A platform cooperative, or platform co-op, is a cooperatively owned, democratically governed business that establishes a two-sided market via a computing platform, website, mobile app or a protocol to facilitate the sale of goods and services. Platform cooperatives are an alternative to venture capital-funded platforms insofar as they are owned and governed by those who depend on them most—workers, users, and other relevant stakeholders.
Platform cooperativism is an intellectual framework and movement which advocates for the global development of platform cooperatives. Its advocates object to the techno-solutionist claim that technology is, by default, the answer to all social problems. Rather, proponents of the movement claim that ethical commitments such as the building of the global commons, support of inventive unions, and promotion of ecological and social sustainability as well as social justice, are necessary to shape an equitable and fair social economy. Platform cooperativism advocates for the coexistence of cooperatively owned business models and traditional, extractive models with the goal of a more diversified digital labor landscape respecting fair working conditions.
Platform cooperativism is not exactly about digital disintermediation, since a co-op, which is a legally constituted moral entity, owns the digital platform. It is different from platform corporations like Uber, in that the governance of the digital platform is democratic. There are some similarities with the peer-to-peer production movement, influenced by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis, which advocates for "new kinds of democratic and economic participation" as far as it is concerned with "the free participation of equal partners, engaged in the production of common resources". Economically and institutionally it is more distant from the radically distributed, non-market mechanisms of commons-based peer production promoted by Yochai Benkler., although they share some ethical considerations. Marjorie Kelly's book Owning Our Future contributed the distinction between democratic and extractive ownership design to this discussion.
While platform cooperatives are structured as cooperatives, granting democratic control to workers, customers, users, or other key stakeholders, companies and initiatives that support the ecosystem of the cooperative platform economy are considered a part of the platform cooperativism movement insofar as they attempt to encourage, develop, and sustain its development. It has also been argued that, as the spread of platform cooperativism "will require a different kind of ecosystem—with appropriate forms of finance, law, policy, and culture—to support the development of democratic online enterprises".
Typology
While there is no commonly accepted typology of platform cooperatives, researchers often categorize platform cooperatives by industry. Some potential categories include: transportation, on-demand labor, journalism, music, creative projects, timebank, film, home health care, photography, data cooperatives, marketplaces. Other typologies differentiate platform cooperatives by their governance or ownership structures.
Platform cooperatives are a business model that differs from platform capitalism, prioritizing fairness and sharing over profit motive. On the other hand, platform capitalists, such as Airbnb and Uber, are more traditional multi-sided businesses focusing on profit and returns to investors. These can also be referred to as capitalist platforms, while cooperativist platforms prioritize cooperation and fairness in addition to a profit motive.
Projects like Wikipedia, which rely on unpaid labor of volunteers, can be classified as commons-based peer-production initiatives, which are distinct from platform cooperatives since they don't employ the same institutional framework and governance.
History The concept developed as part of the traditional struggle between social factions that associate with the left and the right ideologies, the traditional labor vs capital struggle, in the wake of the information age, as the Internet technology introduced the possibility of trans-local participation in economic processes, through digital platforms.
The term "platform cooperativism" was coined by New School professor Trebor Scholz in a 2014 article titled, "Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy", in which he criticized popular so-called "sharing economy" (see disambiguation on the Sharing economy page) platforms and called for the creation of democratically controlled cooperative alternatives that "allow workers to exchange their labor without the manipulation of the middleman". Shortly thereafter, journalist Nathan Schneider published an article, "Owning Is the New Sharing", which documented a variety of projects using cooperative models for digitally mediated commerce, as well as online, distributed funding-models which hoped to replace the venture capital model predominant in the technology sector. Both Scholz and Schneider would later credit the work and provocations of other researchers and digital-labor advocates as their inspiration, including, among others, lawyer Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, who had "called on technology companies in the so-called "sharing economy" to share ownership and profits with their users", and Amazon Mechanical Turk organizer Kristy Milland who had proposed a worker-owned alternative to the platform at the "Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, Barricades" conference in November 2014.
There are several other precursors to platform cooperativism. In 2012, the Italian cooperative federation Legacoop promulgated a manifesto on the "Cooperative Commons", which called for bringing the lessons of the cooperative movement to control over online data. The same year Mayo Fuster Morell published an article named "horizons of digital commons" in which she pointed to the evolution of commons-based peer production merging with cooperatives and the social economy. The article reflects on an event named Building Digital commons, which took place in October 2011. It was the goal of the event to further connect the cooperative tradition and collaborative production. Other previous similar terms on new forms of cooperativism such as "open cooperativism" and also studies of how the digital environment opens up new possibilities for the cooperative tradition are of relevance to the new term platform cooperativism.
In 2015, Scholz published a primer on platform cooperativism, "Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy", which was published in five languages and helped to internationalize the concept. In 2016, he published Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy, which further developed the concept. Together, Scholz and Schneider went on to convene an event on the subject, "Platform Cooperativism. The Internet. Ownership. Democracy", at The New School in November 2015, and edit a book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet.
Roots in criticism of the sharing economy Proponents of platform cooperativism claim that, by ensuring the financial and social value of a platform circulate among these participants, platform cooperatives will bring about a more equitable and fair digitally mediated economy in contrast with the extractive models of corporate intermediaries.
The concept of platform cooperativism emerged from the discourse surrounding digital labor, popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which critiqued the use of digitally mediated labor markets to evade traditional labor protections. Early studies of digital labor, using the theories of Italian Workerists, focused on the "free" or "immaterial" labor performed by users of Web 2.0 platforms (sometimes referred to as "playbor"), while later analyses served to critique the "crowd fleecing" of digital laborers by microtask labor-brokerages such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower.
In 2014, the digital labor discourse shifted to the sharing economy, resulting in an increase in both academic and media attention to the practices and policies of online markets for labor, services, and goods. Researchers and labor advocates argued that platforms such as Uber and TaskRabbit were unfairly classifying full-time workers as independent contractors rather than employees, thus avoiding legally granted labor protections such as minimum-wage laws and the right to join a union with which to engage in collective bargaining, as well as different benefits offered to workers with employee status, including time off, unemployment insurance, and healthcare.
Other research focused on the automated management of the digital workplace by algorithms, without worker recourse. For example, the wage-per-mile by drivers on the Uber platform is controlled moment-to-moment by a surge pricing algorithm, and its drivers can lose their jobs if they fall behind any one of a number of metrics logged by the platform including ride-acceptance percentage (minimum 90%) and customer-rating (4.7 out of 5). Sharing economy workers who complained about this algorithmic management were often ignored, (e.g. a TaskRabbit discussion forum was shut down in response to worker unrest) and sometimes told that, insofar as the platform owners do not employ their contracted labor force, they were not actually being managed by the technology companies behind the platforms on which they worked.
Insofar as platform cooperatives offer worker-owners a more robust degree of control of the platforms they use, the model was seen as offering an ethical alternative to existing sharing economy platforms. As these early critiques of the sharing economy remain relevant, platform cooperatives tend to highlight their efforts to provide their worker-owners with a living wage or a fair share of revenues, benefits, control over the platform's design, and democratic influence over the management of the cooperative business.
Public policy
The platform cooperativism movement has seen a number of global policy proposals and successes.
Spain
Barcelona
Barcelona has a long tradition of connecting cooperativism and collaborative production. On 30 October 2011, an event was held to "Promote dialogue between the cooperative tradition and digital commons".
The Social Economy and Consumption Commission of Barcelona City Council in 2015 started a program on platform cooperativism. The program includes the provision of match-funding to support entrepreneurship and "La Communificadora", an entrepreneurship training and support course, among others.
A March 2016 international event by BarCola (node about Collaborative Economy and Commons-Based Peer Production in Barcelona) produced a set of 120 policy proposals for European governments. Integrated as concrete actions for the Municipal Action Plan of the Barcelona City Council, following a consultative online participatory process, as well as aiming at other local authorities in Spain and the Government of Catalonia, the resulting document criticized the organizational rationale of "multinational corporations based in Silicon Valley" which, though similar to collaborative-Commons economic models, "behave in the style of the prevailing globalized capitalist economic model, based on extracting profits through networked collaboration".