Tag Archives: sharing economy

Home, Labor Studies, Urban Studies

Prof. Kafui Attoh Investigates the On-Demand Mobile Service Sector

Dr. Kafui Attoh, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the Murphy Institute, has been awarded a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. His project is called Economic Inequality in the Driver’s Seat: Household Budgets in the On-Demand Mobile Services Sector, and it aims to get a snapshot of what work in the On-Demand Mobile Service Sector looks like — and what it means for how on-demand workers navigate the broader economy.

To get that snapshot, Prof. Attoh, along with collaborator Katie Wells, will examine contingent and part-time on-demand work in mobile transportation, hospitality, home services, delivery and logistics services, such as Uber, Seamless, Taskrabbit, and AirBnB.

Professor Attoh explains that “the project starts from the presumption that the growth of the on-demand mobile service sector…raises both important and timely questions for researchers concerned with the future of employment. Our study examines the household balance sheets of contingent workers employed by Uber Transportation, one of the fastest growing on-demand mobile services. By looking at the household balance sheets of Uber drivers, we will be able to examine the financial costs, benefits, and challenges facing this new type of worker, as well as the burdens and benefits such work creates for these workers’ households. This project poses two questions:

“How does contingent part-time work for Uber affect the stability and health of household finances and the allocation of household responsibilities, and what does the emergence of the on-demand mobile services sector mean for understanding inequitable growth in the U.S.?”

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From Sharing Economy to Shared Ownership

Want to go deeper on the world of sharing, cooperativism, and an internet economy that works for all of us? Head to the New School November 13-14th for Platform Cooperativism: a coming out party for the cooperative internet, co-sponsored by the Murphy Institute. Register here.

In a new article over at FastCoexist (“The People’s Uber: Why The Sharing Economy Must Share Ownership“), Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholz lament the current state of the sharing economy:

For all the things that companies like Airbnb and TaskRabbit allow us to share with each other […] ownership and governance are not on offer. This is what the democratic promise of the Internet has come to: a democracy of access, of “collaborative consumption,” but not of control, real accountability, or ownership.

It’s a story that’s all too familiar for exploited workers subject to the micro-monitoring, low wages, and new forms of precarity that have opened up with the sharing economy. Yet, while Silicon Valley hails the new “freedoms” afforded by an internet that allows anyone to monetize any of their latent resources — time, bedrooms, cars and more — many workers are suffering from the gigification that has left them without benefits, stable wages, or any sort of certainty. From this, it’s easy for the future of work to look grim indeed.

Scholz and Schneider, however, take a bold step, opening up a new set of imaginative possibilities: What if, instead of being exploited by the “on-demand” economy, workers ran that economy themselves? Continue reading From Sharing Economy to Shared Ownership →

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News Round-Up

Happy Friday! Each week, we come across interesting articles and stories around labor, community, and struggles for equity and justice in our changing world. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve found and liked on the world wide web in recent days:

  • Over at Al Jazeera, Sarah Jaffe writes about the growing cooperative movement in New York City and beyond. (Can worker cooperatives alleviate income inequality?) Roots the present moment in the larger history of cooperative. Lots of exciting work brewing for the future.
  • On Shareable, Nathan Schneider has been writing about how the so-called sharing economy might be disrupted by projects that are actually user-owned. Last month, he wrote a great piece called Owning is the New Sharing about projects that are trying to combine the ease of peer-to-peer sharing platforms with ownership structures that are decentralized and autonomous. This week, he interviewed founders of La’Zooz: The Decentralized, Crypto-Alternative to Uber.
  • At the Washington Post today, Lydia DePillis describes organizing efforts at Politico — which, if successful, would be the first organizing campaign to successfully get off the ground at a major new media company.  (Why Internet journalists don’t organize)
  • Last week, the battle for fair wages and labor standards for fast food workers took on a new dimension, as a group of McDonald’s workers in Virgina filed suit against the company for alleged racial and sexual harassment in its stores. At stake is whether McDonald’s could be held jointly liable for the actions of its franchise operators, per the NLRB decision from this past June. Read more at Gawker.