Six months have passed since the movement started at the Platformcoop Conference in NYC. The meetup on June 5th provides a good occasion for a first assessment: especially given that Trebor Scholz – co-organizer of the conference and who coined the term #platformcoop – will be in town. Trebor will start the event presenting his new book: Uberworked & Underpaid and share his perspective on the first six months, before Ela Kagel, Thomas Dönnebrink and others will report from their #platformcoop events @OuiShareFest 2016 in Paris, Genopreneursummit in Cologne and other past and upcoming events. Then we will open for further input from the participants and start a discussion about common visions, goals, future strategies and next actions.

BOOK DESCRIPTION
Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy
This book is about the rise of digital labor. Companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk promise autonomy, choice, and flexibility. One of network culture’s toughest critics, Trebor Scholz chronicles the work of workers in the “sharing economy,” and the free labor on sites like Facebook, to take these myths apart. In this rich, accessible, and provocative book, Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights.
The book is meant to inspire readers to join the growing number of worker-owned “platform cooperatives,” rethink unions, and build a better future of work. A call to action, loud and clear, Uberworked and Underpaid shows that it is time to stop wage theft and “crowd fleecing,” rethink wealth distribution, and address the urgent question of how digital labor should be regulated and how workers from Berlin, Barcelona, Seattle, and São Paulo can act in solidarity to defend their rights.

BIOS:
Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School in New York City. His book Uber-Worked and Underpaid. How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Polity, 2016) develops an analysis of the challenges posed by digital labor and introduces the concept of platform cooperativism as a way of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on communal ownership and democratic governance. His edited volumes include Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (Routledge, 2013), and Ours to Hack and to Own: Platform Cooperativism. A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (with Nathan Schneider, O/R, 2016). In 2009, Scholz started to convene the influential digital labor conferences at The New School. Today, he frequently presents on the future of work, solidarity, and the Internet to media scholars, lawyers, activists, designers, developers, union leaders, and policymakers worldwide. His articles and ideas have appeared in The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Le Monde, and The Washington Post. He is currently writing a book on platform cooperativism.

Ela Kagel:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ela-kagel-a09459111

Thomas Dönnebrink:
http://2016.ouisharefest.com/participants#_speakers