 Hello. Hi, everyone. You're so spread out. If you're close to the back, feel free to come up. We are going to have an intimate conversation here. I'm Courtney Martin. I'm an author and entrepreneur, particularly positioned in this conversation because I'm writing a book called The New Better Off. This is the first time in history that parents do not think their kids are going to be quote-unquote better off than they were in polls. And so I'm taking that concept of the better off and trying to deconstruct it. What is it really about and how do we create new workplaces, new ways of worshiping, new ways of gathering and living that really honor the possibilities of the better off. So I'm pinch-hitting for Natalie Foster, who some of you might know, and she's actually at the White House in a conversation about workers voice along with some of the colleagues of folks on the stage. So we're shouting out the left coast to the right coast. This conversation is actually happening in both places, which is cool. I'm going to introduce these panelists very briefly. They all have incredibly prestigious CVs, which you should check out, but we're not going to spend our time here listing all of them. To my left and directly left is Tim O'Reilly. He's the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, considered by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. They host conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Strata, the Business of Data, the Velocity Conference on Web Performance and Operations, and have one coming up on work in November, which is where a lot of Tim's comments are going to come from is the thinking going into that conference. His blog, The O'Reilly Radar, watches the alpha geeks to determine emerging technology trends and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. So I'm going to introduce each of them and ask them to answer a question. This panel is about workers and the future of work, which I'll delve into a little bit in a second, but I'm going to ask each of these panelists to tell us the very first job they ever had. And if you want to tell us best and worst parts of that job, so was your very first job, Tim? It's a little hard to remember which one it was, but I think it was, I was a janitor at a school called the School for Contemporary Education, which was a school for the mentally retarded when I was in high school. And my brother and I each were both janitors there and we each had a separate building. And this is my the worst experience was that my brother had somebody in his building, some kid who peed all over the bathroom every day. And James came running over one day and said, you know, he's gone. He's gone. And I went to the bathroom in my building. He'd moved over to yours. All right. So we got a janitor here. All right. Let's go next to Marina, who's next to Tim. Marina Gorbis is a futurist and social scientist who serves as executive director to the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley non-profit research and consulting organization. Her current research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries. A topic explored in detail in her book, The Nature of the Future, Dispatches from the Social Structured World, which we'll hear a little bit more about. Marina, you've actually been at the Institute for the Future for 17 years, which is totally anti where the workforce is heading, right? Because the average at this point is 4.4 years. People switch jobs on average. I almost didn't get the job because of that. Really? They thought it was weird. I was at SRI before that for 15 years. Okay. So this is a long time. Marina goes against the grain in this regard. So do you remember what was your first job, best or worst highlights? I had a great job because I graduated from college from Berkeley and I actually took a job with a refugee agency as a case worker in Austria. It was the agencies that resettled me because I came as a refugee from the Soviet Union at the time and I had the most amazing job in Europe and being 20-some years old. The downside of the job is I felt like if you work in these kind of situations where you're resettling people who are really distressed and you see all this in front, you kind of get inert to suffering and I felt like I needed to, well, I was going back to school anyway. My worst job, right after I came back, though, I went back to Berkeley and I got a job as a waitress in a Greek restaurant in Berkeley and that was one of my worst. It was like going from this amazing, very meaningful work to something that was pretty dehumanizing. Interesting. I actually waitress and loved waitressing. So I guess this is part of our conversation about work is it's all subjective and who you get to work with and what your expectations are. I often, you know, I'm a journalist now but I'll pass by help wanted signs at diners and part of me actually wants to go in because there was something so awesome about that kind of work to me. Palak Shah leads National Domestic Workers Alliance's experimental and market-based approaches to improve working conditions, services and employment opportunities for domestic workers but beyond, which we're going to talk about more soon. Most recently, she served as a leader at Wellmont Health System, an eight hospital health system in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, where she developed the healthcare system strategic responses to the Affordable Care Act and the rapidly changing healthcare environment. So Palak, first job. My first job is so different than what I do right now because I will talk more but I'm squarely in the alternative labor movement right now but my first job was a management consultant at a strategy firm in the industry of media and entertainment, actually, Tim. And the best part of the job was learning Excel and well, that's what was hot then. It was like Excel and spreadsheets and the worst. It was great because I got like a super strategic, you know, kind of framework and then the worst part of the job was basically you work all the time and you're there late nights all the time and so. Okay. Very interesting. All right. So my first official job just to play in with the game is I worked at a concession stand in a movie theater in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which is where I grew up. I think the best part was probably I was like 14 and a half. I don't even know if it was legal for me to be working. And there was this very cute 16 year old boy who also worked there. So that was the best part of the job. The worst part was that I had to deal with that really disgusting fake cheese that you get on movie theater nachos. And every time I rang someone up at the cash register, they looked at me like I had set the prices because you know, they're so such crazy high prices at the concession stand. So that sucked. So as I said, I'm now a journalist. I'm writing this book called the New Better Off. I'm thinking a lot about the changing world of work. And that's what we're really going to be wrestling with today from a bunch of different angles. I did want to make sure that everyone in here is kind of on the same page about what we mean when we're talking about the changing world of work, because there's so much jargon, especially at a conference like this. And I think it can make people feel like they're not in the right room if they don't know all the jargon. So one of the things we're going to be saying probably is the gig economy, which basically just means that this proliferation of platforms in the time of Uber as the title of this, of this panel suggests, there are all kinds of people who are doing essentially contract work, flexible work that the you know, the positive part is that it's flexible, that it's very accessible, regardless of your educational attainment, the negative side being that the social safety net is broken. We have not figured out how to fix it. I wanted to give a few statistics so people understand where we're at with in this regard. The number of workers in the gig economy grew between 8.8 and 14.4% from 2002 to 2014. Independent contractors grew by 2.1 million workers from 2010 to 2014, accounting for almost 30% of all jobs added during the recovery. And it's estimated that by 2020 freelancers will be nearly half of the workforce. So this is an important conversation. It's only getting more and more and more important. The very definition of employee in a tech enabled service driven 21st American economy is up for grabs, right? We have historically had these two kinds. We have the W2 in the 1099 in technical terms, the fully employed person who is supposed to get benefits and the contract worker who's not supposed to get any, but they have the benefit of being flexible. Well now, thanks to all these lawsuits and big conversations that are happening, there's new questions about, should there be a third kind of employee? Are those two categories still really fitting the structure of our current economy? How do we make sure people are safe? How do we make sure people have health care? How do we make sure people have a dignified living? So we're going to jump right in on that point, because I know, Tim, you've been preparing for this conference on the changing world of work and thinking a lot about not just the gig economy, but how robots are changing things. And how do you see work changing? What do you think are the big headlines? So let me start out just by describing this next economy summit, which I'm organizing for November 12th and 13th in San Francisco. It really is about technology and the future of work. Looking at AI, robotics, then kind of like the maker movement, new forms of education, but also this on demand economy. And just a little bit of advertising here. I've been writing a series of posts on Medium. You Google for the WTF economy. You'll see that WTF is sort of a sort of a core notion that I'm kind of playing around with, because when you say WTF, it's an expression of sometimes of wonder and sometimes of disgust. And I think that that WTF that we are looking at today has elements of both. There is amazing stuff happening, you know, with technology, and there is terrible stuff happening with technology. And I think that in some ways we're making technology of false culprit in a lot of the changes that are happening. And this really became clear to me when I started looking into this, you know, this idea of, you know, what does it mean to be an employee in the age of Uber? There have been a lot of lawsuits. There's been a lot of policy discussion. And it sort of struck me that the contrast being made was as if the choice was between the gig economy, you know, I'm an Uber driver, I drive when I want, but I have no protections. I'm really out there on my own. And the other alternative is, you know, I'm in this nice, safe, secure womb of a union job like we used to have in the 60s. And that's actually the more I dug into it, I realized that's actually a really false dichotomy, you know, 1099 versus W2 sort of signals a lot of things to people. But the reality is very different. I wrote a piece called workers in a world of continuous partial employment. And what I realized, this was actually inspired by an article which you should all read, called the spy who fired me by Esther Kaplan, who's actually speaking at the event, which was in Harper's where she was talking about workplace monitoring and scheduling at low wage employers, everybody from the gap through McDonald's, you know, Walmart, even a, you know, well meaning, you know, low wage employer like Starbucks. And what became clear to me is there are scheduling algorithms being used to manage these companies that make everybody an on demand worker. And so the really the real question is the choice of algorithm that we use to manage workers. In the case of an Uber, a Lyft, you know, or any of these on demand companies, there's a marketplace algorithm where they say, okay, you'll do the work. If you get the work, you get paid this much, you know, you have for the work. You can work as long as you want as much as you want. On the other side is an algorithm that says, we're going to schedule you, we're going to tell you when we want you to work, whether you like it or not. In fact, I learned a term which some of you may have may have heard of some of you may not called a clopin. Friends that a clopin is when the scheduling algorithm assigns you to close the McDonald's say at 11 and reopen it at 4am the next morning, despite the fact that perhaps you live 45 minutes or an hour away, you know, and so people and if you don't take the schedule, you're fired. And not only that, the scheduling software is now programmed to make sure that nobody gets more than 29 hours a week. Because at that point, you'd have full, you know, full time benefits. So I look at that equivalence, they went, whoa, we're offering people a cost maxim cost minimization algorithm, which is totally serving the company versus something at least has the potential to work for workers. And I think our goal here should be to put technology to work for the worker and not just for the for the companies. And that's really the challenge. It's like, how do we we harness technology to work on behalf of people? I want to kind of just throw one more thing and move on. You know, one of my muses in putting this conference together is a guy named Nick Hanauer. He's been a very successful investor and entrepreneur. He was the first non family investor in Amazon. And then he had a company called the quantum which he sold to Microsoft for $6 billion. So he's a billionaire. And he gave a talk at Ted in 2012, where he said, I'm a capitalist, I'm very successful capitalist, I'm sick and tired of hearing the capital produces jobs. It's the only one thing produces jobs, and that's customers. And you know, we're even screwing workers for so long that they're no longer going to be able to afford our products. They can't afford to be our customers anymore. And this is a fundamental problem in the capitalist system that we have to fix. You know, everybody who's a capitalist should be thinking about how we get workers paid, because they can't buy our products anymore. You know, we've kicked the can down the road through, you know, two income households through consumer debt, through globalization, you know, well, we'll just sell the people somewhere else. Right. And at some point that that ends. And I think that we really do have a profound rethinking of the fundamental system in which we operate that we're facing. That's great. And Nick Hanauer has written quite a bit, particularly recently on the social safety net and is the future of the social contract a portable safety net. How do we rethink using some of the same innovation? We're disrupting the actual industries themselves. And how do we harness all of that ingenuity and rethink the social contract itself? Maybe it travels with a person, as opposed to being attached to a job and that kind of thing. So check out Nick's, I think it's a new democracy journal is the long version. Yeah, just Google shared security account, and you'll you'll get the paper. Very sexy Google. All right. So he worked on that $15 minimum wage with David Ralph, the $15 minimum wage initiative that's the attack in Seattle. Yeah, David Ralph being longtime union organizer for those who are not familiar. So I actually think we should jump, Marina, we'll we'll come right back to you. But I feel like this, it'll be good for Palak to piggyback on some of what Tim was just saying about technology, because you guys are today in the moment, releasing a pledge that you hope is a form of, you know, harnessing all the ingenuity of these gig economy superstars to be as innovative and how they think about the social contract as they are and how they build their own businesses. So tell tell everyone about it. Right. So before we do that, I mean, back up a little bit and tell you a little bit about who we are and how we got into thinking about the on demand economy. So I, my name is Palak and I represent the three million women in this country who work as domestic workers. They're the women, they're the nannies who comfort the colicky baby, they're the women who comfort the disoriented grandparent, they're cleaners who keep our homes neat and tidy. And most of these women for generations have worked in the shadows in an informal economy, a cash based economy. Since the 1930s, these women have been mostly women, these women have been domestic workers have been excluded from virtually all labor law protections in this country, including minimum wage over time, the right to a weekend, the ability to form a union. And that has its own history, which we won't get into here. But there were two classes of workers in the 30s that were carved out of labor law protections, the domestic workers and the farm workers. And a lot of that had to do with who made up those workforces at that time. And so what's really interesting is there's two kinds of things. One is that the domestic workers have been facing a kind of precarious and set of employment circumstances that have inconsistent hours and no contracts and no healthcare and no retirement, which is kind of similar to the conversation that's starting to emerge as we think about the challenges that we're facing as we move toward a freelance and gig economy. And so we've been thinking a lot about these issues in the context of our workforce. And at the same time, what we started to notice over the last three to five years was the entrance of Silicon Valley and tech companies into the care markets, into these markets that have been for generations informal and behind closed doors and people working in the privacy of other people's homes. And the entrance of companies that do on demand cleaning or marketplaces that allow for caregivers to find people who are looking for care. All of these changes are disrupting the way everything that we've known about domestic work. And as we really started to think about this and realize that we had a lot to offer about the challenges that workers in these types of situations, regardless of whether they're in the care market, when we really started to think about this, we realized that there was a lot of opportunity for me in thinking about how technology can fulfill the promise of extending stability and sustainability for this for our workers. So we see a tremendous amount of promise in the development and entrance of technology. One of the main reasons is that our workforce is extremely disaggregated and distributed. And technology and these platforms are allowing for workers to come together in an aggregation that we've never really seen before in our markets. And there's a tremendous amount of possibility to distribute value and good to workers through these platforms. So we're optimistic, we're not naive, but we're optimistic about the future of both the online economy and the on demand economy in particular, to improve working conditions for domestic workers. So just by way of background, even today at the White House, there is a summit on worker voice that's happening. And the president highlighted a partnership that we had earlier this year with Care.com, which is one of the largest tech companies in the online space in Care about how we moved a set of standards out through that website, through their website of 14 or 15 million users at this point around fair wages and kind of the minimum standards of what it would be to be a fair employer. And it was a creative kind of arrangement between a social movement and a publicly traded tech company. So maybe when we get to kind of thinking about where we want to go in the future, I'd be happy to come back and talk about essentially what we released yesterday, which is called the good work code. But I'll let us get into the conversation a little bit before we return back to that around a similar set of standards, eight simple principles and values that we believe can help the on demand and online economy work for everybody. Great, thank you. So, so Marina jump in here, I know that you've used this term, which I find so interesting, social structured, right? Tell us about that and about sort of how the thinking you did around your book applies to this work conversation in particular. Yeah, in my book, which came out about two or three years ago, actually, my editor hated that word so much that she didn't want me to use it at all. But she got laid off like about two months before the publication. Speaking of work, yes. The reason social structured one word. Imagine that in your head. Yes. And the reason is that I really wanted to communicate two sort of ideas. One is that these sort of layers of technology are enabling us to do things in new way. We're structuring something in new ways, we're creating values in new ways. And the way we're doing it is by ultimately using network technologies and social networks. So that's what I wanted to communicate. And my definition of social structing was it's creating value by aggregating small contributions, bringing together, breaking apart large things, large tasks into smaller bits, and engaging lots and lots of people in contributing to creating kind of new value. So if you think of Wikipedia, that's a perfect example of that. And if you look at things where people are contributing their health data and aggregating it, like the quantified self movement where people also can do analytics on it, that's perfect example. So there's plenty of examples in kind of the social activism world of people doing these amazing things. My other sort of definition of social structing, it's doing amazing things with no management, no money and no staff or very little management, very little money and very little staff. And so the same sort of set of principles that we're seeing sort of emerging with enterprises like Wikipedia, social movements and all these other things, we see emerging in the workplace. And one thing I want to say, Uber didn't come out of nothing. And all these platforms, these are 40 years of layering different technology infrastructure, the internet, which connects everybody and everything. It's about sensing technologies. It's about geolocation technologies that enable you. It's about data analytics. So it's actually a continuous process. It's not something that just came out of thin air. And I think we're seeing sort of just the first generation of these platforms. Can I pause you? So that's a very important reminder, I think, for those of us who are not technological thinkers, that basically you're saying all the functionality built into all these platforms that are now disrupting all these different spaces are like a million different, you know, innovations along the way layered on top of each other. Exactly. 40 years of build or more of building out these layers of technologies that are now transforming, not just work, but virtually every domain entertainment, you know, started with the entertainment and news media and all of the and it's kind of rolling through the landscape. So something in real quickly here. You know, it's so important as how many of those layers were either public domain or somehow put into the common. Yeah, I was exactly internet GPS. You know, this is a government program that got opened up for commercial use. You know, there's so much of that infrastructure, the very foundations of computing were put in the public domain after they were developed during GPS. You know, so, you know, I think this idea of it being collaborative and a commons, I think is is so deeply rooted and all these people who, you know, forget, you know, I think President Obama said, you know, you didn't build that. He was totally right. You know, there's so much that we are building on that was was given to us from the past. And when we have companies that are just like, oh, I want to just take. Exactly. It's a very bad ending for all. Which is a really no, no, but it's great that you brought it up because that's exactly it, that the ethos and what's behind all of these technologies, their commons creating at their core, they're about creating commons. You know, Facebook, we're all sharing a little bit of data. Twitter, we're all, you know, we can say that we're all working for Facebook and Twitter and all these other places where we're contributing value and we're getting value in return, right? We're getting social value. We're not getting economic value or not as much out of it. So at their core, their commons creating and I think that we're kind of in this interesting sort of battle right now that our technologies at the core are about creating commons. Our business models are not about that. So the two are, that's the nature of a lot of sort of discontent. So that's one thing I want to say. The other one, this is just the first generation of these technologies. Like everybody's focused on Uber now. You know, Uber is not even going to probably use drivers or is that they're open about that? They're a logistics company. But what we're seeing is if you go beyond Uber, like we're experimenting as we are studying future work, we're also creating prototypes and prototyping. What's possible? We actually created a little piece of technology that allows us to take research, writing a research paper and basically break it down into tasks, overlay that algorithm on existing platforms like Upwork and Mechanical Turk and engage lots of people in the process and layer that process. So somebody's contributing bibliography, somebody's reading, somebody's doing little analysis, editing and so on. And it's amazing what we, in a week, we basically created an 18 page report that I basically looked at and said we're never writing a research report again in the way we've done it. So it's not just... For someone with a book due in literally one week, I'm like, where was this? I'm alone for months on end. So it's not just about Uber drivers and it's about how we create value. It's about everything that I can't imagine that there will be jobs or work that's not, areas of work that's not going to be impacted by this. Right. Well, and that leads to a question I want to throw to you, Palak, which is around kind of, I mean, I think it's so fascinating what we just uncovered about the actual functioning of the technology is it in and of itself had a collaborative spirit. So then you think built into the ethos of a lot of this should be a sort of look towards the social contract that we are here for each other. And as Nacanna points out, we're actually going to be in danger if people don't have some sort of social safety net. But historically, labor organizing was deeply rooted in collective bargaining. Right. And shaming people with power into having a collective voice saying you have to change your practices or you're going to lose customers, you're going to lose workers, etc. But that's changing, right? There are a lot of really important people within the labor organizing movement who are saying collective bargaining is not what it used to be. And we have to create different ways of organizing and you're at the forefront of that. Right. So today you release something called the good works code. Tell us about it and and put that in the context a little bit about about how labor organizing is changing. Because I think that might be a new conversation for a lot of people in the room. Definitely. Well, I'm really excited to share with you all a kind of we're unveiling this week, something that we're calling the good work pledge. I mean, the good work code. But in response to your your your kind of framing around this. So because domestic workers have never had the right to collectively bargain. And even if we did, it would be a very ineffective strategy because you have one employer and one worker and there's no collective, right. So there's like there's no real strength and in numbers. Our movement has had has been forced to be fairly entrepreneurial and creative in figuring out how it is that we raise standards for domestic workers and distributed, disaggregated and informal markets. There isn't a formula for that. There isn't a playbook for that. It's it's kind of stuff that we're doing trial and error to figure out how do we actually do that. And so what we're releasing is something called the good work code. And the basic idea here is eight simple principles that we would love for investors. I know that's a topic in the focus of this conference, investors, company owners, platforms, workers, all folks who are kind of connected to the new and emerging online economy to provide a set of eight simple principles that are outcomes that we solve for, right. So at this point in the development of the online and on demand economy, we've seen companies brilliantly solve for efficiency. It's been absolutely brilliant that you can click on your phone and three seconds later, a car shows up to take you where you want to go. It's amazing. Now what I'd like to see an incentive is a entire field of innovation around how is it that we solve for equity. And what we are outlining in the good work code is a set of aspirational outcomes that we would like to solve for. And let's figure out how we incent and unleash a field of innovation around solving for these outcomes. So let me run you through an example because it's kind of abstract. So let me run you through a couple of quick examples of what these could look like. So for example, safety. Everyone deserves to be safe at work. One of the things that we're hearing from house cleaners who are working through these platforms is that because of the way the ratings and reviews are structured, I mean, many of you I'm assuming have taken Ubers and you rate your driver. So that rating system sometimes forces, depending on how the platform rules work, forces people to stay in situations where they don't feel quite safe because they're worried about the negative impact on their rating. So this principle is say this value is saying let's figure out how we optimize and solve for safety in all of the algorithms that Tim's talking about. And maybe it looks like a safety button or a way that you can like, you know, I'm not sure what the functionality will be on the platforms, but the idea is let's figure out how we actually get to this outcome. Another example is stability and flexibility, right? So we're all at our best when we when our schedules allow us to balance work in life. And this is both online and offline referencing kind of what Tim was talking about Starbucks and the Clopin's and all of that. But, you know, at this point in this part of the economy, if you're a low wage worker, the flexibility is tremendous. And I want to emphasize that from all of the interviews that we've done, workers appreciate the flexibility because if you're moving from a low wage retail job or a fast food job onto a platform that allows for you to have flexibility, that's tremendous. The challenge right now is if you're a low wage worker, you have it's a math problem. You have to get up to a certain number a month in order to pay your bills. And so figuring out how you get the right hours together so that you don't have an unpredictable and precarious kind of month-to-month existence, that's the kind of challenge that we're going to have to solve for. So I don't know what that looks like, but that would be the kind of thing that we want to write into the code and the algorithm. And just lastly, another example just to kind of wrap your mind around what we're seeing on the platforms with low wage workers is transparency. What we're seeing is sometimes people just don't know how the rules work. Sometimes people don't know what, why their pay rate goes up, why their pay rate goes down, why they get kicked off a platform, how they get kicked off, you know, how they get back onto the platform. So what we're advocating is kind of a principle or a value of transparency so that everyone knows how things work, both consumers and the workers. I will tell you that I was really surprised to learn that my rating of an Uber driver, and I'm sure many of you all know this now, affects how that person does on that platform and other platforms follow in that same suit. So it's helpful for everyone to know basically how things work. So these are the kinds of broad general principles. There's eight of them. It's called goodworkcode.org. Fast Company did an exclusive yesterday on the release of these values. But the general idea is to say, OK, let's put out a set of eight values and let's figure out how we can make this part of the economy, incentivize this part of the economy to work for all of us. So the optimist in me loves this. The ethicist in me loves this. The pessimist in me says, how does this actually translate into enforceable, you know, dignifying practices with these platforms? Yeah. I think that's a great question. I think at the point that we're at right now, I was like, I think we just need to agree about the direction that we want the economy to head in. I think at this point, we need to kind of unite the field and all of us whether you're an investor, an entrepreneur, a worker advocate, can we agree on the direction that we'd like to go? And I think at that point, we can then figure out how do we start to implement and innovate. I don't think the time for policing is right now. I think the time right now is to is aspirational and inspirational. Like let's let's go in this direction. The sheer ingenuity it took to invent the models that we have in the on demand economy. The 40 years of innovation and layering, that's incredible. So let's harness the power of that creativity to now solve for a for a separate and second set of issues. Yeah. So throwing one idea, you know, one of the reasons I chose the name the next economy summit. So based on previous things I've done, like when I sort of coined this term web 2.0 to get after the dot com bust, you know, it became an aspirational term for companies where they were like, I want to be a web 2.0 company. Yeah. And I was actually hoping to get to a point where we'll get people saying I want to be a next economy company. And this kind of thing, you can actually build into the aspirational framework of these are the characteristics of companies that that we're seeing in this new economy. And you want to highlight the people who go there. So I've been working with Palak on how do we get some of these, you know, sort of, you know, unicorn companies as they call them in in Silicon Valley, you know, high profile companies with big valuations to sign on to this stuff. So everybody goes, oh, well, if they're doing that, we somehow have to, you know, we have to be like that. That's that's part of the DNA of success in the next economy. And so that's one one strategy. It's not not saying it's the only strategy, but there is sort of this is the old sort of union model of, well, we're going to beat you up if you don't do these things. And then there's an aspirational model that says, oh, this is how good companies work. And I think in some ways that's sort of the, you know, if you look at what went wrong in our economy, we actually promulgated a set of bad ideas. And it really started with the idea that the only thing that a company is optimized for is return to its shareholders. And you know, once that became the religion, everything went started to get worse for everybody, except for a very small number of people. And I think that, you know, this is the beginning of a process of actually, there's also a report that people you should follow Roosevelt Institute just put out this great report written by Justice Seglitz called rewriting the rules, which is really focused on, you know, some of the fundamental rules, tax policy and the like in our economy, how they set up a framework within which companies operate and that are taking us in the wrong direction. And I think, you know, rewriting the rules is what we are trying to do collectively so that we understand that the economy of the future, if it's going to be sustainable, if it's going to work, has to operate differently from this race to the bottom in which all the proceeds go to people at the top, you know, people are at cost to be eliminated and eventually, you know, we descend into a kind of, you know, chaos. I'm sure the aristocrats before the French Revolution thought that everything was going very well. Right. You know, I think we really, you know, as we get to this level of inequality, you know, we're heading in that direction and we are in fact, there's a set of us who are trying to rewrite the rules so that we understand that being a good company in the 21st century means being a good citizen and supporting your workers, supporting the ecosystem of the economy as a whole. And we are defying expectations already. I know, Palak, you worked on implementing the Affordable Care Act and I did want to point out because I think a lot of people have not fully followed the story here that the Affordable Care Act, which is probably the closest we have to anything understanding, like a new way of thinking about social contract in this age, highly controversial, has now been declared sort of an unequivocal success, right? There were 15 million Americans, predominantly young and poor, that have gained insurance and report a high degree of satisfaction with their coverage. Premiums came in well below expectations. The U.S. economy added more than 240,000 jobs a month on average since it went into effect, even though that was a fear that it would stagnate jobs. And the latest census report claims that Obamacare kept 8.8 million people out of poverty this last year, right? So it's a really interesting, yeah, seriously amazing result. So it's one of the things that I find so exciting about this conversation, which I'm actually fairly new to is how bipartisan it is that there are a lot of really interesting conversations happening around the future of work that don't pull on any one ideological perspective because it's about a functioning economy. It's about things that people across the aisle actually get really interested in talking about. I mean, do you see that with the work you guys are doing at the policy level pluck? Well, I don't know that there's much moving on the policy level right now, but just given the grid luck we have in Washington and I think that at this stage I'm not sure that we're ready for Washington. I think at this stage I'm excited about the possibilities of social movements and tech companies kind of coming together and having a kind of creative collaboration as we figure out what this part of the economy looks like when we kind of have some equilibrium I'd welcome the opportunity for a policy conversation, but for me I just think it's a little bit early. Can I bring up one other thing about policy? I do a lot of work. I'm on the board of an organization called Code for America which brings technology people to work with cities and counties primarily on technology projects. My wife who started also was at the White House as deputy CTO. Jen Palka. Yeah, she's actually going to be here tomorrow. But one of the things that she's focused on is that we have too much policy and not enough attention paid to implementation. I think in her talk tomorrow I saw her preparing the slides she's talking about the trillion dollars that we spend each year in the US on social services and the issue is how badly that's spent. We have a Code for America project working with the state of California on the implementation of food stamps. And there's just so much of the money is wasted because of poor implementation. The application process online is 50 screens long because they basically threw in all the questions from every county which are somewhat different for various reasons into one common application form. They do things like they say, well, you have to have an interview. We'll tell you when your interview is and if you don't show up you have to start the process all over again. Well, guess what? They send out a paper letter and that paper letter often is not actually even sent out until after the date that they've assigned you for the interview. So it's just debugging the implementation sometimes that just like we do it badly and so much of what we have to do in tech is actually help the whole the Affordable Care Act nearly failed because of incredibly bad implementation. And we spent way too much money. We got too little. The second health care the people who rebuilt it were 13 people who did it in three months after they'd spent six or seven hundred million dollars on the first version. It's like crazy town in terms of how badly we actually implement the policies that we agree on. Right. Absolutely. And and brings up this the place in all of this conversation for designers, right? In the same way that we think about human-centered design with an app that lets you get Uber right away. What is a human-centered design of a new social contract? Where is the space for that kind of thing? Marina, you've been wanting to jump in. Yeah. And one thing that you got to design which is great because it's great that we want to change people's minds and I'm all for it. And I think it's very much needed. But one of the areas we are looking at is what can we do at the level of technology because technology you can bake intentions into your technology. Ultimately, these programs are algorithms. They don't come to us from above. Right. They're designed by humans. And the labor economics of platforms are not very well understood. You know, putting a little button that allows you to get a tip or not get a tip has huge impacts on people. Where you place, you know, it's a huge area. And so what we're looking at we've been talking about is how to bake these positive externalities into technologies themselves. And what can we do at the level of technologies to, for example, maximize earnings to improve matching capacity to create a little more equity, all of those things. Like, there are so many things that we can do at the level of technology. It's almost like, you know, the quote for America for positive work. Like, let's get people designing for positive externalities. It's really interesting. Yeah, I'm even thinking about I took Uber on the way over here and so I interviewed my Uber driver because I said I'm going to this conference and the title of our panel actually has Uber in it. Tell me about your work. And I was thinking about that part of what I always have conversations with Uber drivers and I think part of it is the priming from seeing their face in when I order my car. It doesn't just say a Honda Civic showing up. It says this human being is showing up and shows me a picture of their face, right? So even that is a more humanized way than many of my New York City cab experiences where the person never turned around and we were speaking through a pain and that kind of thing. Through things that we... I just want to say, if you value workers, you should be probably using Lyft rather than Uber because you're talking about tipping. Lyft does have that affordance of tipping. It adds a little bit of extra friction which is hurting them in the marketplace. They're making a technical choice to support workers which makes the application a little less seamless than the Uber experience. Exactly. You should reward them for that action by using them preferentially. Again, I think they're both great companies but that's an example of somebody who's actually taking an affirmative action to benefit the workers and, you know... Well, and I'm happy to be a teachable moment because I actually think this... You gotta vote for the people who do that. This speaks to an important thing which is the consumer ignorance around this whole new economy makes it very difficult to even know who, how to be a discerning responsible consumer, right? Which is not to let myself off the hook because it's something I could figure out but I think a lot of people want to pay a dignified wage or want to be part of the more positive influences of this new gig economy but don't even know they're so new at consuming it that they're not even sure how to... Well, I think that's fair, but I also think that there is a fundamental thing that we got wrong a long time ago which is that we've all been conditioned to look for the cheapest. Right. You know, I fought this back, you know, I'm a publisher among other things and back around 2001 I wrote an article called by where you shop, you know, which was at every independent bookstore in America, they printed it out and it was basically, look, if you want your independent book store to survive, you know, you do not go into the bookstore, you know, browse the shelves and then order from Amazon. Like buy from Amazon if you like to shop there but if you shop here, you took a service from these guys and that service is going to go away. You know, and I think there's that fundamental self-interest and of course I felt a little bit like Jeremiah in the Bible. This is a great scene in the Bible where Jeremiah starts preaching to the ground because nobody else will listen to him. He says, oh, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord. All of us probably have had that experience if we're, you know, we go, why, you know, are people, you know, like going, oh man. Convenience always trumps anything. Convenience and they'll cost trumps, you know. Yeah. But that's another interesting... We make those choices that give us the society that we get. It's an important, I think, the issue, though, transparency of the data, that the platforms are collecting tremendous amounts of data and this data at some level, we need to have some protocols for transparency at the level of data itself and somewhat at the level of algorithm which is proprietary and that's fine and I totally understand that but a lot of workers who are working in the algorithm, they're guessing how to optimize it. It's not clear to them. Which is one of the values in the code, right? The transparency piece. It is, it is one of the values in the code and I think to this kind of, what's the evolution at least from a consumer point of view? I mean, we don't know how the good work code will evolve and what role it will play but you could imagine one iteration being a kind of similar type of thing to be corporations or be certified, you know, just something that's helping you understand the kinds of values that are embedded in the companies that you're patronizing. There are also companies that are starting to provide services to workers on these platforms to give them more of that visibility, estimate their taxes, estimate their expenses. Totally. It's a little bit like when the age of Google we had search engine optimization firms, we're now having effectively these on-demand platform optimization companies and applications that are coming in to help fill some of those gaps. Sure, sure. We're gonna turn to you all because I'm sure you have questions. Stand up and there is a roving mic beautiful lady back here and back here. So raise your hand if you've got questions and please do ask a question. We wanna get as many voices in as we can over here. Hi, my name is Justin Marku. I work with the Monitor Institute. We consult with foundations and nonprofits. What's the role of philanthropy in this space? A lot of foundations work in workforce development or regional economic development but I'm not sure that this no employment contract is on their radar. Great, thank you. So the role of philanthropy for those who didn't hear in this new space. Any thoughts on that? So philanthropy, we actually, so we had David Rolf who is a union organizer who wrote the call for shared growth and shared transparency and asked him a question. What, you know, there are all these stakeholders in this field. There's labor, there's philanthropy. What would you suggest we all do? And he said, stop doing what you're doing. First thing, stop doing what you're doing today. Which is, I think, really interesting. One thing that, and examine what the needs are in this new world. There are a lot of new needs. We just had an argument about this backstage but philanthropy is sitting on a lot of assets, money. And a lot of these platforms and other, we can create other kinds of platforms with different governance and different ownership structures and if philanthropy could channel, I'm not saying that they should become venture capitalists. Well, give them the backstories they were talking about. Is it possible to do cooperatively owned platforms? So Uber, but cooperatively owned. And this is where the argument, which we could reenact for everybody. And we probably wouldn't agree on it but there are these new ownership and ownership and governance are big issues in this platform environment. And I do think there's a role for philanthropy to at least experiment with different models. Not in all fields, it's not appropriate in many areas but there are some interesting new models emerging. Let me just throw in something very significant. First of all, fund disruptors. That's what venture capitalists do and it's what philanthropists can do as well. For example, at Coach America, we've had deep, deep support from a mid-yard network from the Knight Foundation, from Google.org among others. And that has really allowed us to be an outside force kind of coming in and disrupting the way the government software market works. And it was interesting just the other night, we're also struggling with, well, how do we make some of this stuff sustainable? And some of it involves getting in business models. Do we get a contract with the state? And then it's like, well, wait, if we do that, then we're just consultants to them. Whereas if we're funded by philanthropy from the outside, we can do the right thing. We can be that force that says, no, that's BS. If we're just consultants, they can just say, well, we paid you, go away. Or we don't like the advice you gave us. But when we're there with that outside legitimacy, so that being a funding source for the people who are coming in from the outside and forcing change, that's super powerful. And other ones we might name real quick, Workers Lab, if you're not familiar, co-workers.org, National Domestic Workers Alliance are some of the disruptors in this space that could use support. Even the SAI. Well, I mean, yeah, and so I run something for the Domestic Workers Alliance called Fair Care Labs. It's our innovation arm. And we, you know, Soros and Ford took a big bet on us as disruptors and thinking about new ways, the code, the good work code, the fair care pledge. All of that came out of the lab activity in trying to think about new ways to solve old problems. And philanthropy hasn't traditionally had an appetite for that and it's time to really start funding the disruptors. I think the other thing I would say for philanthropists is reduce the amount of bureaucracy that you impose on your grantees. I think it's really a problem. Often, you know, I won't name names, but there's some foundations where you just go, it's not worth it. It really is not worth it. The amount of hoops you have to jump through to get the grant in the first place and then the amount of reporting that you have to do and the amount of their events that you have to participate in, you know, sort of like, wait, when do we get to actually do the work? Oh, and then by the way, you tell us that you don't fund overhead. You only, you know, you just impose all this overhead on it. And it's particularly hard for smaller actors. Institutions are good at dealing with other institutions, but if you're talking about individuals and small groups that are trying something new, the burden to transaction costs are really, really high. Yeah, anyway, we've got another question. Over here, I think we have one. So anyone, actually, let's do one on that side of the room just to make things fair. Is that working? Well, and we'll repeat the question. So... Hello? Oh, there we go. Hello, so my question was, with respect to solving this problem in terms of workers being exploited by employers, is one solution to change the purpose of the business to be run for workers as well as to be run for shareholders? What's the question? Is it to make the business be run by employees and not just by shareholders? That's your question. Well, this is what they're fighting about backstage, so it's great to bring it up. There are so many different models. It doesn't mean that, you know, we all think of cooperatives as like, you were in college and there was this food co-op or whatever and nobody picked up their clothes and all of that. Ben Knight, who is right there, is running an amazing organization. Talk to him about what he's doing. There are a lot of innovations in this space. There are co-ops that are actually in partnership with trying to create partnerships with tech companies and platforms and trying to get VC money into this. There are so many different ways. The issue, you don't have to have an employee-owned organization to have workers' voice or people who are working on platforms to have their voice. You can think of ombudsman. You know, in Germany, workers are represented on boards. There are so many models. It almost seems like, you know, we are so stuck in models that we, it's like there's a monoculture that we've created and sometimes maybe we have to go to Kenya and to Germany and these other places in New Zealand to really think about all these other models. I have to say, you saw me take out my phone earlier and I was actually following up on our backstage conversation looking up some of the largest cooperatives because there's a great Wikipedia page that lists them and it's sort of interesting thinking about the different business models and what makes them work. Ace Hardware is a co-op. I didn't know that. Yeah, Costco. But you have to really ask actually how much do they contribute back to the workers and the question, you know, and for me, the backstage argument was kind of like a Me Too co-op, you know, as in, you know, was what I was worried about. Oh, you know, we'll make another Uber that's owned by the drivers and I was just saying, I don't think that'll work. Network effects, it's hard enough for Lyft to compete against Uber, you know, and, you know, you have to get to a new market that's not already been, you know, served by this technology platform and then we started talking about what might be one of those, you were talking about nursing, for example, and that could be, you know. I just think we need to be in this period of where everything is in transition. We actually don't know what works. Yeah. And that there's no probably one magic bullet. Like part of it is this fracturing of the economy means there are gonna be a lot of different answers but in the midst of all those different answers, how do we make sure people are safe, right? Exactly. And have healthcare and don't go into personal debt. You have one more question? Yes. No ladies asking questions, huh? Not my favorite, not my favorite thing. Interesting conversation in the panel. Speak up. Palak on your, sorry, the eight points. Good work code. Good work code. I work for a very large employer for over 25 plus years. Many of the things that you're advocating in the new economy don't exist for companies in the old economy. Didn't exist? Don't exist. Oh, don't exist, yeah. You have all eight of those. He's saying they don't exist. Yeah, exactly. For W-2 employees either. Right now, I mean, 1099 versus a W-2, I don't have all those eight things at a W-2 employer. So a 1099 employer might say, well, that's interesting but you don't have that kind of transparency in a traditional corporation. Yeah, I think that's right but that's also the kind of state of American work right now. And my theory of change and my hypothesis is that we're in a new moment right now. There's an entirely new part of the economy that's emerging and it's super early. So we have the opportunity to rethink and reinvent the way that we want to work. So it is true. I mean, we also have had a bunch of other problems historically as well. And that's fine, but it's not, I'm not saying let's return to what we had yesterday because you're right, we haven't necessarily had all of these protections. Our workers have never had these protections, right? So, but how is it that we, in a moment of reinvention, how is it that we figure out how to solve for these, especially because of the scalability and the kind of some of the benefits that come with technology? I mean, the other thing when I was taking Uber, which I should have been taking Lyft when I was interviewing my driver. No, no, it's okay. No, it's a really good point. But my driver, originally from Cambodia, came to the US in the early 80s, truck driver for 17 years. He was a W-2 employee and he switched to driving Uber eight months ago because he said this very thing. He said, I didn't really get great benefits anyway. So I thought to myself, I can work from six a.m. to 12 p.m., which is my ideal working time and then do creative projects and be with my family and do other things I want to do the rest of the time. So I think when you look back at that truck company, there's going to be new pressure on them if enough drivers don't want to drive trucks for companies that aren't respecting their workers, that they're going to maybe have to shift. So there could be some pressure going both ways, positively. I think it's kind of an artificial distinction that we are in right now between W-2 and 1099 because I think a lot more work is going to look like that. Companies are going to reorganize around on-demand models internally. So I think that this is our opportunity to say, what's the new social contract? Well, let's end on that. I think that was a perfect. Thank you so much to these panelists who were just amazing, all of these different perspectives. Thank you to all of you for being here. Thanks very much. Yeah, thanks.