A New Economy: Social, Commons, Feminist, and Environmental
Summary
Airbnb, Uber or eBay have popularized the collaborative economy, but where cooperativism is? The concentration of wealth continues in corporations.
Cases such as Airbnb, Uber, and eBay have popularised the concept of the sharing economy. Digital platforms allow for the exchange of products and services, defying the business model of traditional companies. As it turns out, however, the expansion of these platforms often goes against the rights of their workforces. This is the dilemma that Trebor Scholz analyses in his book Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016). As an alternative, he proposes platform cooperativism that complements the technological foundations of digital platforms with a cooperative organisational model.
The conference on Platform cooperativism organised by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider in 2015 helped to broaden the debate around the sharing economy, which is summed up in Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. In this book, Scholz explains how the phenomenon of the corporate sharing economy took advantage of the situation that developed after the 2008 crisis as an opportunity to dismantle labour conditions, not as a means to rethink the economic system and make it fairer. The solution now is to go back to the cooperativist tradition as an alternative to the corporate sharing economy. As Scholz says, “The cooperative movement needs to come to terms with 21st century technologies.”