A fair sharing economy?

Despite the clunky delivery, it is good to see Labour talking about what challenges we will face as the world of work changes dramatically. For many people that change is pretty daunting: it isn’t just accelerating, it’s spinning off in new directions. The digital revolution is connecting people in ways we could never have imagined five years ago.

There are robots seemingly waiting to take just about every manual job and algorithms eyeing up a lot of the white collar middle management ones too. We have a growing army of self-employed and freelancers at home, in co-working spaces or in a cafe doing the jobs of today and tomorrow. And just about everything we could apparently need or want is available from the sharing economy, manifesting itself as an icon on our smartphones.

There is a real concern that these new opportunities are neither fair nor balanced and that workers are being exploited in ways few would have predicted until recently. This presents a whole host of questions to the trade union movement. What does this mean for the future of work? Who can moderate the impact of these changes? Who can provide space for a collective voice to influence the things that matter? How do we ensure that we have an economy built on good jobs? How can we ensure health, happiness and security at work in this new environment? 

Of course, these problems aren’t exclusive to the new areas of the economy. Insecure employment is the reality for millions of workers in the UK. We have a government reluctant to intervene and foster conditions which encourage employers to take a longer-term and more sustainable view. This attitude compounds the wider structural insecurities of the digital revolution.

After the dawn of the first machine age it was the trade unions who came together to organise and support workers – making workplaces safer, fairer and smarter. Can trade unions provide balance in the second machine age?

In Community, we believe we can do just that. Yes, these are big challenges but there are also opportunities too. The traditional ways of recruiting workers into unions look pretty tired in this new environment. Trade unions can give people a voice but we need to become more flexible in how we recruit new members and how we provide relevant benefits to people – particularly those who are self-employed. 

The good thing? People are thinking and talking too. Last week, 500 people from the US labour and co-operative movement gathered in New York at ‘Platform Co-operativism’ – billed as the ‘coming out’ event for the sharing economy. They heard about the challenges being faced by freelancers in white collar jobs, the opportunities that socially driven platforms are giving to campaigners and the working conditions of Amazon Mechanical Turks – who are paid so poorly that they couldn’t afford an iPad but are definitely in need of some socialism.

A good society should always have decent jobs in sustainable workplaces at its heart. We also need to recognise that flexibility for individuals and the employer is desirable in many situations. Technology can play an important role here. Imagine an ethical platform where employees and employers engage on flexible but transparent terms, matching employee skills with business needs while removing the need for employment agencies and tackling under-employment. 

And what about the sharers? Obviously we need to promote more ethical, peer-to-peer platforms but we also need to find ways of protecting those that have signed up to platforms that don’t quite hit that mark. If you’re renting your spare room, giving someone a lift to work in your car or letting someone in the next town look after your dog – who is looking after you if things go wrong? How easy is it to get a loan or a mortgage if you support your lifestyle by lending money, letting out your driveway or trading your skills?

Traditional values of trade unions, such as support, empowerment and fairness are as relevant to the working world as they ever were, but they must be applied in a new way to be relevant to this evolving economy.

We don’t know what the sharing economy will look like in ten years but we do know that consumer behaviour is often a major factor in the decisions taken by companies. The offshoring of finance sector jobs and the questionable low cost clothing manufactures are just two examples of public opinion forcing business to change – or at least be seen to change – their business practices. Undoubtedly the digital revolution could throw up similar such scenarios for business to consider. The one difference here is the people who could really change what big companies might be are working out of a flat in north London.

Trade unions can stand-by, watch and let the future be something that just happens to us. Or, we can try to better understand what is going on, get involved and shape the future of work so it isn’t inevitable. We need to learn from our history but we also need to break the mould of traditional trade unionism. If we don’t, who will?

John Park is assistant general secretary of Community union