Joining us today and conversation. Julia is a professor of solely on sociology at Boston College also a member of the Macarthur Foundation has written and edited on the economy sustainability including sustainable less lawn i scale and a fellow former guggenheim fellow in multiple awards for her work and research drain today who was a professor of law at the university of california hastings that her work has been cited by the California Supreme Court and published in the l. A. Times and guardian and slate currently working on a book go today they are discussing based on nearly a decade of Meticulous Research this new book discusses the sharing economy of what it is and what it could have been and what it could still be. From Bill Mckibben himself julia sure and the team are done something extraordinary during research leaving them to understand what the sharing economy feels like and the storytelling ability but the rest of us make complete sense of the data and in addition to have a workable plan for the promise of a useful and fear economy to redefine the field. The stage is yours. Thank you for having me and i am just deeply honored to be in the conversation. You all just heard julies introduction but what was not articulated is she is really not just a behemoth in this particular field sharing the gig economy but also thinking about work more broadly and has been essential a sensible and incredible follower for people across disciplines of thinking and also an amazing thinker and i think everyone probably any one of your students or mentees listening today can attest to that. To re orient this sector it promised economic, social and environmental benefits. It had a discourse on the economic side it promised efficiency using assets that would idle a lot of the time and that was thought to lead to environmental benefits, so you wouldnt have to build as many hotels if people could share cars a lot of people would think they wouldnt need to buy cars it also promised opportunity for people. We are 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 be able to stay in their house and pay down their student debt. These are the kind of things we found when we interviewed people they were hosting person to person interactions all of those things were promised and the idealist discourse grew out of longstanding traditions in Silicon Valley and when we look at those traditions we can see the tasks the idea that Online Connections and online communities lead to egalitarian outcomes and bring people together in flat spaces this was a prominent idea but its continued through the nonprofit platform of the world founded at this time and those are important but also some of the forprofits. But there was another strand in Silicon Valley we might think of as freemarket that the government is bad and corporations are good and corporations will get us all this good stuff. Unfettered corporations bring freedom and prosperity so there was a sort of rightwing Silicon Valley discourse and left leaning one and you could see both of them in the socalled shared economy. Now, i just mentioned the nonprofits. They had been important in the founding and they remain quite important in other parts of the world, europe especially. And they were part of the Early Community and that is where my Research Team started or we are going to build a different kind of egalitarian economy. So, we began i assembled a team and i just want to shout out i dont know if any of the team members are here. I wrote this book with a team of people who were all in sociology at the time and theyve now pretty much all graduated. We did 13 case studies of sharing initiatives and then we turned our attention to the forprofits like air b b, delivery platforms and we ended with a platform cooperative. Im still working on these issues. It went for almost ten years and im still working on these issues with a group of colleagues from northeastern and also phd students and we are looking at a low number of delivery apps. Things havent turned out as expected and the subtitle is how it got hijacked. And i guess the question that i want to address is wide. What happened. So, let me say a word about the process. And i wasnt planning to talk much about them today. Im happy to go into it in the q and a. I think that there are really interesting stories. The nonprofits we studied in the boston area so to the extent if folks are interested we can go into details. With these nonprofits would be the term failure to thrive. One of them actually failed during the time we were studying it. One of them thrives in a lot of ways but not others. In all of these cases there were what we might think of as dynamics that undermine the missions and intentions of the founders and the participants and so forth and i think they hold some important lessons for those that were trying to build alternative economies and i try to put myself in that camp, but what about the forprofits. They comprised many more people and theyve gotten a lot of attention. So, we began studying these in the early days and i would say that in the early days things were pretty good on a lot of the platforms. They were generally happy. Although then as now it was hard to do in the early days and that was true for a couple of reasons either the wages were too low or in the very early days they were good on all the platforms. They were a lot more than minimum wage, they were a lot more than people could get from any other kind of skills that they were engaged in on the platforms but it also has a workforce and its hard to get enough work to have a decent income. People who were dependent on the platforms to pay their basic expenses for their rent and food and car payments et cetera, people who were dependent workers generally earned up to or below the poverty line. It was a very high to get out of poverty. Now of course theres supplemental workers, people adding on to other sources of income, a fulltime job, maybe they are students so they dont need to earn a full income or a spousal income or so forth. They had positive experiences. They had a lot more flexibility in their schedule they just wouldnt do it anymore. It was interesting the extent to which the supplementary workers did things the way they wanted rather than the way the platform worked we found big differences between the dependent workers or fulltime workers though it isnt the same thing in the supplemental so more and more workers thats part of why things have gone south in that way so in some ways it never made sense for the platforms. Thats turned out to be a lot more difficult than they expected. But they are not sustainable on a lot of these to a certain extent and this is a specialty we will talk about when i finish in a minute. There is a point at which they want to see profitability. I think what has happened is the opposite which is the wages are high but that restricts the demand and that is the basic contradiction would they be profitable at a small fraction of the size and that is the question. They dont want to find out. They want to wipe out Public Transportation and wipe out everybody and dominate the market and then they can exploit the customers. More to stay on that but let me end with a question of whats possible and what can we do. Theres plenty of people we want to move to a fulltime system and an experiment to be stopped so one of the things to recognize about the platform is that they are very different than the conventional businesses. They operate with access for the earners and consumers. Almost anybody can join the platforms but the most important part is to try to earn. One of the things it does is gives excess supply particularly when there is a bad labor market and that is what we are seeing right now in the environment with tons of people on these apps and you can also see theres lots of entry and exit over the course of the year and the rising number on the lower they may have other responsibilities. We have people be interviewed who had to leave fulltime jobs because one got a divorce and had to take care of her children so she started working on multiple platforms as a way to do that and their use of the app because many times if you have a disability you dont know when you will be able to work. So that is one thing thats positive is that flexibility. The second thing about them, and this gets to the last point about the platform is they eliminate the function so quality control, matching consumers with earners. If youve looked at this sector at all you know in the early days they didnt hire many people at their corporate headquarters. Workers dont really need that much and this becomes an argument for why the cooperative structure is so much more efficient than th in these kindf platforms and if you get the right technology you can build out a workers coop so it turns out to be a way to organize platforms. Thats why it is a very successful case in which the photographers owned and governed the platform that would solve a lot of the problems of the platform and could make it work in ways that does take advantage of what this technology has to offer so let me stop there and turn it over. I read the first draft and the finished product and it is insightful. Something i want to hear you talk more about this Research Project is a collaborative project across many and then i want to talk about the current moment and how we can use the current recession that we are in and 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 that youve raised. It was a privilege and a wonderful experience. And i do want to thank the Macarthur Foundation that funded the research in the most wonderful way because basically rather than the typical process they gave us money and allowed us to go where the research took us so we were constantly evolving and that was wonderful. You gave me a comment and what we were able to do we were able to take a trip through and that was a privilege because it meant as it started happening we could follow that and we were not stocked with something we had designed that wasnt as interesting. We also started out i talk in the book about the discourse we were also an idealist team that we had hopes and they were so obvious in the dysfunctionality in the period things had really crashed at that time. So even if we ended up if the research led us to see the problems of things going in the Different Directions we would not have hoped they would and the second part of your question that is interesting about the people in the early days on both the forprofit and nonprofit, people were believing in that idealist discourse going on the air b b to rent out environmentally efficient cars like hybrids. They wanted to teach other people about hybrids or they were making print on air b b. They were trying to create a different kind of economy so people believed they would create a person to person economy from the impersonal corporate economy so whether it would be economic benefits, the social order the environmental there were a lot of true believers in those days across the whole range of sharing economy. We have an interesting question from the audience that dovetails into one of my questions. When we think about how we go from here to the three ways there are either the platform capitalists way we sort of enshrine their model into law and regulation are there is the state regulation and then the democratic. In some ways we are all in the same places and at a particular moment where things are shifting and so what are the possibilities and things we need to do to make this possible. Let me say a word or two. The first one wrote an interesting piece in which he wrote obvious now we can see what is happening that the trajectory if we let the platform do what they want there will be a couple of platforms with all of the Different Services and they will dominate the model in which we have the firms. The second is regulation and we have seen a change in this. What i argue in 2018 you start to see the tide turning. Until that point it had been hard to get the regulation through and most of the regulation was in the direction of more leeway and freedom so air b b regulation was operating at high levels and then they got the regulators to change the law to make it legal they start to clamp down on shortterm rentals and competitors so you see it in new york and the vehicle cap and San Francisco that cracks down and i now have one of my collaborators on the book and a tremendous change in the regulatory dimension. We will talk about california and whats going on now and whether or not that momentum will be stopped in november or whether whats going to happen so thats one way and its a sensual theres no question these platforms need to obey the laws that we have and we need to create some new regulations for the kind of problems that they have created but the question is do we stop there and especially can we do enough with regulation in the state that is so captured by industry and that gets us to the third path which is we talked about the worker coops and the question possibility. Make money so i think both are interesting. I would like to see some municipal experimentation now that we have the platforms i know San Francisco is thinking about one. You probably know more about that. You owned that you do such a good job that you are thinking about to be so prolific to understand how the platform economy has rolled out in different places and can you talk about how what you saw in the us with a platform economy and other countries and if they connect or diverge. Yes. There is tremendous variation how the platforms operate across countries. In europe they are highly regulated when the they come into sweden they had to operate take a taxi service with minimum wages and taxes but in the countries of europe where labor is stronger that platforms have to do more to train workers better. But there is wonderful work being done. A colleague at mit is studying Global Cities and finding level of exploitation and abuse through subcontracting, predatory loan loans, all of those familiar tactics that we are seeing there. It is very contextual. Were has been banned in a number of European Countries because it will not follow the rules. Can i ask you a question . [laughter] i really want to make sure we have enough time to talk about california and the classification and vanessa asks many of my colleagues concerned about regulations and to do pioneering work on to support the California Law to make sure they were classified as employees. So what do you think . Its a really hard question. And then to become a target of harassment as a result of a lot of misinformation in the relationship to it. And those who better pr people so i think that part of the reason why is there so much attention paid to worker classification the main pathway to security because we do not have that cities as a social safety net is through employment. As she pay for it yourself. And with Workers Compensation if you are injured on the job and this is through the employee status but that makes employment release so that the reason these Platform Companies really just capitalize they try to widen them and make it seem like they were independent contractors because it was so much cheaper for them to scale and easier for them to fix and keep the labor costs down. And make true independent contractors working for cooperatives to determine their own affairs or prices or those who are hustling to be Small Business owners in these economies are highly influential from the Business Model and algorithms. This is insured across a platform economy that get the most attention so to answer your question there is so much attention being played to worker classification with regulating the platform economy. So my sentences regulators see this the biggest Pressure Point for these companies what they hear from their constituents they are not learning a minimum wage and as opposed to ameliorated in the sense that mr. Have in the United States working ten or 12 hours a day you should be able to food on the table and pay your rent so there is a context between the inhibition and the promise that julie talks about in her book in the shadows that occupy real freedom in real possibility and hope for true ownership of their labor and of their work of the everyday lives and what these platforms ended up offering in real time. So a trajectory in how people doing this work for these companies felt about the work itself. One thing i have written a lot about is how taxi workers were happy as independent contractors for much of the nineties and early 2000s. Because they were. They could build their own client list stop and start when they wanted. Also they had a highly regulated environment flares were regulated, safety issues regulated, so they were getting the best of both worlds and then to feel like they were independent and real Small Business people and it has shifted. As commissions have dropped and workers realize am working much longer hours and that is the existing Pressure Point for the payment status but in california to look at the offline Delivery Company to adopt the test with the perception of employment and the hiring entity and to retrieve treat their workers like independent contractors and that work as the workers themselves as as a Transportation Company then there cannot be employees or independent contractors under state law and that was later codified under 85. There is a lot of consternation about this because and then to capture the issues that industry caused all of this massive classification people who are clearly employees living in the International Economy more unscrupulous businesses to take their work and put that elsewhere. One of those who address this is so that to move to nevada where he is cheaper but his to start thinking about how you make the platform cooperative more broadly a real part of our economy and those that need to be passed. What are the barriers to creating cooperative and what kind of real innovation for regulatory innovation can we push ourselves towards to enable and then the last chapter you talk about the platform cooperative and the failures but can you talk more about that . Were makes it possible to give people the freedom and the feeling of self ownership and creating ways to have real safetynet Protection Survey can solve all of our problems over the next seven minutes. The one thing i want to say about classification, we will finish that conversation first. I had the privilege to study a company that switched all California Workers to the employees in anticipation of 85. The new project i am doing we talk to the workers and also with managers. What is really interesting is it validates a point made quite a few times that these workers retained a lot of flexibility. There is nothing in the law that says that has to happen. They could maintain maybe not absolutely as much but a high level and number one the managers that we talk to have basically said they were this model. Those who are problems, productivity is higher. But the web is that it is more expensive. The biggest reason why they dont want to do it. But what we can say from that is we dont want businesses that can only exist by exploiting people with predatory pricing which is below what it should cost. But the idea that you should have private cars at your disposal at any time is done only ecologically a disaster but really undermines the Public Transportation system and that is something more and occasional occurrence to get to where i need to go to have a private driver. And now, one of the things about the cooperative model , is that they are all individual contributions and type of activities a freelancer, there is wonderful coop 45000 members and all types of freelancers whether graphic design, copy editing, coding, so people are paid what they do unlike a private cooperative where people make a common product. It means that the revenue distribution will be very different in the coop that we studied a small number of people with a high fraction and invest a lot more than what they are doing and they are the full timers and then people who have a much more tenuous relationship. Is one of the things that is different of a platform cooperative versus oldfashione oldfashioned. I know who have thought about the carrier but if you talk about this in your book but must are considered employees of the platform with Unemployment Insurance so what do you think the Employment Status and the platforms are mutually beneficial . And that we never have in the us and policies circles to disentangle the employment from the safety net and to make it possible for people to be freelancers the members of a cooperative. Historically this has been a lot of wonderful things but it has an impact the connection between Health Insurance and employment is a disaster and is really important was studying for my career of working hours. Because the employer gives Health Insurance to work long hours dont want to hire more people and pay benefits. The more we have safetynet issues the better so the vision that i had from the previous book and this one is thinking about ways that make it possible for people to live without that dependence on the employer is whether it provides more municipal level or at the federal level, there are many ways to do this but i do think that especially in a world where employment is less pure and ai will eliminate a lot of job jobs, the need to power down the economy not to have it up for ecological reasons people are working less to deescalate the more we can do outside employment the better that opens up a lot more space for people to be active on these platforms in ways that meet their needs and not oppressive and we have to do it because otherwise if they get sick they dont have our way to be taken care of. So two more minutes and one more thing about your book, i want to encourage you in the audience to consider a book from your library in a very accessible way it talks to the audience of how the got this conversation and why we are so fixated despite the fact is such a small percentage of the economy in the United States and why we talk so much about it why it is touched so many peoples lives and the promises and more or less for the most part now from the voices of the people that experience this have the same inequality as if they were attempting to move past and the fact this is very rare for social science you have answers and examples that is so incredibly helpful not just for academics or policymakers every day People Living their lives this book has a lot to offer thank you for your leadership and collaboration and the culmination of all of that which is a very wise and grand on groundbreaking and important book. Thank you so much. Lastminute answering the question and then to emulate to get in touch with professors legislatures and they felt that we already have the effort hear from the attorney general