Member of the Macarthur Foundation research network. She has written and edited many books on the economy and sustainability including the quest for plenty. She is a fellow guggenheim fellow who has won multiple awards for her research. She joined by a professor of law at the university of california hastings. Her work has been cited by the California Supreme Court and her writing has published in the guardian, shes currently working on a book. They are discussing after the gig based on meticulous research. And i believe you with a quote. And their intensive research. The sharing economy feels like what it participants and their ability, the rest of us make complete sense of the data. They provide a workable plan for how to fulfill the promise of gig work as part of the useful, fair economy. This book will redefine the deal and on that note. I will now go to our speaker, juliet schor. Im deeply honored to be in this conversation, you are just heard for the introduction but it was not articulated, shes not just a behemoth. Thinking about sharing the gig economy but also thinking about work more broadly and she has been a central, central, public intellectual and incredible scholar for people across disciplines thinking about the problems at work for a very long time. Shes an amazing mentor, any of your students or young men listening today can attest to that. This is an amazing book, it will change the conversation and im delighted to talk to you about it. I am thrilled you are willing to come. We are in a mutual admiration society. Let me talk about the book, findings, where we ended up and then veena dubal and i will have a conversation. It makes sense to start with the origin of the gig economy or the sharing economy. In those origins we can see a direction for where we might go to reorient this sector which has gotten off track. Uber and lift were founded in 20089 at the height of the Great Recession after the National Collapse and the sector launch was what we call in the book and idealist discourse. It promised economic, social, and environmental benefits. It had a winwin slightly implausible winwin discourse. On the economic side it promised efficiency using assets that were idle a lot of the time more intensively and that, we thought, could lead to environmental benefits. If you could use their rooms instead of hotels you wouldnt have to build as many hotels. If people could share cars a lot of people think they wouldnt need to buy cars. Those were the sort of twin ideas of efficiency and emissions, reduced emissions, it also promised opportunity for people. In the midst of a terrible Unemployment Crisis as we are today, the platforms were places people could easily hop onto to earn extra money, to stay in their house, pay down student debt and these were the things we found when we interviewed people and there was a social promise about connection, that because these platforms were hosting what i call stranger sharing or persontoperson interaction it was thought they would make durable ties. You pop in a list to the driver, you Start Talking and find you have a connection, you host someone on air b b, couch surfing in your home, you become friends. So all of those things were promised and one thing that i think hasnt been recognized enough is the extent to which the idealist discourse grew out of longer standing traditions in Silicon Valley and when we look at those traditions we can see the two possible paths the sharing economy might have taken. One is cyberutopianism, the idea that Online Connections with online communities lead to egalitarian outcomes, bring people together in nonhierarchical kind of spaces, bypass established structures of power and this is a prominent idea 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 or obviously to the nonprofit platforms that were also found that at this time and those are important. Channel surfing started as nonprofit, you dont pay money, repair cafes, tool libraries, time banks, maker spaces but also some of the for profit use of cyberutopian discourse but there was another strain in Silicon Valley, what we might think of as freemarket text, the idea that the government is bad, corporations are good. The corporations will get us all this good stuff, unfettered corporations bring freedom, prosperity, liberty and that of course is the uber philosophy. There was a sort of rightwing Silicon Valley discourse and a more leftwing one and you can see both of them in the socalled sharing economy. I just mentioned the nonprofits. They has been important. They were in the port and in the founding of the sector, they remain important in other parts of the world, europe especially, they were part of the Early Community and that is where my Research Team started because in 20089, when i first started thinking about these issues, there was a lot of hope for things like time banks and food swaps and repair cafes, true sharing initiative at the Community Level that were really going to help people in economic distress and build a different kind of egalitarian economy so we began. I assembled a team and i just want to shout out, dont know if any of the team members are here. I wrote this book with a team of people who were phd students in sociology at the time, they pretty much almost all of them have graduated, we did 13 case studies of different sharing initiatives, the nonprofits such as the kinds of nonprofits i just mentioned and we turned our attention to the forprofits like air b b, we did a lot of work on torah which is air b b for cars, delivery platforms, uber lift and we ended with a platform cooperative owned by the workers. Im still working on these issues, that went for almost 10 years. Im still working on these issues with a group of colleagues from northeastern and also some phd students looking at insta cards, crimestoppers and a number of delivery apps. We can look what happened since the book came out. If you are from the team and you are here let us know in the q and a. Things havent turned out as expected and the subtitle of the book is how the sharing economy got hijacked. The question that i want to address is why, what happened. Let me say a word about the nonprofit. I wasnt planning to talk too much about this today. Happy to go into it in the q and a. There are a lot of stories, the nonprofits we studied are in the boston area to the extent this is the boston area audience, if folks are interested in these we can go into detail. We studied a food swap and time bank in this locale. The easiest way to talk about what happens is nonprofits, the term failure to thrive. One of them failed during the time we were studying it. One of them thrived in a lot of ways but not in others but in all these cases there were kind of what we might think of dynamics of social exclusion that undermine the mission and intentions of the founders, they hold some important lessons for those trying to build alternative economies and i put myself in that camp. What about the for profits . They comprise many many more people, have gotten a lot of attention. So we began studying these in the early days and in the early days things were pretty good on a lot of these platforms, the earnings were generally happy although, then as now, it has gotten 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 reasons was either the wages were too low so in the earliest days wages were good on all these platforms, they were more than minimum wage, a lot more than people could get for many of the skills they were engaged in on the platform. Even on the highway platforms, the general kind of work platforms in the home and out, the big tasks they were putting together, ikea furniture, housecleaning is a big one but also virtual tasks and so forth. They have really high wages far above minimum wage and also a highly educated workforce, but it is hard to get enough work to have a decent income. One of the things we found was dependent earners dependent on the platform, they pay basic expenses for rent, food, car payments etc. Dependent workers generally earned up to or below the poverty line, very hard to get out of poverty. Some people could but in general that is what we found. What we call supplement to workers, people who are adding on this gig work to other sources of income in most cases a fulltime job, maybe they are students, they dont need to run a full income or possibly a spouse or so forth, those have positive experiences, they have higher wages, they can discriminate more on the tasks they took, didnt just have to work when the market demands it, market demand is very variable. They also had a lot more autonomy, much less worried about their ratings and reputations, deactivation and so forth. One person said to us what would happen when youre reading went down and you do another orientation and they were like no way, they just wouldnt do it anymore. It was interesting the extent to which the supplementary workers supplemental workers did things the way they wanted rather than the way the platform wanted. One of the issues in the scholarship and the public discussion about platforms is how much autonomy do workers have, how much algorithmic control to platforms exercise, we found big differences between independent workers are what you might call fulltime workers, 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 a more dependent workforce which is why things have gone south on the for profits to use it that way. Why did they go south . In some ways the model never made sense for some platforms. If you take uber, the biggest of all the platforms uber priced its rides far below cost. What that meant, they were always losing money, pressuring the drivers. They were only going to have a viable model that comes to dominate the market, wipe out the competition and raise the price high enough to make a profit on each ride. That turned out to be a lot more difficult than they expected. The low prices drove consumers to the services but they are not sustainable on a lot of these apps, certainly not ride hail. To a certain extent also not sustainable on delivery and to some extent on some of the tasks so these platforms depend on the exploitation of the workers and failure to employ to obey employment laws which i will talk about when i finish in a minute. That sort of bad model to begin with meant a lot of pressure from investors because there is a point of profitability and that has been important in a downward trajectory of wages which you have seen on ride hail and delivery. If you look at a highway platform like pack rabbit, what happened is the opposite. That restricts the demand and that is the basic kind of contradiction or basic economic conflict, a simple obvious thing. You lower the price, get more customers would have to squeeze the workers and have a smaller market. Would uber be profitable at a small fraction of its size . That is the question. They dont want to find out, they want to wipe out Public Transportation, wipe out lift, dominate the market and exploit not just the workers but the customers too. Lots more to say on that but let me end with the question of what is possible, what could we do . Can we get the sharing economy back on track and do we even want to . Plenty of people think gigs are terrible. We want to move to a fulltime secure employment system and this whole experiment of the gig economy should be stopped. One of the things to recognize about platforms is they are different from conventional businesses. They generally operate with open access for earners. What that means is almost anybody who joins the platform, there are a few qualifications of background checks but for the most part these are really easy apps to get on and try to earn on. One thing the gives chronic excess supply particularly when there is a bad labor market that is what we are seeing in the post covid19 environment which is tons of people streaming onto these apps, getting harder and harder for people to make money. When a large labor market is doing bad more people go on to apps, as general Unemployment Rate moves, apps participation moves and lots of entry and exit on these apps over the course of the year. Very very flexible. You can see it in the rising number of dependent workers on ride home and delivery but the openness of the apps and the flexibility of the apps attract a lot of people for whom clicks ability is essential, people who have other responsibilities. We have people we interviewed who had to leave fulltime jobs. One woman had to take care of her children, hours that conform to the school day so she started working on multiple platforms as a way of doing that. Katherine hill has done interesting work on disabled workers and their use of the apps. If you have disability you dont know when you are going to work or what it is like today or hour to hour and the apps allow that so that is one thing about the apps that is positive, flexibility, the second thing about them, this gets to the last point about the platform coops earned by workers is the technology of the apps obviate or eliminate a lot of management functions so hr, quality control, matching consumers with earners are done by algorithms. If you look at this sector, these companies particularly in the early days didnt hire many people at their corporate headquarters, the point is the functions of management are now automated. They are done throughout the rhythmic management, workers dont need that much managers as much as they did in this becomes an argument for why the cooperative structure owned by the workers, in these platforms, they scale really rapidly. You build out a workers coop and get the right rules and governments, the workers coop is an efficient way. And the successful case, they get the money back from the photograph they sold and happy about the whole enterprise. The corporate owned platforms, would make it work for workers in ways that does take advantage with what technology has to offer. Thank you so much. This book is fascinating. I read the first draft and the latest finished product, incredibly insightful. In a short time i want to hear you talk more, about also in many ways this Research Project walked the walk, a collaborative Research Project with many students collaboratively written, not just the prototypical platform, not just talking to uber drivers, in the post recession and shadows of the Great Recession trying to imagine their role. To talk a little more about close folks and what their trajectory was, it was differently than those folks did and how you get through the mistakes of that moment. Let me start with the research process. This is a wonderful experience. I think the Macarthur Foundation who funded the research, they funded in the most wonderful way, the typical process of having to write a graph, they gave us money and allowed us to go where the research took us so we are constantly evolving. That was wonderful. You gave me a comment on the early version of the book, which is something you havent realized. What we were able to do, we were able to take a trip through, in the sector, that was really a privilege because it meant as things started happening we could follow that and we werent stuck with something we had designed in year one that wasnt as interesting in year 3 or 4, having done this. We started out, also an idealist team in the sense that we had high hopes for many of these things that were beginning at the beginning. We were interested in them, and solve the problems, the dysfunctionality of global capitalism in the period 2008. Even if we ended up becoming i dont want to say disillusioned, research led us to see many problems going in directions we would not have hoped they would. The second part of your question, people we talked to, one thing that was interesting is in the early days, on the forprofits and nonprofits people were believing in that idealist discord, people were going on the air b b for cars in order to rent out environmentally efficient cars like hybrids, wanted to teach people about hybrids. They were trying to create a different kind of economy. People believe these platforms create a persontoperson economy that was substantially different, dehumanizing, depersonalized corporate economy. Whether it was the economic benefits, social or environmental, a lot of true believers in the early days across a whole range of sharing economy, sharing economy. An interesting question into one of my questions. In your last chapter you talk about how scholars think about where we go in three ways, enshrine their model into regulation, there is a state regulation way and democratic sharing way, the true cooperative way. In some ways in all these places at the same time i think we are in a particular moment where things are shifting and John Marshall asks whether you comment on public municipal ownership of platforms like rideshare. Talk about what that might look like in comparison to coop models, the possibilities, things we need to do to make one or either of those happen. This one really hasnt been talked about enough, let me say a word or two about the three paths i talk about, the first which is corporate dominance platforms. One of my coauthors and friends, a dutch scholar, made the point that now you can see it with what is happening with uber, the likely trajectory, a couple of super platforms that have all the different services, the sort of model, so Many Industries we have two or three dominant firms. That is one direction. The second is regulation, and misclassification in the gig economy. Weve seen real change. What i argue in the book is beginning in 2018 you start to see that side turning on regulation. Until that point it is hard to get any regulations through. Most of the regulation was in the direction of more leeway and freedom for the company. Air b b was illegal in many places where it was operating at high levels and got legislators and regulators to change those laws to make it legal but starting in 2018 regulators start to clampdown, and shortterm rentals and smaller competitors, they get minimum wage and vehicle, really cracks down on air b b, considering serious legislation and the collaborators on the book is the database a b b regulations, tremendous