Some Arguments Going Again the Labor Movement

In October 2019, ii DoorDash drivers — Dave Levy and Nikos Kanelopoulos — launched the #DeclineNow Facebook grouping. The duo had discovered that when a DoorDash driver declines a commitment, the app offers that delivery to another commuter for college pay. In the Facebook grouping, which at present numbers more than xxx,000 members, they urged peers to reject any delivery that doesn't pay at to the lowest degree $seven — more than double the base charge per unit 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 contrary of that."

On September 1, 2021, many Twitch streamers participated in a coordinated protest — taking the solar day off streaming in response to the platform'southward perceived inaction against harassment of marginalized creators. Platform viewership dropped by an estimated 5% to 15%. Though the protest lasted merely a twenty-four hours, it garnered widespread attention: Many news outlets reported on the harassment trouble, and #ADayOffTwitch became ane of the top 10 trending hashtags on Twitter.

These two protests reveal an overlooked truth about 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 actions and algorithms of platforms that they have little to no power to sway, and they have petty recourse to suboptimal policies, dissatisfactory product decisions, and other negative experiences.

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

These efforts tend to exist more bottom-up and diffuse than historical labor unions. Workers find and team up with each other in a peer-to-peer way; voice opposition on social media, through online forums, and to the media; undermine or challenge a platform's normal operations; leverage the ability of their audience or customers; and at times, leave platforms altogether for more worker-friendly alternatives.

Though individual actions have achieved moderate success, DCA has largely struggled to accept a sustained affect. Because platform workers frequently are not in direct contact with each other, it is hard for them to coordinate, and platforms can induce a competitive dynamic among them. Moreover, platform workers typically have little leverage because of low barriers to entry and an excess of willing participants on the supply side. These bug heighten the necessity for a more refined approach from workers, and a more sustainable path forward.

This essay outlines the strategies that platform workers are utilizing to voice 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 terminate users.

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A New Social Contract Between Workers and Platforms

The world of platform labor is in principle a net proficient: Platform marketplaces 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 have made it challenging to make a living from local customers can now turn to a global market. Someone whose main skill is woodworking, for case, can grow a worldwide audience of fans through YouTube and then sell their creations on Etsy.

But that doesn't mean platform workers don't have grievances — or that the contract betwixt platforms and their workers tin't exist improved. Platform workers' liminal status makes them much more vulnerable to exploitation. In the United States, most gig workers and creators are classified as "contained contractors," a categorization the IRS defines as "people who offering their services to the full general public" in an contained trade, concern, or profession. In practical terms, this nomenclature absolves firms from having to provide these workers with benefits, protections, and guarantees that traditional employees relish — fifty-fifty as platform workers and creators are dependent on platforms to reach audiences, connect with potential customers, and earn income.

In an ideal world, long-term platform sustainability would supplant brusque-term turn a profit incentives, motivating platforms to marshal with workers to assistance them abound their businesses and — eventually — obtain a meaningful standard of living and success. Platforms could even 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 than value for both workers and the platform in the long run.

Nevertheless instead, nearly platforms chase brusk-term gains to heave growth and attract outside investment. Equally platforms' network effects have intensified and resulted in meaning market place ability — called monopsony power in the context of labor markets — their workers have 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 meliorate wages, shorter hours, and safer working weather condition. At the plow of the 20th century, these labor movements culminated in many of the legal protections workers enjoy today, including the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which provides the correct for workers to unionize, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which created the correct to minimum wage and overtime pay and established the 40-hour work week.

But with platforms, commonage action is more challenging. Not but do today's platform-based workers exist in a nascent labor category, just 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 need for mutual accountability and evolving protections and responsibilities. Information technology's time to revisit the social compact between platforms and their workers — and discover a new form of collective action to do so.

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Why Practice Workers Need Decentralized Collective Action?

There are many reasons why workers are now turning to decentralized collective action: Correct now, tensions between workers and platforms are centered around some familiar labor bug such as the right to unionize, too as more than platform-specific problems such as ownership of data, content moderation, power to attain customers, harassment in virtual "workplaces," and monetization policies.

Platform lock-in and leverage over individual workers.

Platform workers often confront substantial lock-in, driven by network effects and lack of data portability. Platforms intermediate transactions — equally a result, they gather market information, and often control customer relationships. This type of capital cannot be hands ported over to other platforms or worker-endemic 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 exhaustion. In other words: Because a DoorDash commuter can't discover delivery opportunities on their ain and a Twitter user tin can't export followers' emails, DoorDash and Twitter have marketplace ability.

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

The "independent contractor" classification not only blocks platform workers from benefits and protections, but also means the platform workers are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act, and thus do non have the right to unionize. Nonetheless platforms nevertheless exercise significant amounts of command over aspects of workers' jobs — including determining how much workers are paid, what they exercise, and how they perform their jobs. This has led to contentious debates and regulatory battles around platform worker classification.

Platforms oft have an incentive to commoditize their workers as much as possible.

From the platform'southward perspective, commoditization of workers is desirable, as it allows the platform to provide a uniform client experience and remain the center of the client relationship. For example, the TikTok app design discounts the value of a follower human relationship and instead defaults users to the "For Yous" page — an algorithmically generated feed of content the platform believes would appeal to users. On rideshare apps, driver commoditization ensures a consequent level of service, only as well means that users come back to the app to request rides, rather than seeking out a given commuter directly. The commoditization of suppliers on a platform erodes the ability of workers to found their own businesses or to operate outside of a handful of platforms.

Worker heterogeneity makes it challenging to organize for all.

For creator platforms, the power police force distribution of success means that peak creators have disproportionately more bargaining power with platforms. Ofttimes, this results in superlative creators receiving special treatment from platforms, in the form of greater admission to funding, more than favorable take rates, prominent placement in discovery channels, participation in product feedback processes, and inclusion in funding and monetization programs.

Over fourth dimension, platforms can trend towards catering to a pocket-size segment of pinnacle creators, who have little incentive to push button for improved conditions for all creators considering they themselves are benefitting from the platform's blueprint and policies. In other words, the heterogeneous nature of creators makes information technology challenging for the most powerful creators to take the motivation or cohesion to organize. In contrast, labor movements typically harness the collective power of large workforces who have similar shared experiences.

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Phonation and Go out: Strategies for Decentralized Collective Action

So what options practise platform workers have? The Leave-Voice-Loyalty framework, commencement 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 tin voice concerns in an attempt to modify their situation, exit to seek new employment opportunities, or passively wait, out of loyalty or neglect, for the situation to resolve:

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An early on study examining platform labor's options in the confront of work dissatisfaction was a 2022 study of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a marketplace for on-need tasks. Applying the exit-phonation-loyalty framework, researchers found that:

… participants have the possibilities of loyalty and go out (east.chiliad., petitions, boycotts), but not phonation. In other words: they may cull to sign a petition or to get out if they don't agree [with platform policy]. Just, at that place is little place for discourse when the problem, its source, and its solution are not clear.

Since then, we've seen numerous examples of platform worker voice sally — admitting expressed differently than direct feedback to managers or filing a complaint with 60 minutes. Instances of platform worker voice include worker-to-worker, worker-to-algorithm, and worker-to-public communication — all of which happens in a bottom-upwards, decentralized style.

The following represents a sampling of different platform worker DCA vocalisation strategies nosotros have observed:

Informal Unionization (worker-to-worker) is when workers engage in spousal relationship-like behavior, for instance past coordinating and submitting a list of demands to a platform.

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

Mutual Aid (worker-to-worker) occurs when workers engage in reciprocal support among themselves.

Examples include Instagram pods that agree to mutually similar, comment on, share, or otherwise appoint with each other'south posts; rideshare drivers in Jakarta that have formed concrete basecamps ("common aid stations"), and informal insurance pools.

Third-Party Product Enhancement (worker-to-worker) refers to the design and creation of digital tools that meliorate the worker experience.

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

Information Leveling (worker-to-worker) occurs when workers pool learnings or unlock new or hidden data to assistance 1 some other 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 past 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 set of tactics used by workers to resist the managerial control increasingly exercised by algorithms.

Examples include the DoorDash #DeclineNow move, as well as like attempts to subvert algorithmic control that take been observed on platforms like 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 ane.2M views on his video describing the realities of being a commitment driver. Similarly, popular vlogger Hank Green shared a TikTok video expressing questions nigh TikTok's compensation of creators.

While these strategies for decentralized worker voice can be impactful in the short term, the lack of evolution in platform policy in recent years indicates they are ineffective methods for instigating long-lasting, meaningful alter. 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 entreatment to a platform, and they tin't negotiate with an equation."

Media campaigns take express lifecycles, and platform responses are often performative rather than substantive. Algoactivism merely 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 fourth dimension and endeavor, and again is subject to disruption by changes in platform design. And informal unions lack the scale and organization needed to catalyze lasting change.

This doesn't hateful decentralized collective action can't exist effective; rather, the efficacy of action through vocalism within the existing platform ecosystem is limited.

Returning to the exit-voice-loyalty framework, the alternative to voice is to exit. If voice entails taking actions to improve conditions within the existing environment, exit occurs when individuals or groups resolve that conditions are across improvement, that it is better to make a break with existing systems and to seek piece of work elsewhere. The platform labor motility and 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 it.

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The Hereafter: Worker Ownership and Enfranchisement

Information technology is ultimately through a combination of regulation and organizational restructuring that workers shift the remainder 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 decision-making and are endemic past their workers and users. The Driver'south Cooperative, a New York City-based ride-hailing app that is entirely worker-endemic and governed, is 1 such instance. Founded in 2020, it has more than 3,000 drivers and thirty,000 users. Stocksy is a cooperatively-owned marketplace for stock photography and video, which pays out more than half of its revenue as royalties to its contributors.

Drawing on principles from offline cooperatives such equally 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 20 meg members and $2.75 billion revenue in 2020), platform cooperatives are often funded through a combination of their members and outside debt financing, with profit distributed according to the wishes of the member-owners. Still, this buying structure and fellow member-axial governance has made information technology difficult for them to attract outside capital — hindering the ability of platform co-ops, and co-ops in full general, to be competitive with traditional corporations.

Cryptonetworks and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) every bit the future of internet-native co-ops.

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

Such networks address two major bug that have prevented traditional cooperative businesses from becoming pervasive: admission to capital letter and complication of governance. With the issuance of a token, cryptonetworks can do good from market speculation and raise capital letter that enables them to be competitive vs. traditional corporations.

Experimentation around cyberspace-native governance endeavors also enables diverse member bases to coordinate decision-making at scale: Token-based voting, for example, lets members vote in proportion to their ownership of the platform, similar to the style in which traditional shareholder voting rights exist in corporations today. Reputation voting, meanwhile, allows users to participate in governance based on their perceived value as community members rather than their economic holdings

The digital fine 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 brand collective decisions on the future of the virtual globe. Yield Guild Games — a gaming guild that trains and onboards players into play-to-earn video games — can be seen as the crypto-native version of a workers' matrimony; its large contingent of gamers allows it to negotiate for better platform policies and pattern.

Labor laws to protect platform worker rights.

In parallel with technology-based solutions like cryptonetworks, there 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, there could be regulation of earnings and revenue share rates for creators and gig workers in the platform economy. There has been much debate around the employment nomenclature of gig workers and whether they are entitled to a minimum wage. California'southward Proposition 22, which carved out rideshare workers from being classified equally employees, was recently ruled unconstitutional for limiting the ability of workers to organize and have access to workers' bounty.

In that location could too be regulation to promote data portability and buying: Creators' and users' ability to port data would hateful they could drift betwixt platforms more hands or ready up their own independent properties. As i of us (Jin) explained in a recent web log post: "Creator and user ownership of data, relationships, content, identities, and interactions would weaken platforms' lock-in and entail a shift in ability from platforms to their participants, enabling them to operate exterior of a handful of platforms."

We are aware, all the same, that regulation can and ofttimes does have 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 every bit Full general Information Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been criticized as hindering innovation and competition by making it more challenging for new entrants to collect and share data that would enable workers and consumers to have more options.

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Building Worker Power

In the same examples, users — in a decentralized manner — accept activity to shift their usage to new networks entirely of their own volition, motivated by the benefits over centralized alternatives (social media platforms, traditional financial institutions). Users' participation in cryptonetworks is not only driven by the want for more governance and enfranchisement, but likewise by financial cocky-interest, given the potential upside of tokens.

That points to a basic truth: New alternatives will succeed at scale only when they can exist genuinely — and holistically — meliorate for workers. And that, in plow, sets into motion a positive macro flywheel, pressuring incumbents to evolve their policies and products to favor platform participants. In the long run, platforms have a lot to proceeds from becoming more worker friendly. As one of usa (Kominers) recently argued in the context of both commitment and short-term housing marketplaces, by investing in improving their suppliers' operations and outcomes, platforms improve the quality of their networks in the long run, and increase the overall opportunity for marketplace-based transactions.

Decentralized collective action helps united states move in the right management — both by influencing electric current platforms, and past forging the next generation of disruptive networks that are more than aligned with their participants.

In the coming months and years, as creators and workers realize their commonage ability, these movements will 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 profoundly outperform the power of the hierarchical few.

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

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