Hello everyone, welcome and thank you for sitting in my name is Audrey Stewart and on behalf of Harvard Bookstore im so please welcome you to todays writing forum with juliet schor discussing her book after the gig. She joined today in conversation by veena do fall. Shes a professor at sociology at Boston College and also a member of the Macarthur Foundation research network. She has written and edited many books on the economy and sustainability including sustainable lifestyles and the quest for pleasant. Shes a former guggenheim fellow and has won multiple awardsfor her work and research. She has joined today by veena dupal, her work has been cited by the California Court and her writing has been published in the la times and slate. She is currently workingon a book. Today they are discussing after the gig, based on a decade of Meticulous Research , this new book discusses the sharing economy, what it is, what it could have been and what it could still be. Ill leave you with this quote from Bill Mckinnon himself. Juliet schor and her team have done something extraordinary in their intensive research is let them understand what the sharing economy like to its participants 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 of getting work as part of a supportive, useful air economy. This book will redefine the field and on that note, ill turn things over to our speakers, juliet , veena, the virtual stage is yours. Thank you for having me and i am just deeply, deeply honored to be in conversation with you , julie. 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 speaking about the sharing of the gig economy but also thinking about work more broadly and she has been a central both public intellectual and incredible scholar for people across disciplines in thinking about the problems of work for a long time. Shes such an amazing mentor in addition to being an amazing speaker and i think everyone , probably anyone of your students or Young Mentees can attest to that so please this is an honor, its an amazing book. It will change the conversation and im so delighted to be here to talk to you about it. Thank you. Im thrilled you were willing to,. I think were in a mutual admirationsociety. So 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 gate economy or whats also called the sharingeconomy. Because in those origins i think we can see a direction for where we might go to reorient this sector which has reallygotten off track. Uber and lyft were founded in 2008 and 2009 at the height of the Great Recession right after the financial collapse and this sector launched with 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 access that were idle a lot of the time more intensively and that was thought to lead to environmental benefits so if you could use spare rooms instead of hotels, you wouldnt have to build as many hotels area if people could share cars, a lot of people would think they 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 Unemployment Crisis as we are today. The platforms of places people could easily hook onto to earn extra money and maybe to stay in their house and these are the kinds of things we found when we interviewed people. And then there was a social promise about connection. That because these platforms were hosting what i call strangers sharing or persontoperson interaction, it was thought that they were going to make durable ties so you in a lyft, give up this phone to the driver, you Start Talking and we find we have aconnection. You someone on airbnb or couch surfing, you become friends so all those things were promise and one thing that i think has been recognized enough is the extent to which the idealist discourse grew out of longer standing traditions with Silicon Valley and when we look at those traditions we can see the two possible paths that these sharing economies might have taken and one is called cyber utopianism to the idea that Online Connections or online communities lead to a gallant area and outcomes read a bring people together in a nonhierarchical. ,they bypass established structures power is the idea in Silicon Valley in its early days but it has continued redline that sharing economy forms. Sort of more prominently to the nonprofit platforms that were also founded at this time and those are important. Serving guarded as a nonprofit, repair taxes, school libraries, maker spaces. All the forprofits use this same sort of cyber utopian discourse but there was another friend with Telecom Valley which was what we might think of as freemarket which is the idea that the government is bad, the corporations are good. The corporations are going to get us all this. Unfettered corporations bring freedom and prosperity, liberty and that of course is the uber philosophy so there was a sort of rightwing Silicon Valley discourse and a more leftwing one and you could see both of them in the socalled sharingeconomy. Now, i just mentioned the nonprofits. They had been important. They were important in the founding of this sector. They remain quite important in other parts ofthe world , europe especially. They were part of the Early Community and thats actually where my research. Because in 2008 and 2009 when i first started speaking about these issues, there was a lot of hope for things like time banks and food slots and repair cafcs, sort of true sharing initiatives at the Community Level that were really going to help people who were in economic distress or were going to build a different kind of a gallant aryan economy. So we began by assembling a team and i just want to shout out, i know that many of the team members are here. I wrote this book with a team of people who were all phd students at the time. They moved, almost all ofthem have graduated. We did 13 case studies of different sharing initiatives so those kind of nonprofits i mentioned so we turned our attention to the forprofits, taskrabbit so to which is airbnb four cars. Uber and lyft of course and we ended with a platform cooperative by the workers. Im still working on these issues. Thats when for almost 10 years. Im still working on these issues with a group of colleagues from northeastern. And also some phd students and were looking at insta cards, and a number of delivery app so we can talk about whathappened since the book came out. If you are from the team and youre here, let us know in the q and a. So things havent turned out as expected and this is look at how the sharing economy got hijacked and i guess the question thati want to address is why , what happened . So let me just say a word about the nonprofits. And i wasnt planning to talk too much about them today, im happy to go into it inthe q and a there. I think theyre really interesting stories but the nonprofits we study are on the boston area so this is a boston area audience thats interested in these, we can go into detail. We studied maker space, food slot and the contract in this area and i guess the easiest way to talk about what happens with these nonprofits would be the term failure to thrive. So one of them actually failed during this time that we werestudying it. One of them thrived in a lot of ways but not in others but in all of these cases, there were kind of what we think of as dynamics of social exclusion really undermined the missions and the intentions of the founders and i think they hold some important lessons or those of us trying to build alternative economies and i hold myself in that camp. But what about the forprofits . They comprise many more people and have gotten a lot of attention. So we began studying these in pretty much the early days i would say that in the early days things were pretty good on a lot of these platforms read the earnings were generally happy. 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. That was true for a couple of reasons. Even the wages were too low so in the very earliest days wages were good on all of these platforms read there were a lot more than minimum wages, there were a lot more that people could get through the kinds of skills that they were engaged in on those platforms but even on a really high waste platforms, the taskrabbits as i mentioned, its a general in the mans Work Platform in the home and out, some of the big projects from taskrabbit were putting together ikea furniture, housecleaning is a big one but taskrabbit tends to havehigh wages. Far above minimum wage and also has highly educated workforce but its hard to get enough work on taskrabbit at its be a decent income and one of the things we found were what we called dependent hers, people who were dependent on the platform to pay their basic expenses like their rents, their, car payments, etc. People were dependent workers generally earn up to or below the poverty line. It was very hard to get out of poverty as a defendant worker. Of course some people could in general thats what we found whereas what we call supplemental workers, people who are having on this game to other sources of income, in most cases a fulltimejob , maybe students but they dont need to earn a full income or possibly a spousal income, those folks and really positive experiences. Got higher wages so they could discriminate more. They had a lot more flex ability in their schedule so they didnt just have to work when the market demanded and in any of these gigs the market demanded variable even over the week. They also have a lot more autonomy, much less worried about their ratings and reputations. As one person said to us when we asked what would happen if your rating went down and the platform asked me to do another orientation they were like , no way. It just wouldnt do itanymore. It was interesting the extent to which the supplementary workers, supplemental workers things in a way they want rather than the way the platform wanted. One of the issues in the fellowship and also in the public discussions about platforms is how much autonomy the workers had, how much algorithmic control platform was exercising so we found big differences between workers who you might think of as fulltime workers and the supplemental. And one of the important things is that over time, more and more workers on these platforms especially the lowwage platforms, ride hailing and delivery were workers. It came to be a more and more dependent workforce thats part of why things have gone back onto forprofits if you think of it in a way. So why did they go . In some ways the model never made a lot of sense for some platforms so if you take uber, the biggest of all the platforms and the most workers, uber prices rise far below cost and what that meant was they were always losing money, always pressuring the drivers. They were only going to be able to have a viable model if they could absolutely come to dominate the market, wipe out all the competition and raise the prices high enough so that they could make a profit oneach ride. That turned out to be a lot more difficult than they expected and the hype about uber is that the low prices are a big part of what drove consumers to the services but theyre not sustainable on a lot of these apps, certainly not one ride hail. To a certain extent not sustainable at current levels on delivery and the task. So these platforms are dependent on these locations of the workers and the failure to advance employment law, thisis a specialty were going to talk about in a minute. But what thats a bad model to begin with meant was eventually, a lot of pressure from investors because theres a point at which an want to see profitability and thats an important inthe downward trajectory of wages which you have seen on ride hail, you see on delivery. If you look at highways platform like taskrabbit, whats happened is the opposite which is the wages are high but that affects the demand that the basic, theres a kind of basic contradiction there where basic economic conflict there , its an obvious thing. You lower the prices, you get more customers but you raise the prices, youhave a smaller market. And would uber be profitable at a small fraction of its size lesson mark thats the question read dont want to find out, they want to wipe out Public Transportation and whiteeverybody out , dominate the market and then they can exploit not just the workers but the customers to. Lots more to say on but let me just end with the question of whats possible, what could we do that mark can we get this sharing economy back on track and do we even want to lesson mark are plenty of people think its repairable. We want to move to a fulltime, secure employment system and this whole experiment in the economy should be shot. So one of the things to recognize about platforms 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 isalmost anybody can join the platform. There are a few qualifications around background checks and so forth but for the most part, its a really easy app to earn on rent one of the things is chronic supply, particularly in the bad labor market and thats what weve seen right now in the post covid environment which is people screaming quantities apps, getting harder and harder for these people to make money so when the larger labor market is doing bad, you can see that in the data as the general Unemployment Rate moves and you can also see this market entry and exit on these apps over the courseof the year. Its veryflexible. And you can see it in the rising of the workers on the lower righthand with delivery. But the openness of the app and the possibility of the apps also attracts a lot of people for whom likability is essential. They may be people who have other responsibilities. We have people that we interviewed who had to leave fulltime jobs because one woman got a divorce and had to take care of her Children Hours that conformed to the school day so she started working on all platforms as a way of doing that. Catherine hill has an interesting work on all workers and their use of the app because if you have many times a disability, you dont know when youre going to be the work or how the hour by hour and the apps allow that thats one thing thats positive, thats likability and thesecond thing about them , and this gets to lastly about platform coops owned by workers is that the technology of the app obviates for sort of eliminates a lot of management functions. So hr, polity control. Matching consumers with earners. Many of these things are done by algorithms. So you probably look at this sector at all, you know the companies particularly in the early days didnt hire many people their corporate headquarters. There are very lean in that way, drivers especially and delivery workers but the point is that a lot of the functions of management are now automated. They are done through algorithmic management that means that workers dont really need that much managerial supervision. They dont need managers nearly as much as they did and this becomes an argument for why the cooperative structure which is owned by the labor is so much more efficient. Then in these kinds of platforms. They also scale directly to get the right technology. You can build out a workers coop and you get the right rules and governors, you can build out a 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 and a photographers cooperative. Very very successful case in which the photographers owned and governed the platform. They got much more of the money back from the photographs that they sold and were really happy about the whole enterprise. So i think that is one possible future for the gate economy that would solve a lot of the problems of the corporate owned platforms and could really make it work for workers in ways that does take advantage of what this technology has to offer. So let me stop there and im going to turn it over to lisa. Thank you so much julie. Again, this book is really updating. I read it but the first chapter i read made this project and itsincredibly insightful. I wonder something you didnt get a chance to reflect on in a short time but i want to talk more about and i think the audience probably wants to hear you talk more about also, in many ways this Research Project walks the walk. This is a collaborative Research Project across many students that this book is collaboratively written and looked at it not just for the principle platform capitalists who were just uber drivers, youre also talking to people in the postrecession and shadow of the greatrecession who were trying to reimagine their world. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about those folks and where, what their trajectory was and then i want to talk about the current moment and how we can use this current recession that were in to make it differently than those folks did and how to learn from the mistakes of that moment. Let me just start with the Research Process and the team process which you raise and it really was, it was a privilege it really really was a wonderful experience. And i do want to pack the Parker Foundation funded the research and a pundit is in the most wonderful way to cause basically, rather than the typical process of having to write a grant that says youre going to do this and you have to do what yousaid , 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 o