 New platform companies based on continuously collected granular data Develop such end-to-end digital intelligence about every aspect of any sectors economic activity that they virtually become the brain of that sector and Everything else activities and actors are then like the physical body, which completely gets controlled by the brain Now if this looks very scary it indeed is so let us try to find an escape from it It's global political economy news docs I'm Lynn freeze and that was a clip of the executive director of IT for change Parminder jeet Singh who as a guest speaker was commenting at a forum hosted at the international labor organizations 2019 International Labor Conference the forum looked at how to shape technological change to promote decent work Taking the example of uber sim commented that in order to protect and promote workers rights We need to go to the heart of what a digital economy is and the role of capital and workers in it This show features those comments But we go first to a related clip for some context at the time of Walmart's 16 billion dollar acquisition of India's e-commerce company flipkart Parminder sin when interviewed by news click explained that a duopoly over the e-commerce sector Implies a duopoly over the whole economy Platform is a new kind of animal which controls everything from production to logistics to even primary activity like agriculture and farming data Gives power to platforms to predict what needs to be manufactured in what quantities the manufacturer would soon get a design and that person has simply to do 3d printing and Produce exactly the number of goods which are already been predicted and the logistics would move as per the platform's directions Everybody's moving as per the directions the platform because platform is digitally intelligent from the data It has gathered it acts like a brain of the whole system the farmer is already told how much production is expected How much rain is expected? How is your soil quality? What kind of inputs you should make what kind of things you can produce when I would pick it up? so it becomes an animal which controls the whole economy through the digital intelligence which acts like a brain as I said and Every player Becomes like a worker, you know, you lose your economic independence like a worker who's told in the morning You have to do do these these things and five o'clock you can go off So everybody a trader a manufacturer a primary producer becomes like a worker Who's exactly told what has to be done and what produces to be produced and how it will be collected and therefore when you lose your economic independence? We are given sustenance amount of returns and of course there are no worker benefits in in a traditional sense and therefore platform is neither a marketplace Nor a firm is a completely new kind of an institution and since it's a new institution It requires new kind of regulations which government of India is not even started thinking about But at least as long as the companies are Indian we can when the time comes regulate them But if we get dependent as we are on Facebook and Google on global e-commerce companies who are very strong And I keep on saying add the artificial intelligence angle to it Which will become very forceful in the next decade or so you are not able to regulate them and therefore you leave lose all your economic independence right to the primary producer and Also political independence because you don't have political policy independence and outsiders control your economy and with it Also your politics and culture we go now to our featured clips of Parminder since comments at the ILO As a digital society and economy takes over two themes get most discussed regarding its impact on workers These are auto name automation that is destroying jobs and the ever-greater Informalization of workforce through what has been called as the uberization of the economy These very important themes are expected to get much airtime here and I would therefore not discuss them But even more importantly, I would like to go beyond them because these themes largely address post facto impacts of the digital economy and not its basic structural nature, which is what this short Presentation would focus on my main submission here is that if we are to really protect and promote workers rights We need to go to the heart of what a digital economy is and the role of capital and workers in it Let's take ubers example The deteriorating incomes and work conditions of uber drivers are sought to be addressed by declaring them as drivers and not Independent contractors as quotes in many countries have done Understand the reasoning and even more the moral concern behind it and Have great sympathy for it but really our Uber drivers who own their own capital goods workers If so then soon small manufacturers will also be like workers as E-commerce companies thoroughly and minutely dictate what they produce how and when Almost entirely sub planting the manufacturers own agency and this is already happening new platform companies based on continuously collected granular data Develop such end-to-end digital intelligence about every aspect of any sectors economic activity that they virtually become the brain of that sector and Everything else activities and actors are then like the physical body which completely gets controlled by the brain Now if this looks very scary it indeed is so let us try to find an escape from it Staying with the uber example Let's provisionally accept uber drivers as independent contractors They're going to a contract with uber that provides them commuters and for this So for this service charges about one fourth of the fear Which is well fear enough, but ubers a real asset is not Connection forming and the brokerage which comes from it It is a detailed intelligence that it builds about a town its drivers and people which is systematically and continually Accumulated much of it is collected through the drivers and their cars And this is an important point to note one might ask Who legitimately owns the cumulative economic value of such data and the digital intelligence that it provides? Contributing to this main and ever-growing Intelligence asset of uber was never a part of the deal between uber and its drivers some EU policy documents have raised questions about who should own Internet of Things data Whether the application provider or the owner of the points of generation of such data Data coming from caps is not much different a case may be made out that cab drivers as the main data Contributors have a stake in the key asset of uber, which is data and the intelligence which comes from the data This could justify cab drivers co-owning the uber platform The extended means of which would need to be determined and defined But by that right they should be able to participate in its management Drivers might prefer this route to rightful inclusion in the digital economy rather than just being declared as workers of uber If industrial revolution was about mass production digital revolution is about intelligent production It is marked by intelligent work processes and intelligent products and services a Book delivered to your house at just the most convenient time is as much a service as a product and embedded in it is Constable data-based Intelligence that is what situates this activity in the digital economy So is an uber ride and intelligent service It is cheaper in many ways more convenient because of constable data-based intelligence embedded in it Ownership of such sectoral intelligence, which can be described as digital capital Increasingly occupies the top of value chains in every area. We may again ask Do platform companies really and fully own all such digital intelligence? which the capital market values at trillions of dollars or Do the points and actors that contributes the all-important data behind such intelligence have an ownership stake in it That to me is a central political economy of the emerging digital economy Coming to workers proper say in a factory it may be claimed that since the employer owns the workplace Unlike it is with uber all the data coming from the workplace is legitimately. It's that means the employers There are many problems with this argument if data contribution is a part of the work contract or just the physical and or Intellectual labor that's a question and even if it is how is it to be demenurated? Data contribution to digital intelligence is quite unlike that of physical labor to physical production the marginal value of contributed data to which Which could normally be a basis of remuneration is relatively quite low. However, data's cumulative value is very high Neither can the worker Appropriately price her data contribution as she does not feel the immediate cost. This fact is well known in privacy Debates the only way to price and remunerate data contribution Therefore is through collective ownership over the cumulative value of data and digital intelligence Making co-deceitons about it and benefiting proportionately from profits made out of it Even more importantly data contributed by workers gets used to build the automation that replaces them And it is used to develop the digital intelligence to closely control and manage those who survive automation Even as they might be more distributed and informalized than ever Data contributing workers therefore have a right to know how such data and the digital intelligence arising from it are employed And they should be able to at least partly own and control such uses Now if all this sounds very complex as I'm sure it does remember that political economy around the assets of land Industrial capital and intellectual property when they respectively came to be at the center of production was not simple either Whether and when we begin to develop legal frameworks around data and do the required value Accounting considerably depends on who benefits the most from such an exercise India has come up with a draft policy that declares collective ownership over data by a community that contributes it Data's collective ownership is also inherent in many policy frameworks that propose or suggest requiring some kind of data sharing across the economy and Society for everyone's benefit One of these is the data for all initiative of the Social Democratic Party of Germany Platforms are where a sector's data is mined and converted into digital intelligence Which is then employed to orchestrate all activities and actors in any sector It has been argued that platforms should be public utilities in order to actively promote the considerable public interest inherent in their working similarly, but separately a stake of the workers and other Distributed data contributing actors like cab drivers small traders and SMEs Can be built into how a platform is run and managed and how its efficiency gains are distributed as Workers get digitally separated from each other and simultaneously closely controlled More than a foreman could ever on a factory floor the pushback has to be through data collectivization With a view to take back at least a part of the digital control Workers need to collectivize their data to break their digital chains This will require appropriate legal forms of collective ownership of data that is key to intelligent production Workers economic rights over data produced by them and thus their stake in the ensuing digital intelligence that drives the digital economy Can be reconciled with profit-oriented entrepreneurship and progressive capitalism Data collectors too will have appropriate rights over data's value as would data contributors Such rights will be differentiated as per the kind of data Different uses of the same data time-limited exclusive rights versus sharing obligations Co-decision making and so on But today it is undeniable that the pendulum has swung too far in favor of owners of digital capital It requires to be pulled back towards the rights of workers and other marginalized actors of a digital economy to end Appropriately understanding the economic relationships around data and digital intelligence is necessary for shaping a new social contract That many of many have called for in a digital society It can provide workers their due share of the digital economy pie. Thank you very much Panelists and I would try to address some questions Which were raised all very excellent ones the Malaysian workers group representative talked about increasing in formality And how things are getting into our personal life and I like the point that look at the human behind it We get into a machine versus man contest The problem is not the machine versus man But machine in front of man in front of machine and the man behind the machine because machine is being used as Amplifier of power and that's important now talking about What to do about informality? I think we need to go to the structural causes and not just see the symptoms And I'm sorry to say that a lot of treatment here of the subject is of symptoms loss of jobs Informality etc. But these are very deep structural changes and we need to see what is hecking at the heart of it And as I was discussing its data and digital intelligence which also increases in formality because first time you can control a very Distributed and informalised work force by use of digital intelligence Almost as you could do it in the same office and therefore who Who owns that control mechanism who owns what contributes to that control mechanism? Which I was talking about is data unless you go to data and keep on talking about the symptoms You are not going to make it and and that's where I will come to the Saudi employers Group which talked directly about what is community data and I should make it clear that it is is a corrective Concept not an all-compensating Concept we are trying to see how to get and you said about striking the balance How to strike the balance right in the physical economy and the physical society there are public sector owned infrastructures and resources they are commons and some are owned by private there is a balance between the three But if you look at the digital even infrastructures are owned by the private sector There's nothing public or common whoever collects data completely Appropriates it and we are trying to get the balance right and at least some areas of data are supposed to be community Generated and therefore community has some rights over that data. How would that happen is we are at a very early Times but unless you start making those concepts Then you wouldn't go and do the striking the balance which was being talked about and I gave an example that when land became at The center of production or later when industrial capital became the center or intellectual property became the center We had to start figuring out who owns what rights when whether they are time bound whether they are permanent Which kind of data what uses of data that start will be made at least by first Marking out that there are some data which are commonly owned some data Which could be public sector owned and then we go ahead with it So my my issue is that you don't have simple answers here and cutting the debate into Optimists and pessimists is not the right way to go because businesses are supposed to be optimistic because they look at Opportunity but policy makers are supposed to look at what could go wrong and policy maker cannot be too much like a businessman as The businessman should not be like a policy maker So the issue of optimism and pessimism does not come here my organization's name is it for change We have been around for 20 years looking at all the positive sides of it But regulation has a different responsibility And I think we don't have simple options if businesses are looking at data All boardrooms are discussing data as the liver on which change is happening on the other side Workers in the marginalized groups cannot be talking about symptoms unless you go deep and directly Address the complex issues. You don't have simple issues simple answers You would need to build the capacity because it's very normal among human groups when wealth is out there to be Captured that people kept try to capture more for yourself and therefore capacity building your workers Governments will have to build capacity around data and digital intelligence And and we are at a start. We are happy that these kind of discussions are taking place We have to leave it there. Thank you for joining us