Some Arguments Going Again the Labor Movement

In October 2019, two DoorDash drivers — Dave Levy and Nikos Kanelopoulos — launched the #DeclineNow Facebook group. The duo had discovered that when a DoorDash driver declines a delivery, the app offers that delivery to another driver for higher pay. In the Facebook grouping, which now numbers more than thirty,000 members, they urged peers to decline any commitment that doesn't pay at least $7 — more than double the base rate of $3. "Every app-based, on-demand company'south objective is to constantly shift profits from the driver back to the company," Levy explained. "Our objective is the reverse of that."

On September 1, 2021, many Twitch streamers participated in a coordinated protest — taking the day off streaming in response to the platform's perceived inaction confronting harassment of marginalized creators. Platform viewership dropped by an estimated five% to xv%. Though the protest lasted only a day, it garnered widespread attention: Many news outlets reported on the harassment trouble, and #ADayOffTwitch became one of the top 10 trending hashtags on Twitter.

These two protests reveal an overlooked truth well-nigh the platform economy: Despite real differences in their jobs, both gig workers and content creators are reckoning with the fact that their livelihoods depend on the deportment and algorithms of platforms that they have petty to no power to sway, and they have little recourse to suboptimal policies, dissatisfactory product decisions, and other negative experiences.

In the face of this, a new form of collective labor activism tailored to the gig and creator economies is emerging — what nosotros call decentralized collective action (DCA). This encompasses worker-led movements from insurance pools created by Jakarta rideshare drivers to an informal union of global musicians and music workers.

These efforts tend to be more lesser-upwards and diffuse than historical labor unions. Workers find and team upwardly with each other in a peer-to-peer mode; vox opposition on social media, through online forums, and to the media; undermine or claiming a platform's normal operations; leverage the power of their audience or customers; and at times, leave platforms altogether for more worker-friendly alternatives.

Though individual actions take achieved moderate success, DCA has largely struggled to accept a sustained bear upon. Because platform workers oftentimes are not in straight contact with each other, information technology is hard for them to coordinate, and platforms can induce a competitive dynamic among them. Moreover, platform workers typically have little leverage considering of low barriers to entry and an backlog of willing participants on the supply side. These problems heighten the necessity for a more refined arroyo from workers, and a more sustainable path forward.

This essay outlines the strategies that platform workers are utilizing to phonation their concerns through DCA today, and lays out a roadmap for how to achieve outcomes that better serve the interests of all stakeholders — participants, platforms, and end users.

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A New Social Contract Between Workers and Platforms

The earth of platform labor is in principle a cyberspace good: Platform marketplaces tin can substantially better social welfare by enabling new or improved transactions. This leads to new forms of labor activity, expanding workers' options. Those whose niche interests and skills would take made it challenging to brand a living from local customers can at present plow to a global market. Someone whose main skill is woodworking, for example, tin abound a worldwide audition of fans through YouTube and so sell their creations on Etsy.

Merely that doesn't hateful platform workers don't have grievances — or that the contract between platforms and their workers tin't be improved. Platform workers' liminal condition makes them much more vulnerable to exploitation. In the U.s.a., most gig workers and creators are classified as "contained contractors," a categorization the IRS defines as "people who offer their services to the general public" in an independent trade, business, or profession. In applied terms, this classification absolves firms from having to provide these workers with benefits, protections, and guarantees that traditional employees enjoy — even equally platform workers and creators are dependent on platforms to reach audiences, connect with potential customers, and earn income.

In an ideal earth, long-term platform sustainability would replace short-term profit incentives, motivating platforms to align with workers to assistance them grow their businesses and — somewhen — obtain a meaningful standard of living and success. Platforms could fifty-fifty set prices and policy to shift more value towards workers and enable them to invest in higher-quality service, which tends to grow engagement and create more value for both workers and the platform in the long run.

However instead, near platforms chase short-term gains to boost growth and concenter outside investment. As platforms' network effects have intensified and resulted in pregnant market power — called monopsony power in the context of labor markets — their workers take struggled to find recourse.

Historically, collective action has emerged to solve for this misalignment of incentives. These movements have centered on workers organizing and negotiating with companies directly or working to promote broader social change. In America, labor unions grew out of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s: Unions fought for amend wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions. At the turn of the 20th century, these labor movements culminated in many of the legal protections workers enjoy today, including the National Labor Relations Human action of 1935, which provides the right for workers to unionize, and the Fair Labor Standards Human activity of 1938, which created the right to minimum wage and overtime pay and established the twoscore-hour piece of work week.

But with platforms, collective action is more challenging. Not only do today's platform-based workers exist in a nascent labor category, but their participation is decentralized, making it harder for them to connect with each other. As the industry has matured, and consolidation has led to monopsony power, platform labor has reached a turning point. Platforms are increasingly governing participants' opportunities and livelihoods, and with that comes the demand for common accountability and evolving protections and responsibilities. It's time to revisit the social compact between platforms and their workers — and discover a new form of commonage activity to do then.

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Why Do Workers Need Decentralized Collective Action?

There are many reasons why workers are now turning to decentralized commonage activeness: Right now, tensions between workers and platforms are centered around some familiar labor issues such as the correct to unionize, as well as more than platform-specific bug such as buying of data, content moderation, ability to reach customers, harassment in virtual "workplaces," and monetization policies.

Platform lock-in and leverage over individual workers.

Platform workers oft face substantial lock-in, driven past network effects and lack of data portability. Platforms intermediate transactions — equally a result, they gather market place information, and often control customer relationships. This type of capital cannot exist easily ported over to other platforms or worker-owned properties, which ways that platform labor is reliant on platforms for work — leading to worker dissatisfaction with pay rates and monetization models, income instability, and anxiety and burnout. In other words: Because a DoorDash driver tin can't discover delivery opportunities on their own and a Twitter user can't export followers' emails, DoorDash and Twitter have market ability.

Worker classification doesn't reflect the evolving nature of piece of work and independent contractors are unable to unionize.

The "independent contractor" nomenclature not merely blocks platform workers from benefits and protections, but also means the platform workers are non covered by the National Labor Relations Human action, and thus exercise not accept the right to unionize. Yet platforms withal exercise pregnant amounts of control over aspects of workers' jobs — including determining how much workers are paid, what they do, and how they perform their jobs. This has led to contentious debates and regulatory battles around platform worker classification.

Platforms oft accept an incentive to commoditize their workers every bit much equally possible.

From the platform's perspective, commoditization of workers is desirable, equally it allows the platform to provide a compatible customer experience and remain the heart of the customer human relationship. For instance, the TikTok app design discounts the value of a follower relationship and instead defaults users to the "For You" page — an algorithmically generated feed of content the platform believes would appeal to users. On rideshare apps, driver commoditization ensures a consistent level of service, simply also means that users come back to the app to asking rides, rather than seeking out a given driver directly. The commoditization of suppliers on a platform erodes the ability of workers to found their own businesses or to operate outside of a scattering of platforms.

Worker heterogeneity makes it challenging to organize for all.

For creator platforms, the power law distribution of success means that top creators have unduly more than bargaining power with platforms. Often, this results in top creators receiving special treatment from platforms, in the form of greater access to funding, more favorable accept rates, prominent placement in discovery channels, participation in product feedback processes, and inclusion in funding and monetization programs.

Over time, platforms can trend towards catering to a small-scale segment of top creators, who take little incentive to push for improved atmospheric condition for all creators because they themselves are benefitting from the platform's design and policies. In other words, the heterogeneous nature of creators makes information technology challenging for the well-nigh powerful creators to have the motivation or cohesion to organize. In dissimilarity, labor movements typically harness the commonage ability of large workforces who have similar shared experiences.

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Phonation and Exit: Strategies for Decentralized Collective Action

So what options do platform workers accept? The Go out-Voice-Loyalty framework, showtime described by economist Albert O. Hirschman, describes how individuals react when dealing with dissatisfaction in firms, organizations, and states. In traditional labor environments, dissatisfied employees can voice concerns in an endeavour to modify their situation, exit to seek new employment opportunities, or passively wait, out of loyalty or fail, for the situation to resolve:

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An early written report examining platform labor's options in the face of piece of work dissatisfaction was a 2015 study of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a market place for on-demand tasks. Applying the leave-voice-loyalty framework, researchers found that:

… participants have the possibilities of loyalty and get out (e.g., petitions, boycotts), just not voice. In other words: they may choose to sign a petition or to get out if they don't concord [with platform policy]. Merely, at that place is petty identify for soapbox when the problem, its source, and its solution are non clear.

Since then, nosotros've seen numerous examples of platform worker voice emerge — admitting expressed differently than direct feedback to managers or filing a complaint with Hour. Instances of platform worker voice include worker-to-worker, worker-to-algorithm, and worker-to-public advice — all of which happens in a lesser-upward, decentralized fashion.

The following represents a sampling of unlike platform worker DCA vocalisation strategies we have observed:

Informal Unionization (worker-to-worker) is when workers engage in matrimony-similar beliefs, for instance by coordinating and submitting a list of demands to a platform.

Examples include the Twitch protest mentioned above; the Black creators TikTok strike; the Spousal relationship of Musicians and Centrolineal Workers' (UMAW), which mobilizes music workers to fight for fairer deals with streaming services and record labels; the Instagram Meme Union, comprised of a group of meme creators enervating greater transparency in advice with Instagram; and the Freelancers Matrimony, a nonprofit advocating on contained workers' behalf.

Mutual Assist (worker-to-worker) occurs when workers appoint in reciprocal back up amidst themselves.

Examples include Instagram pods that agree to mutually like, comment on, share, or otherwise engage with each other's posts; rideshare drivers in Djakarta that have formed physical basecamps ("mutual assist stations"), and breezy insurance pools.

Third-Party Production Enhancement (worker-to-worker) refers to the pattern and creation of digital tools that improve the worker experience.

For example, Commuter's Seat Cooperative helps drivers track and optimize their mileage vs. their payouts.

Information Leveling (worker-to-worker) occurs when workers pool learnings or unlock new or hidden information to help one another better navigate opaque platform piece of work environments.

Examples include FYPM (for creators) and Turkopticon (for Mechanical Turkers), which are both examples of Glassdoor-like platforms which have been independently spun up by workers to aggregate reviews of employers in the absence of a platform-native culling.

Algoactivism (worker-to-algorithm), a term coined by Stanford and MIT researchers, refers to a growing ready of tactics used by workers to resist the managerial command increasingly exercised past algorithms.

Examples include the DoorDash #DeclineNow movement, as well equally similar attempts to subvert algorithmic control that have been observed on platforms similar TikTok, Uber, Airbnb, Fiverr, and TaskRabbit.

Public Media Campaigns (worker-to-public) happen when individual workers share instances of mistreatment or frustration on social media.

Examples include when @deliveryguy100 went viral on TikTok in early June, receiving i.2M views on his video describing the realities of being a commitment driver. Similarly, popular vlogger Hank Greenish shared a TikTok video expressing questions about TikTok'southward bounty of creators.

While these strategies for decentralized worker voice can be impactful in the brusque term, the lack of evolution in platform policy in contempo years indicates they are ineffective methods for instigating long-lasting, meaningful change. As Dawn Gearhart, policy coordinator for Teamsters Local 117 and a Seattle labor organizer, explained: "Unions cannot collectively bargain with an algorithm, they can't appeal to a platform, and they can't negotiate with an equation."

Media campaigns have limited lifecycles, and platform responses are often performative rather than substantive. Algoactivism only provides a temporary fix until platforms modify their codebases and close loopholes. Edifice out new tools to help workers in the context of their existing platforms requires substantial time and effort, and again is discipline to disruption past changes in platform pattern. And informal unions lack the scale and organization needed to catalyze lasting alter.

This doesn't mean decentralized collective activity tin't exist effective; rather, the efficacy of activity through voice within the existing platform ecosystem is limited.

Returning to the exit-vocalization-loyalty framework, the alternative to vocalisation is to leave. If vocalization entails taking deportment to better conditions within the existing environment, get out occurs when individuals or groups resolve that conditions are across improvement, that it is ameliorate to make a break with existing systems and to seek work elsewhere. The platform labor motion then may exist more successful using DCA to build a set of more worker-friendly platforms that disrupt the existing ecosystem — and thus enable exit from information technology.

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The Future: Worker Buying and Enfranchisement

Information technology is ultimately through a combination of regulation and organizational restructuring that workers shift the balance of power in a sustainable way. Here are some emerging efforts in that direction:

Platform cooperatives that institutionalize worker voice.

Platform cooperatives are the tech-native version of cooperative organizations: platforms that rely on democratic controlling and are endemic past their workers and users. The Commuter's Cooperative, a New York City-based ride-hailing app that is entirely worker-owned and governed, is one such example. Founded in 2020, it has more than than three,000 drivers and 30,000 users. Stocksy is a cooperatively-endemic marketplace for stock photography and video, which pays out more than than half of its acquirement as royalties to its contributors.

Drawing on principles from offline cooperatives such every bit Mondragon (the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, with 81,000 workers and €12 billion revenue in 2015) and REI (a consumer cooperative with xx 1000000 members and $2.75 billion acquirement in 2020), platform cooperatives are frequently funded through a combination of their members and outside debt financing, with profit distributed according to the wishes of the member-owners. Yet, this ownership construction and member-axial governance has made it difficult for them to attract outside upper-case letter — hindering the power of platform co-ops, and co-ops in general, to exist competitive with traditional corporations.

Cryptonetworks and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) as the future of net-native co-ops.

Cryptonetworks provide a promising culling: Decentralized organizations that no single entity controls, which facilitate trust among participants through hard-coded rules. In these networks, buying is distributed to all stakeholders via a native cryptocurrency or "tokens," that reward deportment that contribute to the network'south success.

Such networks accost ii major issues that have prevented traditional cooperative businesses from becoming pervasive: access to capital and complication of governance. With the issuance of a token, cryptonetworks can benefit from market speculation and raise capital that enables them to exist competitive vs. traditional corporations.

Experimentation effectually net-native governance endeavors also enables various fellow member bases to coordinate determination-making at scale: Token-based voting, for example, lets members vote in proportion to their buying of the platform, similar to the way in which traditional shareholder voting rights exist in corporations today. Reputation voting, meanwhile, allows users to participate in governance based on their perceived value equally customs members rather than their economic holdings

The digital art marketplace SuperRare recently launched a token to decentralize curation and oversee a treasury that is collected from platform commissions and fees. Decentraland is a virtual world owned by its users, who can make collective decisions on the hereafter of the virtual world. Yield Gild Games — a gaming society that trains and onboards players into play-to-earn video games — can be seen as the crypto-native version of a workers' union; its large contingent of gamers allows it to negotiate for improve platform policies and blueprint.

Labor laws to protect platform worker rights.

In parallel with technology-based solutions similar cryptonetworks, in that location is the potential for labor laws to evolve to address the unique needs of platform workers. Regulation, historically, has codified and avant-garde the rights of workers. Analogous to existing regulations around minimum wage and overtime pay, at that place could be regulation of earnings and revenue share rates for creators and gig workers in the platform economic system. There has been much debate around the employment classification of gig workers and whether they are entitled to a minimum wage. California's Proposition 22, which carved out rideshare workers from being classified every bit employees, was recently ruled unconstitutional for limiting the power of workers to organize and have access to workers' compensation.

There could likewise be regulation to promote data portability and ownership: Creators' and users' power to port data would mean they could migrate between platforms more easily or prepare up their ain independent properties. Every bit one of united states (Jin) explained in a recent blog post: "Creator and user ownership of data, relationships, content, identities, and interactions would weaken platforms' lock-in and entail a shift in power from platforms to their participants, enabling them to operate outside of a handful of platforms."

We are aware, nevertheless, that regulation can and often does take unintended consequences, potentially strengthening incumbents' market position. Regulations around payment rates and creator compensation could favor giant tech platforms that have deep pockets vs. newer startups. Data protection regulation such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been criticized equally hindering innovation and competition by making it more challenging for new entrants to collect and share information that would enable workers and consumers to have more options.

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Edifice Worker Ability

In the aforementioned examples, users — in a decentralized way — accept action to shift their usage to new networks entirely of their own will, motivated past the benefits over centralized alternatives (social media platforms, traditional financial institutions). Users' participation in cryptonetworks is non only driven by the desire for more governance and enfranchisement, but besides by fiscal cocky-involvement, given the potential upside of tokens.

That points to a basic truth: New alternatives volition succeed at scale merely when they can be genuinely — and holistically — improve for workers. And that, in turn, sets into motility a positive macro flywheel, pressuring incumbents to evolve their policies and products to favor platform participants. In the long run, platforms take a lot to proceeds from becoming more worker friendly. Every bit one of united states of america (Kominers) recently argued in the context of both delivery and short-term housing marketplaces, past investing in improving their suppliers' operations and outcomes, platforms ameliorate the quality of their networks in the long run, and increase the overall opportunity for marketplace-based transactions.

Decentralized collective action helps the states motion in the correct direction — both by influencing electric current platforms, and by forging the next generation of disruptive networks that are more aligned with their participants.

In the coming months and years, as creators and workers realize their commonage power, these movements volition grow in number. And as demonstrated throughout history — from the French Revolution to the growth of Wikipedia — the power of the distributed many can sometimes greatly outperform the power of the hierarchical few.

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Source: https://hbr.org/2021/09/a-labor-movement-for-the-platform-economy