Think Outside the Boss: Cooperative Alternatives to the Sharing Economy

Summary

Think Outside the Boss: Cooperative Alternatives to the Sharing Economy

Civic Hall NYC on Tuesday, March 10 2015

Given the mounting attention to the unethical labor practices in the so-called “collaborative sharing economy” with labor brokerages like Handy and Uber, what are the alternatives? Imagine for one moment that the algorithmic heart of any of these citadels of anti-unionism could be cloned and brought back to life under a different ownership model, with fair working conditions, as a humane alternative to the current model. There isn’t just one, inevitable future of work and while cooperatives are not a panacea for all the wrongs of platform capitalism, they could help to weave some ethical threads into the fabric of 21st century work. In his introductory remarks, Trebor Scholz will discuss good digital labor and argue for what he calls platform cooperativism.

PANEL

Trebor Scholz, Associate Professor, The New School Sara Horowitz, Founder & Executive Director, Freelancers Union. Saket Soni, Director, National Guestworker Alliance, & New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Caroline Woolard, Artist, Co-Founder, TradeSchool and OurGoods Nathan Schneider, Reporter, Vice, The Nation, & The Chronicle of Higher Education. Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens

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Civic Hall, a project of Personal Democracy Media, is a vibrant, collaborative, year-round community center and beautiful event space in Manhattan’s Flatiron District where civic innovators – technologists, social entrepreneurs, government officials, community organizers researchers and makers – can work, network, learn and organize to solve civic problems at scale. http://civichall.org