Digital trade unions will empower tomorrow's sharing economy employees

The insecurity brought about by sharing economy jobs can be offset by digital trade unions

12 Jan 2017

Tech-savvy social innovators will help rally the millennial gig-economy workers

Nick D Burton

According to Sharing Economy UK, a million people, amounting to three per cent of the UK's workforce, work in the sharing economy. For many, this has meant more flexibility and additional income - but with this shift has come greater insecurity. This partly reflects current uncertainty over hours of work. It also stems from the absence of workplace rights such as sick pay and a minimum wage. How, then, can vulnerable workers better protect themselves in the digital age?

Part of the answer may come from an unlikely source: the trade union movement. For starters, unions - old and new - are beginning to engage with the new nature of employment. A high-profile example is the case the UK GMB trade union has taken against Uber, which went to court in July. The union argues that drivers are classified as self-employed contractors while in practice being treated as workers. (This echoes a rash of similar class actions brought in the US - some of which have resulted in large payouts.)

Similar cases are being brought by a new union, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), against four courier companies: Excel, City Sprint, eCourier and Addison Lee. The cases will be heard separately with the first hearing, against Addison Lee in November 2016. Expect more of this in the year ahead as scrutiny grows over the legal basis of "gig"-style working and the balance between the control companies exercise over working time and the workplace rights they grant.

These relatively rare examples of British union activism pale in comparison with the surge in pro-labour innovation that has occurred throughout the US. Across big American cities, labour leaders have been organising low-paid service sector workers in pursuit of a "Fight for $15 [£11]", the campaign for a substantial rise in the minimum wage. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York have adopted a $15 minimum wage. Hillary Clinton declared support for the campaign and committed to moving to a $15 federal wage-floor "over time" if she had been elected president.

There's also a rapidly expanding Freelancers Union offering services and support to the self-employed, and - for campaigns at specific workplaces - platforms such as

Take the hourly workers at Netflix who noticed a large gap between their parental leave provision (virtually non-existent) and the provision for salaried employees (who are entitled to up to one year's paid leave). They started a petition on arguing for equivalent treatment, which quickly attracted thousands of signatures, both online and offline.

The petition, coupled with support from campaigners, led to hourly workers securing an increase in their parental leave to 12 to 16 weeks as well as an extension to parental and adoption leave - though the fight for full parity continues.

This is just one example concerning an unusual employer. But the US labour movement is also seeing some success in using technology in traditional low-paid sectors. The "OUR Walmart" campaign, which gained national attention in the US in 2012, was one of the first major campaigns rooted in social media to effectively organise a large workforce. The disruption and reputational damage brought about by the series of high-profile strikes organised by the campaign led to the announcement last year that the basic rate of pay would be increased for hundreds of thousands of workers. Recent figures suggest the average hourly wage for a part-time Walmart worker has increased by more than a dollar in the past year.

Read about the Taylor Review on Modern Employment Practices

Workers are also learning to use and develop software to their advantage. Amazon's Mechanical Turk, one of the first online "crowdwork" platforms, provides a way for workers from anywhere in the world to carry out micro-tasks (from translating documents to writing captions for photos) for a micro-payment. But the site doesn't offer any way for workers to review those offering tasks, even if they fail to pay up.

Labour advocacy groups have recently developed a browser extension called Turkopticon that allows workers to do just this, so anyone with the extension can learn from others about which requesters to avoid. A similar initiative, FairCrowdWork, is now being developed in Germany.

Low-paid workers are also starting to use technology to cut out employment agencies that have often taken a slice of their pay. Rather than losing up to 20 per cent of their earnings to an agency, Coopify - a new co-operative of domestic workers in New York City - has developed an app that puts workers directly in touch with clients. In San Francisco, Loconomics Cooperative is looking to establish itself as a worker-owned platform covering a whole range of services, from childcare to bicycle repair.

"If I was setting up a union today," said Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party, "it would be the Union of Web Workers - organising the interests of information workers who use screens and keyboards as the tools of their trade." An interesting thought, though notably not one his or any other political party has pursued.

Others suspect that if the precarious workforce of the sharing economy start organising themselves it's likely to be via a more diffuse medium than anything resembling a 20th-century union. Joining such a traditional organisation would be deeply counter-cultural for many millennials - detached from their experience of work, with little possibility of securing collective bargaining over pay in their fragmented workplace.

If our existing unions are too shackled to the past to reinvent themselves for this task, then other pro-worker, tech-savvy, fleet-of-foot social innovators are likely to step forward. History suggests that sooner or later labour finds ways of responding to changes in how capital organises itself. Maybe that age-old dynamic is all played out - perhaps we've reached the "end of history" in terms of how workers organise.

Possibly, but it's more likely we're witnessing a painfully slow adjustment, one that will - eventually - give rise to new forms of post-industrial organisation that will usurp the old. In 2017, we will begin to find out.

Gavin Kelly is chief executive of the Resolution Trust and chair of the Living Wage Commission
