“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.
w/ 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

related text @ http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/04/think-outside-the-boss/#.VUDkLCEzbIU