself in that camp what about the forprofits theyve got a lot of attention. So we begin studying these pretty much in the early days. And i would say in the early days things were pretty good on a lot of these platforms. The earners were generally happy. Although, then, as now. Of course is gotten much worse. 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. Either the wages were too low, so in the very earliest days, wages were good on all these platforms. They were a lot more than minimum wage, there a lot more than people could get for many of the kinds of skills they were engaged in on the platforms. But, even on the really high reach plastic jim platforms, its a general kind of errand and work platform, both in the home and out. Some of the big tasks on task rabbit where ikea furniture, delivery of cleaning is a big one. Tests have high wages far above the wages. In a highly educated workforce. Its called dependent earners, people were dependent on the platform to pay the basic expenses for the rents, the foo food, people were dependent workers generally earned up to or below the poverty line. It was very, very hard to get out of poverty. Of course some people could. But in general, that was what we found. Whereas we found supplemental workers, people who are adding on this gig work to other sources of income. In most cases a fulltime job. Maybe they are students so they dont need to earn a full incom income. Or possibly espousal income or so forth. Those folks higher wages because they can discriminate more in the path they took. Have a lot more flexibility in the schedule mary market demand is very variable they also had a lot more time to me much less worried about the reputation one person said to us who have that the rating went down the platform message another orientation they 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 autonomy do workers really have . How much algorithmic controls are they exercising . We found big differences between the dependent workers and what you might think is a fulltime worker, which is not exactly the same thing and the supplemental. One of the important things is over time, more and more workers on these platforms. Especially lowwage platforms. Were dependent workers. It came to be more and more dependent workforce. That is why things had gone south on the forprofits to think of it in that way. So, why did they go south . So in some ways, the model never made a lot of sense for some platforms. So if you take over, the biggest of all of the platforms has the most workers. Uber prices rise far below cost. What that meant as they were always losing money, were always pressuring the drivers. They were only going to be able to have a viable model if they can absolutely dominate the market, wipe out all of the competition and raise the prices high enough so they can make a profit on each ride. That turned out to be a lot more difficult than expected. And the hype about hoover said the low prices are big part of what drove consumers to the services. But they are not sustainable on a lot of these apps. Certainly not on ride, to a certain extent i think also not sustainable printable concurrent level. These platforms are depending on the exploitation of the workers in the failure to obey employment laws, or going to talk without my finisher in a minute. But, that sort of bad model to begin with meant was eventually a lot of pressure from investor investors. Because there is a point at which they want to see profitability. And that is been important in the jeep downward trajectory of wages, which is seen on ride hail, and on deliveries. If you look at a hall platform you see the opposite which is the wages are high that restricts the demand. That is the basic contradiction there for basic sign of economic conflict there. Its a very simple obvious thin thing. The lower the prices you get more customers. But you have to squeeze the workers. He raised the prices have a smaller market. And with hoover be profitable at a small fraction of its size . I mean that is the question. They dont find out they want to wipe out Public Transportation and a wipeout lift, the wife everybody out of dominate the market and they can exploit not just the workers with customers two. Okay a lot more to say on that. Let me just end with the questions of what possible, what could we do, can we get this economy back on track . Do we even want to . Plenty of people say gauges are terrible. We want to move to a fulltime secure employment systems. This whole experiment of the gig economy should be stopped. So one of the things to recognize about the platform is that they are very different than conventional businesses. They generally operate with open access for earners and obviously for consumers to. What that means almost anybody can join the platforms. There are a few qualifications around background checks and so forth. For the most part these are really apps to get on and try to turn on. One of the things he gets chronic excess supply. Particularly when theres a bad labor market, that is what were seeing right now and the post covid environment is tons of people streaming onto these apps getting harder and harder for people to make money. So a labor market is doing bad , more people on the aspirate you see that in the data as a general unemployment moves participation moves you can also see lots of entry and exit on the apps over the year. Very, very flexible. You can see the rising number of dependent workers on ride home and delivery. The thinnest of the apps, the flexibility of the apps also attract a lot of people for who that flexibility is essential. They may be people who have other responsibilities. They had to leave fulltime jobs because woman got a divorce and had to take care of her Children Hours it conform to the school day. She started working on the platforms has a way of doing that. Catherine hill is on really interesting work on disabled workers used of the apps. Technology app obviates or eliminates 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 the sector at all you know these companies particularly in the early days did not hire many people at their corporate headquarters. They are very, very lean that way. Complaint of delivery workers and drivers especially. The point is, a lot of the functions of management are now automated. The w algorithm management. That means that workers dont really mean that much managerial supervision. They dont need managers nearly as much as they did. This becomes an argument for why the cooperative structure which is owned by the workers so much more efficient. These kinds of platforms. They also scale really rapidly build an efficient way to organize platforms for thats our last case with the cooperative was a photographers cooperative. Very, very successful case in which the photographer owned and govern the platform. They got much more of the money back from the photographs they sold and were really happy about the whole enterprise. And so i think that is one possible future for the gig economy all a lot of problems of the corporate owned platforms could really make it work for workers that does take advantage of what this technology has to offer. Sony stuff there. Im going to turn it over. Scenic thank you so much julius. Again, this book is really fascinating. I read it, read the first draft and then i read the finished product is incredibly insightfu insightful. We do not get a chance to reflect on and a short time. I want to hear talk more about me think the audience was to hear you talk more about it. In many ways this Research Project walks the walk. It is a collaborative Research Project with many students this book was collaboratively written. At looked at not just the prototypical platform capitalis capitalist, youre not just talking to hoover drivers you were talking to people in, you know, the postrecession shadows of the Great Recession were really trying to reimagine their world. And so i want you to talk a little bit more about those folks and what their trajectory was. And then i want to talk about the current moment and how we can use the current recession that we are in maybe differently than those folks did. And how to learn through the mistakes of that moment . Yeah, let me start the Research Process and the team process which you raised, was a privilege and a wonderful experience. I dont think the Macarthur Foundation and the research. Most wonderful way to write a grant youre gonna do this and you do it he says. 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. You gave me a comment on the easterly version book. Which was something i kind of hadnt realized. That basically, what were able to do because we started sector was just beginning, we were kind of able to take a trip through kind of moved with the sector. And that was really a privilege. Because it meant as things started happening could just follow that. We were not stuck with something that we had designs in your one that really was not as interesting in your three or four. We were also an idealist team in the sense that we had hoped, we had high hopes for many of these things that we were beginning in the beginning. Were really interested in because we thought they could make meaningful change things and crash at that time. We could easily end up being was not a dissolution but her research let us things going in Different Directions that we would not have hoped they would. And the second part of your questions you guys was really interesting about the people. The people we talked to at the beginning. One thing that was interesting was in the early days, on both the forprofits and the nonprofits, people were really believing in that idea of discourse. People were going on to work of the airbnb 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 airbnb. They were trying to create a different kind of economy. Some people believe that these platforms would create a persontoperson economy that was substantially different from what the dehumanizing, depersonalized or impersonal corporate economy. So weathers the economic benefits, the social or the environmental, there were a lot of true believers in those early days across the whole range of the sharing economy, sharing economy apps. See what we have an interesting question from the audience curtails into one of my questions. When your last chapter you talk about how scholars really think about where we go from here in three ways. There is either the platform capitalist way, we sort of enshrine their model into law and regulation. There is the state regulation way, and then there is the democratic sharing way. You know, the true cooperative way. In some ways we are in all of these places at the same time right now. Though i think we are in a particular moment where things are shifting. And John Marshall asked, whether you could comment on public municipal ownership of platforms and 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 are sort of the possibilities in this realm . And what are the things we need to do to make one or either of those things possible . Guest that is a great question. That is one that is not been talked about enough. Let me say a word or two about the three