Fredrik Söderqvist as Part of Who Owns the World? PCC Conference at The New School 2019

Summary

Fredrik Söderqvist at Who Owns the World Conference, convened by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School in November 2019. Söderqvist is a speaker for Town Hall 2 – Labor Power for the Platform Economy Now! Digital Labor Is Not Free panel discussion.

About this town hall: The world of work is not working for too many people. Labor Law in many countries including the United States is broken. That’s why we ask: What are innovative forms of associational power for workers in the gig economy? Can we re-imagine and rebuild the gig economy in a fundamentally fairer way? How important a role does ownership – and Employee Stock Ownership Plans in particular- play in creating leverage for platform workers? How aware are workers of the ownership option? Do cooperatives emerge when unions fail, or do unions have an essential role to play in co-op development? How much hope do we place in the enforcement of AB5, a law passed by the California State Senate requiring platforms such as Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees? How can technology help to link up, organize, and empower geographically dispersed workers?

Fredrik is a senior economist at Unionen, a Swedish trade union organising white collar workers in the private sector, a PhD student in industrial economics at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, and currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Work and Employment Research at MIT Sloan. His work focuses on atypical employment arrangements, algorithmic management practices, and collective bargaining.