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Nous avons également découvert l’initiative d’IG Metall, le puissant syndicat allemand, qui a mis en place un site pour faire remonter des plaintes de travailleurs ubérisés. « Il y a deux ans, j'étais tout seul derrière mon ordi à essayer de fédérer quelques dizaines de personnes. Maintenant ça nous a largement dépassé. Aujourd'hui, les plateformes commencent à comprendre que la lutte se fait à l'échelle européenne », explique Jérôme Pimot.

L'ère n'est plus seulement à la lutte contre l'ubérisation, mais à la construction de plateformes alternatives et coopératives, qui permettront aux livreurs ainsi qu'à toute profession menacée de s'auto-organiser. Bien sûr, il faudra continuer d'expliquer pourquoi ces géants de l'économie dite "collaborative" ne créent pas de l'emploi, mais achètent de la force de travail au rabais, subtilisant au passage la valeur produite par le travailleur pour enrichir des actionnaires. Il faudra sans cesse rappeler que face à l'indépendance factice de l'auto-entreprenariat, il est nécessaire de défendre aujourd'hui une autonomie effective de salariés coopérateurs. Que face à une génération d'entrepreneurs du web biberonnés au lait de la startup nation, il faut mettre en valeur les projets collectifs de celles et ceux qui ne prônent pas la liberté contre la justice sociale.

This “performance indicator over ratings” feeling was even stronger with food delivery workers. They expressed even less concern about the issue, focussing more on their delivery metrics such as attendance and cancellations. The rider app screens we were shown support this.

This makes sense for both food delivery and transit: the customer has little to no ability to use workers’ reputation data to inform their purchase decision. (When we press a button to order a cab or for food to be delivered, speed is the primary factor and platforms emphasise that in their design.)

It was a radically different story for tradespeople. Their reputation data feels important to them, and they prefer to keep control over it. They preferred word of mouth reputation and recommendations, as there was no middleman who could take that away from them. Online platforms were seen as something to graduate away from once you had a sufficient “real world” presence.

Alongside our user research, James Darling looked at the technical possibilities, drawing on the Resolution Trust’s initial work and the research that our policy intern did. They came up with five possible solutions and gave them names and some logos. They are in increasing order of complexity.

Personal referenceThis is the status quo: when approaching a new employer, workers create their own CVs, loosely standardised by convention.

Publicly hosted reputationsWhat feels like a technical quick win is to ensure that a platform hosts a publicly accessible web archive of all worker reputation data, including for profiles which have been disabled. This would allow workers to provide a URL to anyone they wish to provide their reputation data. How would this be encouraged/enforced?

Profile verificationHow does a worker prove that they are the owner of a publicly hosted reputation profile? There are a few technical solutions that could be explored here, like a public/private key verification or explorations around OAuth. Is it possible to create something that is secure, but also usable?

Decentralised open data standardA data standard for reputation data could be created, allowing automated transfer and use of reputation data by competing platforms or external services. Creating the standard would be the trickiest part here: is it possible to translate between both technical differences of different platforms (eg 5 stars versus 80%), but also the values inherent in them.

Centralised data holderPerhaps one way to help standardise and enforce this easy transfer of reputation data is to create some sort of legal entity responsible for holding and transferring this reputation data. A lot of discussion would have to be had about the legal framework for this: is it a government department, a charity, a de facto monopoly?

We also thought about ways to verify identity (by including an RSA public key), what a best practice data standard might look like (here’s an example in JSON), and what the import process might look like (via a mock competitor site). The code for all this is on Github, and everything above is available in a slide deck here.

I worry that the concept of “owning” people’s ratings reflects some deeper, more systemic issues around who “owns” things more generally in society. In the coming months, we’d like to keep working with like minded organisations to explore that idea more, as well as how the cumulative effects of those systems affect us all.