How Platforms Are Reshaping the Fight for Workers’ Rights

I for one embrace our new robotic overlords

A recent Aeon article by George Zarkadakis — “Workers of the World Unite on Distributed Digital Platforms” tackles a heavy topic that doesn’t get spoken about enough.

We often worry about the sci-fi threat of job losses to tireless robot workers, or the immediate challenges of low paid work coming from new industries. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the wider destabilizing impact of distributed platforms on how society organizes the labour market.

Platforms undermine the existence of corporations because they save or even eliminate the costs that made people invent corporations, which were outlined by Nobel prize winner economist Ronald Coase back in 1973.

Resourcing work from inside a company is cheaper than finding new people every time.

work from inside a company is cheaper than finding new people every time. Transacting costs are those connected to different workers with different jobs working to the same end. If they all work in one company, you don’t have to pay for cooperation between them.

costs are those connected to different workers with different jobs working to the same end. If they all work in one company, you don’t have to pay for cooperation between them. Contracting is about negotiating rules — for companies, the fewer times they have to do this, the better.

“Thanks to software, the internet and artificial intelligence, the expenses that Coase identified can now be reduced just as well with tools from outside the company as they can from within it. Finding freelance workers via online marketplaces can be less costly, less risky and quicker than recruiting full-time employees. Collaboration tools are opening up space for manager-free forms of work. And contracting costs are likely to fall markedly thanks to the advent of blockchain protocols — algorithms that replace trusted third parties, and instead automatically verify transactions using a huge digital ledger, spread across multiple computers.”

Corporations have been the dominant organisational form since the rapid rise of the British Empire. We understand the labour market through the lens of this organisational form so any changes to this form is bound to be A Big Deal.

It’s exciting to be around to see everything changing. A lot of the issues we have in contemporary politics relate to the overbearing influence of corporations so disruption in that power balance could be uniquely transformative. But, as Zarkadakis points out, the corporation-first status quo is also how we’ve structured workers rights’ platforms.

Unions work in opposition to a big centralised power. If we all work for a distributed platform, how do we coordinate? Do we even know our colleagues? Who are we fighting against?

The Aeon article concludes, essentially, that workers need to own the platforms that replace corporations to prevent a dystopian future work scenario. Which is a nice sentiment, but how the hell would that happen?

We’re already bought in to virtual monopolies in many parts of the digital economy, so creating an open source alternative faces the gargantuan task of overhauling a dominant player. Furthermore, these platforms were built by private sector interests. They don’t owe anybody anything. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of this type of decentralized work is how willing people are to sign up to it, despite the reduction in rights and benefits.

One solution that I see is to treat platforms somewhat like infrastructure — private interests can sell water to us, but they can’t (or shouldn’t) own the pipes themselves. We’ll need the antitrust movement to get significantly more outspoken to get to that point.