And then there was a socl promise abou connection that because these platforms were hosting what i called stranger sharing or personperson interactions it was thought that they we going to make ties, so you give a fist bump to the driver and find you have a connection on air b b and become friends. So all of those things. One has not been recognized as the extent to which this grew out of the longer standing traditions within Silicon Valley and when we look at those traditions we see what it mht have taken. There was the idea that the online communities need to bring bull togetr in these spaces andhis was a really into the nonprofit platform that was founded at this time. And withhat cyberutility and there was another strand in Silicon Valley. Prosperity and there was the right wing Silicon Valley discourse in t war leftwing one and with the sharing economy. And now i just mention the nonprot. And it remained quite important parts of the world. And that is whermy Research Team started because in008 and nine when i first started speakingbout these issue sues, there was a lot of hope for maker spaces a time banks and repair cafes to build that you could tell it egala terry and economy. I just wanted to give a shout out. I wre this book so those dowel are almost all had graduated. And of those sharing initiatives with the nonprofitsnd then we turned our attention to the for profit like airbnb. Which is airb for cars and delivery ptforms. And to and with a platform cooperative. Still working on these issues that was almost ten years and also phd students and insta cart and delivery apps. And let us know in the q a. And the subtitle of the book when the economy got hijacked and the question that want to address is what happened . I want to say for the nonprofi. And an interesting story. And then we can go into detail. Following the maker space and the time bank in this loca. So the easiest way to talk about what happened would be the term failure to thrive. One of them failed one thrives in some ways and not in others and with those dynamics with the admissions may hold important lessons such a parcels and i can. And they comprise ma more people to get more attention. So so pretty much in the early days things were pretty good on these platforms. So making a fulltime living on these platforms ways hard even in the earldays. That was true for a couple of reasons. So in e very earliest days it was more than minimum wage and that peoe could get from those skills that they were engaged on the platform. And the work plaorm and the big task grab an housecleaning is a big one but also so forth but to have very high wages far above minimum wage and also ha a highly educated workforce. And we found thoseependent earners to p the rent and food and car paymentst cetera. Those that earn up to the poverty line but in general those th add on the gig work to other sources of income maybe the are students they dont need to earn a full income those had positive experiences with higher wages and uld discriminate more, a lot more flexility in their schedule because they didnt have to work wn the market demand was there because its variable over the day or the week they also had a lot more autonomy how they did the work ich were worried about the readings and reputation and one person said to us what would happen if the platform askeyou to do another orientation . They said no way they just wouldnt do it anymore. Where that supplemen true one supplemental workers did the way the platform wanted. D so much autonomy and with the fulltime workers and one of the important things is over time especially the lowwage platforms and the delivery we dependent it came to be more depdent workforce and thats why things have gone south if you think of it in that way. Why did they go south . In some ways the model never made sense huber would rise below cost. And they would only have a viable model to dominate the market and wipe out the competitio on that has turned out to be more difficult than expected. But they are not sustainable and to a ctain extent so these platforms having that failure to those employment laws but that bad model to begin with was eventually and there is whe they want to see pfitability. That you have seen on delivery so on task grab is the opposite which the wages are hiut that isnt the demand and th is the basic contradiction and that is a simple obvious thing you lower the prices and you get more customers buyou have to please the workers and then raise the market and would it be profitable with a fraction . They don want to find out they went to wipe out everybody and dominate the market and then ey can exploit not just the workers buthe customers. A lot more to say on that but let me and with the question if we get the sharing economy back on track. With theull employment system and all of that which should be stopped. And with very conventional businessesenerally for earners and consumers also what that mea there are a few qualifications with background checks and so forth but it is a really easy act to get on. Gives chronic excess suppl particularly with a bad labor market. That what were seeing right now in the post covid environment which is tons of people streaming onto these apps getting harder and harder for people to make money. You can see that in the data in the general Unemployment Rate with these entry and exit over t course of the year. And you can see in the raising numbers of the worrs on delivery. But the openness and the flexibilit actually attract lot of people for whom that flexibilit is essential. May be people who have other responsibilities and have interviewed bause one woman got a divorce and those that could noconform to the school day so she started to work on multiple platforms. And their use of the app and not knowing when it is to wk or even an hour to hour. That is one thinthat is positive and the flexibility in this real gets to my last point and the technology of the apt so that hr, Quality Control and looking at th sector at all to get their Corporate Headquarters but the point is the functions of management are automated and that means workers dont need that managerial as much as they did. And that bomes and argument for the cooperative structure is so much more efficient and also scale rapidly witith the right technology and with the rus and govnance. So the wkers coop is an efficient way to organize platforms and thats why the last case was workers and so we are happy about the terprise. And that that could make it wo to take advantage of what the technology has to offer. Thank you so much. This book is fascinating and then to be incredibly insightful and then to reflect on a short time that the audience wants to hear you talk more about and not that not just uber drivers in the postrecession who are trying to reimagine their role. So to talk more about those folks and their trajectory and how we can use that current recession we are in differently and those mistakes that moment and to start with the Research Process and the macarthur foundations the typical process you have to do this they gave us money and allowed us to go to her the research took us. Is constantly evolving and you gave a comment on the early version of the book which is something i hadnt realized that basically, what we were able to do because when the sector was just beginning and that was a privilege because that meant as it started happening to design and year number one that wasnt interested in year or four. And we also started out, we were also the idealist team thate had hopes for many of these things in the beginning we were interested in them to makeeaningful change or solve the problems that were so oious of the dysfunctionality of global capitalism so things had crashed at that time. So we are not disillusion that we would not have hoped they would. The send part of your question is interesting about the people. And one thing that is interesting in the early day days, and the forprofit and nonprofit with that idealist dioursegoing on and airbnb for cs to rt out cars like hybrids making friends on airbnb and trying to create a different kind of economy. So with a person to person economy and the corporate economy and the environmental in the whole range of sharing economy. An interesting question from the audience and in your last chapter you talk about how scholars think about where we go from here. And then enshrined their model into regulation. There is the state regulation way and the true cooperative way. And all of these places at the same time for where things are shifting. And with those platform businesses like rideshare or tell us more what that might look like in comparison to the possibilities and the things we need to do to make one or either of those things possible. But the first one that you rate corporate dominance platforms. One of my coauthors and friends and to make a point it is oious now that we see it with uber that we t the platform do what they want and it has all the Different Services like coke and pepsi, it is that model. Some of the biggest cities start to clamp down. A little bit less delivery and on Short Term Rentals air b b and a few smaller competitors so new york they have minimum wage. If you get a vehicle in San Francisco they really cracked down on the air b b. La, boston, seattle now considering the legislation. I now have one of the collaborators on the book and a database of regulations in the ten biggest cities and there is a tremendous change with the momentum going and the regulatory dimension since 2018. Weill talk about california and whats going on there now but whether that momentum is going to betopped in november or whether whats going to happen, so thats one way and i think thatts essential. There is no question these platforms need to obey the laws that we have ande need to crea new walls andegulations for the new problems theyve created. But the question is do we stop there and especially in the United States can we do enough with regulations when we have a state that is so capred by industry. At gets us to the third path. We talked about the word coop and platform cooperative is and the questionersossibility which is municipally coop on atforms. Municipally owned ptforms i think do provide some really interesting opportunities. There are pros and cons. With the worker coop, the democratidemocratic control is e bit easier where you have a municipally owned coop you can have the democratic control but you always have the state and its own interest coming in and will it really be run in the interest of the workers or the citizens, consumers. With the municipal coop you will ideally have a multistakeholder. You might want to set it up as a more independent kind of entity so i doesnt getsed for political reasons so it has that integrity. The worker coop model you are a little bit more subject to the vagaries of th market where particularly with the municipal model theseould probably run at a city level. We studied these Consumer Services most of which are facetoface so it tends to be obal markets. Theres other kinds of markets air b b has a global dimension but the digital labor and so forth present some other things. If we foc on the Consumer Services where you have a municipal entity it can shape th market and then the question of will it be the only actor in the market, competing against privatend so forth. I will mention one thing that happened when i did the research and i was approached by someone setting up a municipal labor market in a city in britain at a time of really high unemployment. It was gng to be a General Service labor market so the consumers would go and anybody could come on to try to get those jobs and it failed almost instantly because there was an in balance. Many more people needed the work then there was work available. With the worker coop they have an easier time because unlike most of the platforms they tend not to be open access so they restrict the number that can be on the platform at any one time. They try to basically match the supply and demand and theres good arguments why you want to do that otherwise it becomes hard for people to make money on the platform. I think both models are interesting and i would like to see some experimentation now that we have a decade of experience i know San Francisco is thinking about one in the delivery sector in a pretty serious way i think. Not very much actually but i wonder you mentioned where they were considering a publicly owned firm. Katie is in the audience and has a great question and i think you do such a great job thinking about and understanding how the platform economy has rolled out in different places, so just wondering if you could talk a little bit about so alongside the platform economy and other countries and whether they connect or diverge. Theres tremendous variation. The platforms have wonderful work being done in that context. A colleague at mit studying in many Global Cities it is very contextual. Can i ask you a question, because i want to make sure we have enough time to talk about whats going on in california and classification. Because i am a freelance professional many of my colleagues were concerned about the regulations that go too far forcing the companies. And youve done pioneering work on what led to so many drivers to support the California Law that re classifies and makes sure they were classified. What do you think . If they become a target of harassment and misinformation about whats been going on in california and my relationship to it and i see some of the pr people in our attendees list. So they are here and listening and curious what we have to say. I think that part of the reason why is there so much attention being paid to the issue of worker classification. In the United States, as you all know the main pathway to security because we do n have another kind of social safety net in the way that they do in Northern Europe in particular so the only way that you get healthcare unless you are paying for it yourself the only way you get access to Unemployment Insurance and competition on the job, all of these safety nets that we all need is through employee status but that makes it expensive and so the reason these came in and capitalized to see and they are independent contractors is because its so much cheaper for them to scale. True independent contractors determining their own affairs or prizes who are hustling to be Small Business owners and workers in these economies are highly controlled through the Business Model and algorithms. This isnt true across the platform economy but it is particularly true in the u. S. For the Platform Companies that get the most attention and employee the most workers. Thats why theres so much attention being played for the worker classification when we think about regulating the platform economy more broadly. Regulators see this as the biggest Pressure Point for these companies and what they are hearing from their constituents is they are sleeping in their cars. In california that economic inequality as opposed to being ameliorated by this work and if you work ten to 12 hours a day you should be able to put food on the table and pay your rent, so theres some conflicts between the promise that julie talks about in the book and that was sort of promised at the beginning. In the shadows occupied people wanted real freedom and flexibility and hope for the true ownership of their labor work and everyday lives and then what these platforms actually ended up offering in real time. So i see a trajectory shift in how people doing this work felt about the work itself. One of the things ive written a lot about is how taxi workers across the board were pretty happy as independent contractors for much of the 90s and early 2000. Part of the reason that was is they were arguably true independent contractors and they could build their own client list and in many cases they could sort of stop and start when they wanted to and they could work when they wanted to but because they were working in a highly regulated environment and the safety issues are regulated so they had the safety net and because of the regulation they are also able to feel like they were independent in the Small Business people and they do not feel that way. Its shifted over the past eight years as the commissions have dropped and workers realized they are being controlled by the algorithms. They are working longer hours to make that amount of money and that is the existing Pressure Point that we have in the law to the Employment Status to sort of address these issues. In california that led the California Supreme Court to look at an offline Delivery Company to adopt this test that essentially says for those of you that are not familiar theres a presumption of employment and the hiring entity wants to trade the contractors and if they are doing the exact same work then there cannot be the employees and that was later codified and applied to all. There is a lot of consternation about this because while this attempts to capture all of this because we live in an International Economy it is meant theyve been able to take their work and put that work elsewhere so one of the ways to address this is to nationalize the test so you cant just move but the other way is to think about how we can make it cooperative, or cooperative more broadly. Part of our economy, what are the necessary regulations that need to be passed to facilitate this. What are the barriers to create a cooperative and what kind of innovation whether technological or regulatory can we push ourselves to words to enable this. In the last chapter we talk about this platform and the possibilities and failures and i wonder turning back to you if you could talk about that. What do we need to do to make this possible to recapture and give people the freedom that they want and the feeling of not being a loss, the feeling of self ownership and simultaneously offering them creative ways to have a safety net protection. There is one other thing but we will finish that. I had the pvilege of being able to study a company that switched all of its california workers. Ive been able to in this new project talk to the workers and managers. Whats been really interesting is this validates the plant that has been made quite a few times. These workers retained a lot of flexibility under the Employment Status. This company was able to maintain a high level. The managers said they preferred this. But its more expensive. I think what we can say from that is we do not want the businesses that can only exist by exploiting people or basically doing predatory pricing which is pricing below with the service should cost. Consumers may not love it because they will become more expensive but the idea that you should have really cheap private cars at your disposal at any time is not only ecologically a disaster but it undermines the Public Transportation system. What we need is a Public Transportation system to meet peoples needs is more of an occasional occurrence rather than ever everyday i can get whi need to go by having a private driver. One of the things about the cooperative model in these kind of texts is that these are almost all individual contribution types of activities so the driver, housecleaner, freelancer. There is a wonderful coop more than 35,000 members operate in over 40 countries. Its all freelancers whether it is graphic design, copy editing, you name it. So those are individual contributions. People get paid for what they do like applying the cooperative or auto factory where people are making a produ. One of the things this means is the revenue distribution is going to be different than the coop that we studied with a small number of people that learned a lot. A high fraction. They also invest a lot mor and theyre the full timers. Then you have people that kind of pop in and out and have a relationship so thats one of the things thats different than the oldfashioned collaborative. I wonder if you could i dont know if you have thought about this in your book but in the platform context that we are talking about unless they are coidered employees of the platform, they will have the same sort of precarious problems with regards to injury on the job or Unemployment Insurance and so i wonder the extent to which you think Employment Status and platforms are sort of mutually beneficial and possible to exist simultaneously. Or the other sort of conversation that we never have in the u. S. Or at least not in the real policy circles where how do we disentangle the employment from the safety net and make it possible for people to be freelancers and Small Business people and members of a cooperative and still lead secure lives . I think that buying everything to the Employment Status historically has been very it did a lot of things. Its really important to an issue i studied most of my career which is why the working hours are so high in this country because an employer gives health insurce to someone they want them to work longours. They dont want to have to hire moreeople to pay their benefit. So the more that wean delink the dimension from employment, the better. Thats onef the great unersal basic incomes and so the visionhat i had in my previo book and this one is sort of thinking about ways that make it possible for people to live without that dependence on their employer to get their basic whether its providing re of the municipal level or at the federal level. T especially where its becoming less and less secure and going to eliminate a lot of jobs where we need to per down n our economy and not kind of rise up for ecological reasons and people working ls. Theres a lot better kind of deescalate. All of those things suggest the more we can do outside the betternd that opens up a lot more space for people to be active in these flexible ways on these platforms in ways that meet their needs and they have to do it because if they get ck they dont have a way to be taken care of or so forth so yes. We have two more minutes and i want to say one more thi about your book. And then i want to give you the floor. I want to encourage all of you in the audience who havent already purchased a book to purchase it or get it from your library or buy it for your library or your school because i think what it does is in a very accessible way talk to an audience about how we got to this conversation and why we are so fixated on it. Why the platform economy despite the fact that its such a small percentage of the economy in the United States. Why do we talk so much about it and why has it touched so many peoples lives. What is the promise for and why have they more or less not been met and how i think from the voices of the people that have experienced it how in many ways they reproduced the same inequalities that they were attempting to solve or move past. The fact that you have, this is very rare for a social scientist but the fact that you have answers for us. You have examples that are so incredibly hopeful and promising so not just for academics and policymakers but for everyday people making their lives thank you for the decade of research and collaboration and the culmination of all of that that is this very wise very groundbreaking and importa book. Thank you so much. I want to spend my last mite answering the question about the chapter in the blue state to emulate and get in touch with progressive legislators and progressive unions and they will help that. We already have an effort here in massachusetts from our attorney general. University of virginia professor on how to focus on responsibility and ethics and its influential businesses