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