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 of and realized but basically what we were able to do, because we started from when the sector was just beginning work on the people to take a trip through. We moved with the sector and that was really a privilege because it meant as things started happeningwe could just follow that. And we were, that was something we have been dying and that wasnt as interesting in your three or four, having done this over quite a few years you so we also started out, i thought about the idea of discourse, we were also an idealist team in the sense that we had hoped, we had high hopes many of these things were beginning at the beginning and so we were really interested in them because we thought they could make meaningful change and solve the problems that were so obvious and the dysfunctionality of global capitalism in the period 2008 and still, things had really crashed at that time. So you know, even if we ended up becoming, i dont want to say disillusioned, were not disillusioned but we bought our research us to see many of the problems of things going in directions that we would not have hoped they would be an and the second part of your question is interesting about the people, the people that we talked to at the beginning and one thing that was interesting was in the early days on both the forprofit and nonprofit, people were reallybelieving in that idealist discourse. Able were going on the airbnb for cars in order to rent out environmentally efficient cars, hybrids. They wanted to see other people without hybrids or they were making hybrids on airbnb. They were trying to create a different kind of communities of people believe that these platforms would create a persontoperson economy that would substantially different from what they thought the dehumanizing, impersonal corporate economy. So whether it was the economic benefits, social or environmental, there were a lot of true believers in these early days across the whole range of sharing economy, sharing economy apps. We have an interesting question that dovetails into one of myquestions. So in our last chapter you talk about how scholars really think about where we go from here. Theres either a platform capitalists way where we sort of enshrined their model and live with it. Theres the state revelation way and then there is the democratic sharing way. The true cooperative way and in some ways were kind of in all of these spaces at the same time right now. I think we are in a particular moment where things are shifting. And so John Marshall asks you whether you could comment on public municipal ownership of platforms and businesses like rideshare and maybe youd be able to talk to us about what that might look like in comparison to coop models, what are sort of the possibility in this and what are the things we need to do to make one or either of thosepossible . At a great question and its one that has been talked about enough. Me just say a word or two about this free pass, the last chapter that you raise the rent the first one which is the sort of corporate dominance platform, one of my coauthors and friends, a dutch probably going franklin wrote an interesting piece in which he made the point and of course its obvious now, we can see it with whats happening with uber is the likely directory if we just let the platform do what they want, they corporate ones is there will be a super platform that has all the Different Services and they will come to dominate uber, lyft area its just that sort of model which in so Many Industries we really basically have 2 to 3 dominant ones so thats one direction. The second is regulation which you mentioned course veena has worked so much more on employment misclassification in the gate economy and we seem real change in this. What i argue in the book is beginning in 2018 , you have, you start to see the tide turning on regulations until that point it would have been very hard to get any regulation through and in fact, most of the revelation happening was in the direction of more leeway and freedom for the country so airbnb relations, airbnb was illegal in many places where it was operating at high levels and the company got legislators and regulators to change those laws to make it legal starting in 2018, regulated some of the biggest cities start start to clampdown in ride hills, delivery and shortterm rentals, aaron pnb and a few of their smaller competitors. You see it in new york where ride hail drivers get a minimum wage and you see it in San Francisco which really cracked down on airbnb. La, boston, seattle now considering various legislation and i now have one of the collaborators on the book, i now have a database on airbnb regulations in 10 cities and you just see a tremendous change, were really going in the regulatory dimension since 2018 and we will talk about how california now, whether or not that momentum is going to be stopped in november or whats going to happen. I think its essential. Theres no question that these platforms need to obey the laws that we have and they need to eliminate, create some new laws and regulations for the new type of problemsthey create. But the question is sort of do we stop there and especially in the United States, and we do not with regulation where we have a state that is so captured by industry and business. And that gets us to the third path which is we talked about the word coops, whats called platform cooperatives is an and the question is municipally owned coops, so municipally owned platforms i think you provide some really interesting opportunities. So there are pros and cons at the workers coop model versus worker owned. With the municipal model democrats control is a little bit easier you have municipally owned coops, you get, you dont have the democratic control but you always have a variance where you have the state in its own interests coming in there it would really be run in the interests of the workers or the citizens, the consumers so with the municipal coop you will get a multi, ideally you would have almost a stakeholder. You might probably want to set it up as a more independent kind of entity so that it doesnt just use for political reasons like it has integrity, government every. The worker coop model, youre a little bit more subject to the vagaries of the market where particularly with a municipal model, this would probably be run at sea level with a lot of this, we study the consumer services, most of which are facetoface but tends to be a local market. There are other types of which are global. Obviously airbnb as i mentioned but digital labor and so forth where youre calling on a global labor force. Will stop unless a minute that i will just mention one thing that happened while i was doing the research. I was approached by someone who was setting up a municipal labor market in the city in britain at the time of really high unemployment and was going to be a General Service so consumers would go whenever they would need it. They, and anybody could come on to try and get those senate failed almost instantly because there is such an imbalance of supply and demand. Many more people needed the work then there was work available. This is also what the worker coops they have an easier time because unlike most of the platforms they tend not to be open access so they are membership models. So they restrict the number of work that can be on the platform at any one time. They try to match the supplied to the demand and theres a good argument for why you would want to do that. Otherwise it can become hard for people to make money on the platform. So i think both models are interesting. I would like to see some municipal, some experimentation with municipal models now that we have a decade of experience with the platforms but i know San Francisco is actually thinking about one and a delivery sector. In a curious way i think. You probably know more about that. Juliet you mentioned in Great Britain where they were considering a publicly owned forum. Kitty wells is any audience hi katie and she is a great question that i think you do such a good job of thinking about because youve been so prolific in terms of meeting and speaking to an understanding how the platform economy has rolled out in different places and shes wondering if you could talk a little bit about how what you found in the u. S. Sits alongside the platform economy in other countries and whether they connect toward the verge with studies elsewhere. Yeah suthers tremendous variation without platforms operate across countries but in europe many of them are highly regulated so in uber came in to sweeten it had to operate like a regular taxi service and pay minimum wages and taxes and so forth. In the countries of europe where the labor markets or the labor unions are stronger the platforms have to do more to treat workers better pretend the other hand theres wonderful work being done in the global context. A colleague named Jason Jackson at m. I. T. Is studying rate hail right hails in many cities and finding levels of exploitation through subcontracting through predatory loans, you know all the familiar tactics of labor exploitation that we are seeing their so it is very contextual. Uber isnt demanded a number of European Countries for example because it wont follow the rules. Veena can i ask you a question . Sure. I really want to make sure we have enough time to talk about whats going on in california and misclassification and vanessa says im a freelance professional. Many of my colleagues are concerned about regulation that goes too far in the way it treats its employees and veena is done pioneering work on how ride hill workers make sure they are classified as employees. What do you think . Its a really hard question and i see some of you might become a target of harassment with. Theres a lot of misinformation about whats been going on in california and my relationship to it may see some of the uber people in our attendee list and im they are curious to hear where we have to say. I think that part of the reason and the question why is there so much attention being paid to the issue of worker classifications of the United States as you all know the main pathway to security because we do not have another kind of social safety net in the way that they do in Northern Europe in particular is through employment. Its the only way you get health care unless you are paying for yourself. Its only way you can get access to Unemployment Insurance and Workers Compensation if you are injured on the job. All of these safety nets that we all really need is through Employment Status but that makes employment really expensive. The reason the platform came in and just really capitalized on these carveouts in the law and trying to widen them and tried to make it seem like their workers were independent contractors was because it was so much cheaper for them and easy for them to scale and to keep labor costs down. Unlike mature independent contractors like tivo who are in corporate is for example a and it determining their own fears are their own prices or Building Client lists who are hustling to be a smallbusiness owner, workers in these economies are highly controlled through the Business Model and their algorithms. This is true across the platform but its particularly true in the u. S. For the Platform Companies that get the most attention and support their workers. I think to your question that is why theres so much attention being placed on the issue of worker classification. We think about regulating the platform and economy more broadly. My sense is that regulators see this as the most, is the biggest Pressure Point for these companies and what they are hearing from their constituents is that people are not earning minimum wage and they are slipping in their cars. In california economic inequality is being exacerbated by this and theres a sense we still havent United States that if you work 10 to 12 hours a day you should be old to put food on the table and pay your rent. There are some real conflicts between the innovation and the promise that julie talks about and that she talked about today. People want real flexibility and real hope for true ownership of their labor, of their work of their everyday lives and this is what the platforms ended up offering in realtime. We might see it trajectory and how people doing this work for these companies felt about the work itself. One of the things that ive written a lot about is how taxi workers acrosstheboard for happy as independent contractors for much of the 90s and early 2000. Part of the reason that was was because they were arguably true independent contractors and they could fill their own client list and it meant that they could stop and start when i wanted to and work when they wanted to but also because they were working in a highly regulated environment in which fares were regulated and their safety issues were regulated. They were getting workers comp and Unemployment Insurance so they were getting the best of oath worlds and that they have a safety net and because of supply regulations they are able to feel like they were independent and Small Businesspeople and workers in this economy do not feel that way. Its really shifted and it shifted over the past eight years as commissions have dropped and workers realize that they are being controlled by the algorithm and they are working much longer hours and make the same amount of money and that is the existing Pressure Point that we have in the law to claim status to address these issues. In california the California Supreme Court looked at an offline Delivery Company to adopt this test which essentially says for those of you who arent familiar the presumption is unemployment and the hiring entity wants to treat their workers like independent contractors and they have a threepart test and if the hiring entity is doing the exact same work as the workers themselves in the Transportation Company in the workers are transportation, companies that cant be any kind, those workers cannot be employees and independent contractors under state law that applies to all California Law under ab five. There is a lot of consternation about this because while this test really attempts to capture the issues that industry has caused, all of this you know massive misclassification of people who are very clearly employees a cozy live in a National International economy it has meant that some more unscrupulous businesses have been able to particularly in Certain Industries deal to take their work and put that work elsewhere. One of the ways to address this of course is to nationalize test. You cant just move if you dont want to use a writer in california because its too expensive move to where its cheaper but i think the other way and this is really important and brings us back to julies work is to start thinking about how we make a cooperative or cooperatives more broadly real part of our economy. What are the necessary regulations that need to be passed as facilitate this and what are the barriers to creating cooperating cooperatives and what kind of real innovation technological innovation or regulatory innovation can we push ourselves toward to enable this and in your last chapter you talked a lot about the platform cooperative and the possibilities and the failures and i wondered julie turning back to you if you could talk more about that. What could we do to make this possible to recapture to give people the freedom that they want the feeling of not being a boss the feeling of ownership and simultaneously offering them, creating ways to have real safety net protection . And solve all of our problems for us in the next seven minutes. Theres one other thing i want to say about employment classification. Let me just finish and we will finish that conversation for a minute. I had the privilege of being able to study a company that switched all of its California Workers a Platform Company that switched all of its California Workers employees in anticipation of ab five and ive been able to in this new project im doing talked about the workers and we have also talked with managers. Whats been really interesting is and is very much validates the point that veena has made quite a few times these workers retain a lot of flexibility under Employment Status. The companies will lose flexibility and theres nothing in a law that says that has to happen in this company was able to maintain maybe not absolutely as much but a highlevel, number one the managers we have talked to have basically said they preferred this model. There are fewer problems than the efficiency is higher in productivity is higher. The rub on it is this is the biggest reason by the companies dont want to do it but i think what we can say from that is we dont want businesses that can only exist by exploiting people are basically doing predatory pricing which is pricing below what the service should cost. Consumers may not love it because it may become more expensive but the idea that you should have really cheap cars at your disposal at any time is not only ill a disaster but it undermines the Public Transportation system which is what we need is a Public Transportation system that basically an meets peoples needs and going in the private cars is something that is more of an occasional occurrence rather than every day i can get to wherever i need to go by having a private driver. And the platform coops, i think one of the things that i found the cooperative model in these kinds of context is that they are coming these are almost all individual contribution kinds of activities so the driver, the housecleaner a freelancer and theres a wonderful coop in europe with more than 35,000 members and operates in 40 countries and all types of freelancers whether Graphic Design copyediting you name it, coding. Those are individual contributions and so people get paid for what they do unlike a plywood core operative or an auto factory cooperate of her people are a comment product. One of the things this means is the revenue distribution is going to be very different in the coop we studied a small number of people earned a high fraction. They also invest a lot more in what they are doing and they are like the full timers and then you have a lot of people who pop in and out and have a much more relationship. Thats one of the things theres a oldfashioned Workers Cooperative and a platform cooperative. I wonder juliet i dont know if you have thought about and i know youve thought about this but i cant remember if you talked about this in your book but in the platform context you are talking about in the u. S. And less those are considered employees of a platform they are having going to have the same sorts of precarious problems with regard to injuries on the job for Unemployment Insurance if the platform folds so i wondered the extent to which you think Employment Status and platforms are mutually beneficial or possible simultaneously or the other sort of option or conversation that we never have in the u. S. Or at least not in real policy circles where we are actually making policy is how do we disentangle the unemployment from the safety net and make it possible for people to really be freelancers or really be Small Business people are members of a cooperative . This is so important. I think tying everything to Employment Status is darkly has been, i mean there has been a lot of wonderful things but its also have a lot of impacts so for example people have been to stay in jobs for Health Insurance and the connection between Health Insurance and employment at think is a disaster and its really important is an issue of study for most of my career which is working hours and its why working hours are so high in this country. An employer gives Health Insurance to someone and they want them to work long hours. They dont want to have to hire many more people and the more week in delink safetynet issues safety net dimensions from employment the better and thats one of the great things about universal basic incomes. The position that i had in my previous book and this one is thinking about ways that make it possible for people to live without the dependence on the employer to get their basic needs and whether its providing at the municipal level providing at the federal level there are many ways to do this but i do think especially in a world where employment is becoming less and less secure where ai is going to eliminate a lot of jobs where we need to power down our economy and not rip it up for ecological reasons people working less is a lot better kind of deescalate or at all of those things suggest the more we can do outside of employment the better and that then opens up a lot more space for people to be active in these flexible ways on the gig platform in ways that meet their needs and better not oppressive and they have to do it because otherwise if they get sick they dont have a way to be taking care of and so forth so yes. We have two more minutes and i want to say one more thing about your book and then i want to give you the floor to and. I want to encourage all of those in the audience who havent already purchased the book to purchase it from or get it from your library or buy it or your library or your school because i think would does in a very accessible way you talk to an audience about how weak got to this conversation why we are so fixated on it. And despite the fact that its such a small percentage of the economy in the United States at least. Why we talk so much about it and whites touched him a different lives. With the promises were and why the promises have more or less for the most part have not been met and from the voices from experience how many ways they have reproduce the same that they were attempting to move past and this is very rare for a social book or as sociology at the fact that you have answers and visions for us and its so incredibly hopeful and promising so not just for academics and not just for policymakers but everyday people who are living their lives and have a lot to offer. Leadership in collaboration and the culmination of all of that which is really very wise. Groundbreaking. Thank you so much. I want to spend my last minute answering the question about what should they chapter in a blue state due to emulate californias 85 and progressive legislators and progressive unions and they will help that. We are to have an effort in your message from our attorney general. Host Reed Hastings and erin meyer in the coop theres a this look netflix and the culture of reinvention. Mr. Hastings is the ceo of netflix. Mr. Hastings what is netflix and what do you do . Guest netflix is about a world leading entertainment system. We distribute amazing Television Series and movies for weve been around for 20 years and have Members Around the world. Host is their connection tohe