What is happening to the economic activity generated by all the great projects we are a part of?
As a part of the 2015 Platform Cooperativism conference at the New School, NYC, this session brought together different perspectives -including those with experience founding new labour organisations- to discuss how the role of labour is changing and which innovations can best ensure it’s supported.
Panel: Yochai Benkler, Michelle Miller, Daniel R. Schlademan, Kristy Milland
Faciliated by: Sara Horowitz
Daniel Schlademan:
Schlademan introduces himself as the co-director of OurWalmart. With 2.2 million employees, Walmart is the US’s largest private sector employer, only coming second to the US Department of Defence in global terms – which, Schlademan says, gives us an idea of the worker power behind it.
The movement began in 2010, with the theory that OurWalmart would not wait for the government or the company to say it was okay for the workers to join an organisation. The internet became an essential part of mobilisation, with 400,000 workers on Facebook listing Walmart as their employer, the internet becomes a place to share strategies and collectively organise power.
Social media is now an intrinsic part of social activism and organising. Schlademan attributes the increasingly negative responses to Walmart shown by millennials to the coverage social media provided the OurWalmart movement.
Michelle Miller:
Miller introduces herself as the co-founder of Coworker.org, born from the traditional labour movement and the drive to find ways for workers to organise themselves. Issues raised by workers would often be invisible to management and worker advocacy staff, but would be quickly rallied round by co-workers. Miller found that often these workers would take on leadership roles in petitioning and, amazingly, sometimes they won.
As such Miller wanted to create a platform that would build and shift power within major companies. Over the past few years Coworkers.org has worked with American Airline workers, Uber drivers and Starbucks baristas – the Starbucks story will frame Miller’s points about collaboration…
Kristie Williams, a barista, wrote a campaign about Starbucks anti-tattoo policy. Once posted online it quickly took off with other baristas. Coworker.org asked if they wanted help and got involved. Williams developed an Instagram account for members to tell the story of their tattoos, and instinctively used the corporate hashtag. The ensuing flood of pictures caught the attention of the mainstream press. Yet when Miller approached Williams for press comments, Williams said she did not want to speak to the press. Here Miller realised that these campaigns need organisation beyond an individual, and so 30 baristas were identified to become the media committee for the campaign. The petition resolved with Starbucks announcing an overturn of the policy, 2months to the day from Christie’s petition. Miller feels that the experience of empowerment through collective organising is useful to the individuals involved, despite Starbucks denying the input of the petition – the network has now grown to span several issues ran by baristas across the world.
As such the importance of Coworker.org is experience of empowered through collective advocacy, and it provides a model for how technology platforms can help collectives build power within companies.
Yochai Benkler:
Benkler begins by wanting to frame the day, and argues that what has arisen from the conversations is the need to recognise the vitality of a variety of strategies to negotiate the long-term alongside, and as part of, other major interventions.
Schlademan’s Walmart example shows the need for the traditional method of labour organising -as does Coworker.org, although across a broader spectrum. These strategies are, for Benkler, the empowerment of positions routed in the traditional worker/employee power structure, including leverage and bargaining power, rather than models of cooperativism per say. Unionism becomes a difficult task in these highly disorganised places of labour, and as such a turn to cooperativism is an attempt to find new strategies of disruption.
Here Benkler turns to the net as a platform that allows the creation of spaces outside the traditional structures of power. Both freelancers and contingent workers (the definition dependant on class divides) rely on mutual assurance through the provisioning of goods and the generation of political capabilities. How do we leverage the kinds of political organisation that we have seen successfully change the structure of labour organisation?
Sara Horowitz: Introduces the Freelancers Union and highlights the new campaign in NYC and asks people to get in touch if they want to get involved. Tries to build the standards, resources and political weight of freelance workers by creating systems of mutualism which support their needs and diversity.
Q&A: Have we seen a shift in this thinking with new technology platforms?
Schlademan: Having worked in the labour movement for 24years, the institution of labour is struggling dramatically, including how technology is undermining and changing the way it functions. Those who want to uphold the status-quo are scared of the collective power that social media embodies. But social media isn’t taking over traditional organising – it’s adding to it. Labour organisers still need to uphold traditional strategies, but it opens up the scale to new depths.
Miller: For the past 40years, institutional roles which technology has over-ridden: i) communicators ii) convenors iii)holders of knowledge, expertise and experience
the internet now allows workers to negate those institutional needs – where before institutions saw their role as mediators that is now not the case -however, this can open up opportunities to new functioning -instead of holders of knowledge, they can become expert navigators of that knowledge, access to deep expertise -spaces of trade unions halls as open and usable co-working spaces -facilitating mutual aid, applying that existing functionality to forming networks
Benkler: We should recognise cooperativism is a left-wing mirror or right-wing libertarianism of non-regulation: both reflecting disillusionment with public institutions and the rise of neoliberalism, NSA surveillance, failure of capitalism etc. One of the problems of the left in the US is a fear of the state as its susceptibility to being ‘captured’ – we need to capture the power within the state with the understanding that it’s fallible, but still engaging it.
Horowitz: Exciting that we’re starting to have a more fine-grained discussion about the role of the state. If people want to see these organisations, individuals need to help build them.
Kristy Milland: Amazon Turckers
The Turker movement began on Dynamo.org, a site open to all workers, with the letter campaign ‘Dear Jeff Bezos’, the CEO of Amazon. The amount of responses caught mainstream media attention, which in turn pressured Amazon into some changes however, these were not attributed to the campaign. For example, one of the letters was from an Indian worker regarding the fact their pay-cheques had never arrived. Amazon introduced direct debit, but framed it as their own choice. The campaign still claim it as their own victory however, and now utilise the strategy of positive framing, presenting plans of improvement that make Amazon look good. Milland now works with old and new form (web 2.0) unions. Despite the Uber legal route, she believes that for an invisible and non-interactive work force like the Turkers, there are problems to organisation that override that strategy.