Upstream - The Sharing Economy with Keally McBride

Episode Date: April 18, 2016

In this interview we spoke with Keally McBride, Professor of Politics and the Chair of International Studies at the University of San Francisco. She was featured in our Sharing Economy episode. We chatted about her research on The Sharing Economy (companies like Uber, Taskrabbit, and Airbnb), the tech industry's impact on Oakland and San Francisco, neoliberalism, and labor vs. capital in the 21st century. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You are listening to an Upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition project. Today, we're speaking with Dr. Keeley McBride, a professor in the politics department at the University of San Francisco. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Let's start by, if you could just tell us a little bit about your background and what drew you to your research about the sharing economy. politics and basically from the time I was an undergraduate, I was really, really interested in how we think about economics and how we structure economics ends up constraining people's self-conception, how it ends up creating particular cultures. I was really interested in watching

the evolution of culture along with the evolution of capitalism. It was something that I could observe intuitively, and it wasn't until I started studying political economy and political theory as a graduate student that I had a vocabulary to really attach to that. So that was exciting for me. And so the relationship for you between economics and politics is really natural. For me, it was really important to learn the history of economics because so much of what we talk about economics today, it's sort of taken as self-evident. And it's not until you look at economics more broadly and historically that you realize, oh, this is just a series of choices we make. Because I think particularly in the United States, people say things like, well, that's just

the way the market works. And it's kind of taken as absolute truth. And so to even understand that all economics actually is politics was a major revelation for me personally. And what about the sharing economy and your research about the sharing economy? What drew you to that area? Well, it was sort of happenstance because I started talking with a friend in Philadelphia who'd been doing research on the solidarity economy. And we decided to do a comparative study on the way the solidarity economy works in Philadelphia and San Francisco. And so naturally, we started talking with everyone we knew about doing this research.

And everyone said, oh, you mean the sharing economy like Uber? And we're like, no, no, no. Those are not the same thing at all. And the more times we ended up having that conversation, the more we realized that we needed to make the distinction between those two things really clear. And so then once I started studying the sharing economy in more depth, I started to realize that I think that the emergence of the sharing economy at this particular juncture in global capitalism is a major turn. That when you study the history of capitalism, right, there's particular moments like when Ford, for instance, realizes that he'll be able to sell more cars if the workers in his factory can actually buy the automobiles that they're manufacturing. And that's kind of the birth of mass capitalism. And it seemed to me that the emergence of the sharing economy was a

similar turning point in the way capitalism is structured. So the more I've thought about it, the more I realized that it's the extreme inequalities of wealth around the globe that have both created the need for the sharing economy and also the context in which the sharing economy thrives. And that in combination with the technological advances, it's sort of like this is, I think, a really important formation and reflection of what it means to live in 2015. So what were some of the first signs of the sharing economy? If we look at a historical perspective, where did it start to pop up? Well, depends on how you define sharing economy, right? But so the car sharing was the first

kind of movement towards that. And if you look at the way Zipcar worked initially, it was like Robin Chase bought four cars on credit and started parking them in her neighborhood in Cambridge and realized that it was a really good business model. And then immediately there were other groups like CarShare that emerged in other East Coast cities. And the idea was, here's a really fungible asset that, you know, it's expensive to park, particularly in urban areas, people don't use their cars all that much. So that is the first emergence really of the sharing economy. And so the intention behind that first Zipcar was to make it easier for people to get around. Right. And to give people access to cars without forcing them to purchase it and to use technology to reduce the price of providing car rentals. Robin Chase describes the model as splitting. So generally, when you go to a car rental place, you have to rent a car for a whole day. If you use Zipcar, you can rent a car for an hour. And it's significantly less than

renting it for the whole day. But if the car company is able to actually rent the car out for 10 different hour blocks, they've made a lot more money than just renting the car out for one whole day. So that was the kind of insight that you can use technology to substitute for different physical locations and physical interactions. You don't need to have a corporation that builds a building and opens its doors in order to provide services. building and opens its doors in order to provide services. And then was it soon after that the folks at Zipcar realized how this could get bigger and bigger really quickly? Yeah. Because I know one of the big things about the sharing economy is how it scales really

fast. Very fast. And they argue, and they're correct, that it's because what they're doing is they're capturing assets that are already in existence. So Airbnb has been able to scale up insanely quickly because they don't actually have to ever build any brick and mortar buildings like other hotel chains do. So they just need people to come to their platform and sign up. And what they need to do is keep updating their platform and making sure it can handle the traffic and dealing with different issues as they arise

and providing ways for hosts to connect and really monitoring insurance issues. But Airbnb as a company does only a very small part of what a hotel chain would do. So that's why they're able to just expand as quickly as they've have. Yeah, they don't have anyone at the front desk. They don't have anyone they're hiring to clean. Nope. None of that.

Yeah. And so that was a real aha moment for me when I started doing research on the sharing economy. And I'd actually, at the same time, been doing research on San Francisco and the tech industry and the way the tech industry has impacted doing research on San Francisco and the tech industry and the way that tech industry has impacted the economy of San Francisco. So when I read that Uber, this was two years ago, when I read that Uber had been valued at $19 billion, now it's over 50. I don't remember what the latest valuation was, but $19 billion and they had fewer than 200 employees. $19 billion, and they had fewer than 200 employees. And I thought, wow, this is the greatest wealth concentrating business model I've seen that's even more effective than finance, right? I mean, I'd kind of thought of finance and real estate as the pinnacle of wealth

concentration, but the sharing economy trumps them. So what is the basic history of the tech industry? I know for me, it feels like it started in Silicon Valley, so San Jose area, and then it kind of came into San Francisco. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's been a move over the last 10 years. So most of the tech industries were really clustered down in San Jose, in Silicon Valley, right? That's the story that a lot of people are pretty familiar with. But what's happened over the last 10 years is that more and more of them are migrating up to San Francisco. So now San Francisco is the number two location for tech employees in the country. And now Oakland has just moved into number four or five. So they're also now moving over to Oakland. And they do that in part because their employees want to live in San

Francisco and Oakland. They don't want to live in San Jose. And now it's getting more and more competitive to actually attract workers in that industry. So they say they're doing it in order to maintain their workforce. And what have been some of the implications of that move? Well, you know, we've seen a lot of protests over the Google buses. Now that you have a larger sector of people who are now commuting down to San Francisco, or down to San Jose from San Francisco, the Google buses became the kind of flashpoint. But the other thing that happens is that, you know, average tech salaries are amazingly high. There was a study that came out last week.

The average tech employee in San Francisco earns $176,000 a year. San Francisco's had a long-term policy since Dianne Feinstein to build a lot of office buildings and attract corporate headquarters. They want to, quote unquote, bolster their tax base. But San Francisco made a decision not to build any new housing. And so at the same time that San Francisco is out adding thousands of jobs every single month, literally thousands. We are not building

any new housing. So what you've got is people who want to live in San Francisco and commute down to San Jose, tech industries moving into San Francisco, and that gives them an advantage in hiring workers because they don't have to commute down to San Jose, no new housing, and really high salaries. What that means is that people are walking around and able to pay massive amounts of cash in rents and also creating a spike in real estate based on when startups get popular, when they get sold, all of a sudden you have a flood of new millionaires into the real estate market. This has been really notable over in Oakland.

I have a friend who's a real estate agent and, you know, she was telling me one week before yoga class, oh yeah, all the Nest people are over here now. Like Nest just went public. They've all got millions of dollars of cash and they're coming in and buying up every single available house in Oakland. So you mentioned that the sharing economy, parts of it started on the East Coast. It was Zipcar. So why then has it moved to San Francisco? What is it about San Francisco, the culture or Silicon Valley, this area that has given rise to Airbnb and Uber, Lyft, all those other companies? Well, the thing about the sharing

economy is it's all about the platform. That's all the sharing economy is, is a platform. So this is a natural place to go for finding people who can build these platforms, maintain them, provide the security. Companies have worked like this for a long time. You want to be located next to the other companies that will provide parts of the services you need. So they need people who are really good at online security in order to process all the payments and keep that safe. They need other corporations who provide the reputational analytics. So there's different pieces that all stream into an Airbnb website. So it makes sense to be located next to the other technological corporations who are good at doing those things.

And the sharing economy isn't just one thing. It's not just one type of business. Airbnb and Uber and Lyft are maybe one part of it, but there are other parts of the sharing economy. Can you describe those? Right. So, for instance, like Etsy is another example. So there's the splitting model that I already referred to in terms of Zipcar,

but then there's the splitting model that I already referred to in terms of Zipcar, but then there's the aggregation model. So Airbnb is also based on that aggregation model where we're going to take 11 million hosts and make them all available in one spot. So it's like comprehensive services for anyone looking for a place to stay. a place to stay. Etsy is another business that does the same thing with craftspeople, where anyone who used to go to, you know, the farmer's market or holiday craft fairs in the middle of town, they can now have their products up at Etsy year round. And anyone who's looking for, you know, knitted tea cozies can go there and know that they can find them. So that's another form of the aggregate model. And Craigslist would be one. Yeah. Wikipedia.

Well, Wikipedia, that's a good question. So that's where, you know, the sharing economy isn't necessarily cut and dry. And in my research, admittedly, I've been focusing on the super profitable sharing economy platforms. But Wikipedia is certainly not super profitable and they don't sell things. So they've had fundraising drive. They've asked for people to donate

so they can keep their license open. And people aren't getting paid to write or edit Wikipedia entries. So I would argue that's more of a collaboration, right, which is pretty different than being an Airbnb host. So in terms of the differences within the sharing economy, you mentioned the splitting thing that you mentioned, which is the utilization of durable assets, right? Right, in very small segments. So bike shares are another. And then companies like TaskRabbit, that would be different. That would be more skill sharing. I would say skill selling, right? Because you don't go on TaskRabbit and say, I'm looking for something to do just to be generous on Saturday afternoon. You're selling your time, right? So I will go mail your post office packages for you.

I think sharing is a misnomer. I think sharing is a misnomer with most of these corporations. Yeah, let's talk about that. So I know there's many other names for this. I think sharing is a misnomer with most of these corporations. Yeah. Let's talk about that. So I know there's many other names for this. Yeah. So we are saying sharing economy because that's what's most known. What are the other names for it? And what is it really?

What's the most appropriate name for you? I would say the gig economy, where you make yourself available for really specific gigs. And it's not any kind of extended employment. It's entirely precarious. I think the gig economy is a pretty good word for it. It's also known as the 1099 economy, which is non-employee compensation. That's the category and federal tax code for that. And the feds are actually trying to catch up with all of this and reevaluate their 1099 and whether people should be paying payroll taxes

out of their 1099 forms. So they're starting to recognize it's a growing part of the economy. So part of the problem is that the technology is increasing at a rate and these companies are increasing at a rate and then the laws and the regulation abilities and... Are lagging way behind. Lagging way behind. Yeah. So that's what you're saying that the Fed is kind of catching up to that and even cities.

They're trying to, yes. And cities are trying to figure out how to regulate it as well. And that's where the politics comes into it. What's happening in San Francisco is a real soul-searching moment. There's a recognition that, in large part, because of the tech industry explosion here, people can't afford to live here anymore. People are getting evicted. I think at this point, almost everyone knows someone who's been evicted.

evicted. I think at this point, almost everyone knows someone who's been evicted. And so the question is, does Airbnb and Uber, does that allow middle-class people who couldn't afford to live here the chance to stay? Or is this just an example of even greater wealth disparity. I mean, one of the things that you see is that middle class people are leaving San Francisco in droves. The people at the bottom of the spectrum are getting poor quite quickly. The people at the top end of the spectrum are getting wealthy really quickly too. So San Francisco has the fastest growing wage inequality in the country. And that's why I think the sharing economy thrives here. And it's not because it's allowing the middle class to survive, which is what Airbnb likes to argue. It's because you have a lot of people who have very precarious labor situations,

and you have a lot of people who have a pretty astonishing amount of disposable income, right? I mean, when you were growing up, would your aunt or your parents or your grandparents thought, I want to pay someone else to go stand in line at the post office for me? No. No. So there's starting to be this whole new category of essentially servant that is really accessible and easy for people. And it implies no commitment or long term relationship between the person contracting the service and the person providing the service. It's entirely impersonal. I'm really starting to think of it as the return of pseudo-aristocracy in some ways. People who just use their cell phones and order services and drivers and people that pick up their kids and do their cleaning. And in part, that's because we're living in a society that has such extreme wealth inequality. I am the light of the world. Succes! Sous-titrage ST' 501 Thank you. 아멘 That was I Don't See the Branches, I See the Leaves by Chris Zabriskie. Welcome back to Upstream. We've been talking with Dr. Keeley McBride,

Professor of Politics and the Chair of International Studies at the University of San Francisco. Let's talk about the solidarity economy and how that's different different so can you tell us a little bit about you started with the solidarity economy can you tell us about that your background with the solidarity economy i don't have that much of a background with the solidarity economy like i i spent some time living in ithaca participating in the ithaca time bank and um ithaca dollars and i've participated in cooperatives like nursery, you know, so I came at it from a personal experience of being a broke postdoc or grad student with a kid and needing to figure out collective daycare alternatives, because there's no way I could pay the going

market rate for that. And so my personal experience was collective solutions to individual issues were essential. I had groups of friends that we would all get together on every weekend and help fix each other's houses in Philadelphia because we couldn't afford contractors. It's really hard to relay the sewer pipe in your basement without a whole bunch of help. So and from that, the sort of collective gained information and knowledge that we could pass on with one another. And it also provided basically, a work exchange so we could afford to fix our homes. So that was the position that I came to the solidarity economy from. But I'd always really been interested in the cooperatives and collectives that are here in San Francisco.

And most of them were left over from the 1960s. And there are people who embrace the solidarity economy and worker-owned collectives from a really ideological point of view, which I also support. a really ideological point of view, which I also support. And so in some sense, I was really interested to try and figure out whether more people would embrace the solidarity economy kind of ideology and outlook out of economic necessity. And if you could see a transition in the Bay Area from those long-term collectives who organized based out of Marxist principles in the 60s, largely, and whether or not they were attracting new audiences out of economic necessity. And what I've been able to ascertain so far, and I'm just beginning this research, is that actually the collectives and cooperatives that originate in

more economically distressed communities are pretty separate from the worker-owned collectives that originated a long time ago from ideological principles. They're sharing strategies. They share resources with one another about how to organize, how to maintain worker involvement, quality of product, things like that. But they tend to, it seems like, serve very different audiences. And what's the relationship between Latin America and the birth of the solidarity economy there? I think I read that you wrote the birth of it in Latin America after the 1980s, after neoliberalism. Right. And so, yeah, that it kind of started there, more so out of need, like you're talking about.

Right. And I would argue that that's a really similar outlook, what you see happening in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, West Oakland. There's a project called Oakland to the World. And it was started by Elaine Brown, who was one of the leaders of the Black Panther movement. And there you see the ideologies converge. There, you saw that with the Nation of Islam too. There's a political reason to run your own businesses and to not interface with most of the capitalist structures in your neighborhood, like to keep the wealth in the community, as it were. But in that sense, it's more like the business serves the political ideology as opposed to the business model being the political statement, if that distinction makes any sense to you. Yeah, the means and the end.

Yeah, yeah. So once you start to kind of disaggregate and understand all these different nuances, it becomes very difficult to say, to lump them all into one category. So what are the defining differences between the sharing economy and the solidarity economy? Well, one is, of course, in the solidarity economy, the people who do the work get the profit. And I recently met someone in San Francisco who's trying to have a worker-owned version of Uber. Why can't we steal their technology, have our own platform. And rather than giving all of the, you know, at this point, Uber drivers give 20%

of their receipts to Uber. Why not have workers pay 5% in order to keep the platform going, and then they get to keep 95% of their wages. And the idea would be that the platform would be a nonprofit. If there was any excess generated through the platform, that it would be distributed to the drivers. So I've talked to several people who have this hope that, okay, so now that we've got the corporations to figure out how to do this, and actually the technology isn't that complex, groups should be able to adopt it to their own ends. So there's hope that particularly in a place like San Francisco, where people pride themselves on being more progressive, that if they can get the word out that here's the worker-owned Uber, people would rather get a ride with them. And their assumption is that, of course, all the drivers would rather drive for them as well

because then they would be in control of more of the profit. What are, if you said that it grows really quickly, these type of platforms. Because it's just a platform. You don't need to do anything. The technology is not that complicated so what are the barriers then what would be what do you see as the some of the barriers for for say this individual right so at this point i mean even lyft is trying to

figure out how to get their word out there um they've been outmaneuvered by uber for sure so ubering something just like Googling something, it's become a kind of generic, just like we talk about Kleenex as opposed to tissues, right? I mean, Uber has, and Airbnb have really seized that brand, that activity. So how you get around that is going to be really difficult. How you would get enough drivers to provide the same kind of service as Uber right away. So how many times would people call that app? And if they had to wait an extra 10 minutes as opposed to just five minutes, would they go back to using Uber? So there would be a late entry into the market. and so that's always a disadvantage in some ways.

So that would be a competitive, right? This other solidarity economy competing with the sharing economy. What about transitioning sharing economy into more of solidarity economy? Do you see any instances of that? Well, for instance, there's couch surfing, right? There's a site couch surfing that says, actually, Airbnb says it's all about meeting humanity. Well, this is really about meeting humanity. I'm inviting you to come sleep on my couch, and I'm going to be there and I'm not going to charge you anything. So that's an instance. I don't believe couch surfing will ever be as big as Airbnb. But that would be an instance of a spinoff from a sharing economy platform into a solidarity economy.

And what about the size? Do you think that in our current global economy that it can be a scaling of that big with the solidarity economy? Or do you think that it'll stay more of a small scale thing? That's a great question. I would love to see, like this example with a worker-owned taxi cab app, I would love to see there be non-profit kind of shadow versions of all these more corporate sharing economy platforms evolve. I doubt that they would ever be as successful and big as the profit driven ones. But the difference is that the sharing economy functions in such a way as you can share without having any sort of interpersonal connection. And I would argue that the real strength of the conception of the

solidarity economy is it's about connection. And this is another thing that I think is so important at this particular juncture. You have people for a long time, and when I was young, I used to think, oh, this is so oppressive. A corporation starts to own you. They take you on vacations and you become a company person. Originally it was a company man, but now you can also become a company woman where everything you do is identified with that corporation. And now I think, oh, how quaint and how sweet that would be. Because at this point, more and more people's work is so disconnected from any sort of corporate umbrella, from any union. So the nature of employment has become so increasingly alienated. That's one of the things I think is really, really important about the solidarity economy.

That's one of the things I think is really, really important about the solidarity economy is that it's not about maximizing productivity or it's really about understanding that economic relations are embedded in social relations and re sharing economy reflect are ones of extreme alienation and absolute lack of interpersonal connection. That's why it's so easy for people. But that's why in the end, it's a reflection of soullessness rather than the answer to the increased alienation of labor. So it's kind of the difference between, like you said, working for gigs and then having a livelihood. Yeah, exactly. And a livelihood based on connection with others. Right. And putting other things besides profit first.

Right. I mean, if you never have a boss who says, you've got these skills and how can you develop them and how can you bring them back to our company? I mean, you just become utterly dispensable. Everything about the sharing economy is based on quick, easy, in and out, rapid transformation. Airbnb has no reason to be committed to their hosts, their guests, or even the people who work for them. I mean, if someone fell out of date with their knowledge of the mechanics behind these platforms, they would just be fired. There would be no reason for them to be invested in those individuals.

So let's talk a little bit more explicitly about Marxism and the perspective there. So this seems like a twisted form of Marxism where people don't, where the ownership of the means of production doesn't necessarily lead to the ownership of surplus value. So for example, you know, one might own their car or own their house, but they're not actually in charge of their own work. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. At one point in the early industrial revolution, it began with piecework. There was this idea that, well, you don't want women to work outside the home. And also factories who couldn't expand quickly enough to meet all their orders. They would just pass the pieces off to women and they would take them to their apartments and they would sew them off site and

they would get paid per piece. I look at the sharing economy as something really similar to that, where we're not going to provide anything for you. Those women had to buy their own sewing machines. They had to maintain their sewing machines, transport the pieces to and from the factory themselves, right? So it's a way of offloading the... The risk. Yeah, the risk and the capital needed to maintain... And they're alone. They're working alone.

Yes. In their houses. Yes. So it's kind of... Isn't there a similar organization or company for lawyers where lawyers work per hour or per gig? Yes. Very similar.

And MBA consultants. So what was the response for the piece? What was it called? The piece? Piecework. Piecework. Was it applauded or what was the? Well, no.

Eventually people realized that they were getting less wages than they would if they were actually working in the factory. So there was a movement to push it back into the factory and regulate piecework before it used to be like there was no minimum wage attached to it, right? Because you just got paid per piece. Things like TaskRabbit, they're going straight back to that. So Marx argued that one of the things that was going to happen through having collective work sites is that workers would develop a collective consciousness, they would start to rather than viewing each other as competition, they would start to form an affiliation with one

another and understand that other workers were in a similar situation. I mean, it's kind of like the feminist insight that the personal is political. So one of the things that happens with the sharing economy is that people who can't pay their bills, there was a study that just came out, actually Uber released it, interestingly enough, the day before the last California Supreme Court decision, that most Uber drivers have other jobs. But clearly those other jobs don't give them clear working hours or sufficient wages in order to make ends meet. So they're looking at this as an individual problem. And so they say, okay, well, I guess if I drive three hours for Uber

in the morning or the afternoon when I haven't been scheduled and I can just decide at the moment that now I've got this time and I'll sign up to drive, that becomes a kind of enabling device that matches the precarious part-time work that they're being subject to. That employers can ask people to come in and then send them home. They can decide the night before, oh, we just cut that shift, sorry. Or they can say, you need to be available anytime from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. And we'll let you know at 9 a.m. when we actually want you to come. So it's already a weakening of labor's relationship with capital that you're seeing in the structure of work.

The sharing economy presents itself as, here's the answer. Here's the empowerment of the worker. You get to set your own time. You get to decide how much you want to earn. But in a sense, it's not the answer to it. It's a further symptom of how degenerated labor can be. It's a positive feedback loop. Yeah, it is.

So now those workers can drive for Uber, and they can have another insecure job without benefits to match their other job. And it's hailed as the freedom of the worker. And so a big part of the problem, like you've mentioned, is the precarious nature of work. Yeah. And so, and I have heard Uber say, well, you know, it was never meant to be a full-time job. Yeah. It was supposed to be. Yeah.

You know, part-time work. And I know students who do it or people who do it as, you know, part-time extra income. But the problem is that we have, like you said, the wealth income inequality gap growing. And so what are some of the, one solution is to unionize the workers of Uber, for example, or to more concretely regulate Airbnb or other companies like that. But what are some of the larger, more systemic things that we need to do to address this rising income inequality gap and the precarious nature of work? Oh, that's so hard. So basically, you would have to completely, you would have to create an

international tax structure. Because at this point, the wealthy have stopped paying taxes, they just circulate their money around the globe and park it in various locations and manage to avoid paying taxes into the system. The other thing you would have to do would be to redefine labor and work. So much of this rides on the definition of what a full-time worker is, and at what point people have to be given benefits, and what formal employment is as opposed to individual contracting. And for a long time, I think being an individual contractor was kind of akin to being like a small businessman. But I think that that's another distinction that needs to be clarified. Being a contractor is not the same as being a small businessman. And there's a precariousness there that needs to be regulated.

I mean, it's just sort of like start from scratch, right? That question. So maybe some examples could be a basic living wage. Or what do you think about that idea? Or, yeah, maybe balancing work weeks across, like, making a 21-hour work week for everyone. Right. Those are some things that I've heard about. Right. You know, there was a really great woman from Yale Law School. I saw her give a talk, I don't know, like 10 years ago.

And she was arguing for a maximum 30-hour work week. And that if you think about all the volunteering that needed to happen, of a talk, I don't know, like 10 years ago. And she was arguing for a maximum 30 hour work week. And that if you think about all the volunteering that needed to happen, if you think about all the gender imbalance in childcare, if you think about mental health, she had an entire list of social problems that could be solved by people working less. The problem is, is that even at the upper end and the lower end of the spectrum, you see people working more and more. You can't keep one of these really well-paid jobs if you don't work 60 hours a week. And technology makes it possible for people to sit on the bus and work while they commute, to sit on the beach while they're supposedly on vacation and work too. Right. So in some sense, I would blame technology for a lot of the creep of the work week everywhere. And because the distinction between the haves

and the have nots has grown so large, there are people in a panic about kind of falling off the lifeboat as it were into the sea of precarious employment. And so they're willing to work 60, even 70 hours a week, just because they're scared of keeping their jobs. So there's like a general anxiety in all classes about labor at this point. It's expressed differently, and the benefits of being in the wealthy sector of the workforce is clearly a lot better. But I think it's all being fed on this fear of, quote unquote, the market. It's like we're all subject to something completely out of our control. And as long as we only think about individual solutions,

like, oh, I'll just work over the weekend to keep my boss happy, or, oh, I'll just drive Uber for 20 hours a week on top of my other part-time job, then we'll never get anywhere. It's the collective solutions that need to happen. And so I would argue what we need is something kind of akin to like a worldwide labor movement again. It's like time to dust off that playbook. And where do you see some examples of that happening that's sprouting up? I'm not sure about that, right? I mean, I see small local examples. And, and I would argue, right, I mean, it made sense to me to look at Europe and Latin America and the increase in neoliberal policies, it made sense to me that that would give rise to the philosophy of the solidarity economy.

But a lot of that's also because those societies aren't marked by the same kind of physical and geographical mobility as somewhere like the United States. There was a strong intact community that people could draw upon in order to create a collective solution to these austerity policies that were being generated, the cut in welfare, state entitlements. So you see local pockets where there's already an intact community. And then you see like small liberal enclaves, like places like Ithaca and Berkeley and Eugene, Oregon that have had cooperatives going for a long time. And then you see communities that have actually been shut out of the global workforce at this point, generating local alternatives.

So I don't see anything that's kind of comprehensive. I mean, I see comprehensive ideological platforms and endorsement of alternative economies, but I don't see anything systemic emerging at this point. I don't know. What do you think? I think there are a few of, I think, the transition town movement, but that could be where I am physically located. Right.

That feels like a big movement, global, and it does have a lot of elements of the solidarity economy. Yeah. But it is hyper-local. Yeah. I think one of the big things is the new economy is not about scale, but about scope. Yeah.

So it's more distributed than centralized. But I do think that, yeah, so it's not going to look like a big looming thing, but it's going to look like little pockets that can be connected through technology if technology is used as a tool and not as a way to do this. Well, and if they can inform each other about strategies and solutions, right, then I suppose that that could be considered global, right? But gaining a global consciousness that there is an alternative seems like a really difficult battle. So it's a paradigm shift. Yeah.

That needs to happen. Yeah. And if we had that kind of paradigm shift, then I think the local movements would gain even more traction because then people would be like, well, I don't like the way this is organized, but there is an alternative. It's the lack of imagination of there being an alternative for most people, right? I would say probably about 96% of the world's population thinks there's no alternative, right? So that's the battle. And it's hard to even consider the time to think of an alternative when you're working 60, 70 hours a week, like you mentioned. Well, and it's also really hard to think that you need an alternative because so much of this is about poverty. People tend to blame themselves, right? I mean, poverty has been

pathologized. And so there's a shame. That's why the collective aspect of it, I think, is so important because you get past that. You know, just like feminism had the personal is political. We need, we need to have a, the economic is political. It's not personal, right? You experience it as a personal, right? You're the one that says, oh, I can't pay that bill. Oh, I can't pay my mortgage or my rent. This it's who you feel it's personal, right? But there, there needs to be a kind of fight back against the market as something that no one can do anything about. That's why it's really exciting to actually have one candidate who's a socialist finally get some sort of traction. But I've been

thinking about this a lot, right? I mean, the last time we had a kind of global crisis of capitalism was the 1930s. And that was the moment where you saw fascism and socialism emerge as alternatives. The center didn't hold. People didn't believe that you could go forward that way anymore. So I see kind of the sharing economy as a band-aid that's emerged at this time. Workers are bleeding. People are really suffering. And they're trying to figure out how to make ends meet. But what we need is a political answer to this, not an individual one. So you're, you're a professor, and you're doing research, you know,

how do you feel about the relationship between research and teaching and action and just that whole dance of how to create social change from your position. Well, it's interesting. I tend to focus more on I don't worry so much about my discipline. And in fact, the article that you read was sent back by one journal. They said this is really important and everyone needs to read this, but it doesn't engage the existing political science literature, so we can't publish it. So that's one of my real frustrations is that I think the universities and colleges and educators have a real opportunity to start to try and change this perception that there is no alternative. To give the facts that, look, you experience this as an individual

personal problem, but it's a much larger one. And look, if you look at the history of labor history, there are alternatives. It did used to be different. But in many ways, the structure of the academy is designed to prevent you from having a clear political aim for your work. It's interesting you brought up the Margaret Thatcher quote, there is no alternative. And I'm just thinking, I'm wondering if the sharing economy has kind of emerged and kind of capitalized off of the fact that it can be seen as an alternative, but it's actually not.

And that's really what your work is about, is the sharing economy is not an alternative. And actually the real alternative is the solidarity economy. Yes, exactly. And that's what we're trying to argue. not an alternative yes and actually the real alternative is the solidarity yes exactly and that's what we're we're trying to argue and and we were particularly disturbed at the the rhetoric around the sharing economy which is we bring people together we we prove that humanity is good and kind right that airbnb ad that just makes me absolutely nuts. But they're selling some, a form of labor alienation as overcoming labor alienation. So that's why it was so

important for us to draw the distinction between the two. So have you had any, you've had reactions, you know, probably from your students, or you said people have contacted you since your last interview. What has been that, has everyone been totally on board? Like, yes, yes, but what's the reaction? So most people have been, yes, totally on board. Let me tell you about what we did with Proposition F. Let me tell you about my new project to have worker-owned, you know, version of Uber. But other people got angry and they said, How can you say sharing is bad?

Isn't this really what we all need to be doing? So there are people that that kind of believe the rhetoric of the sharing economy. And when I when I would send the paper and explain my position more, they would say, Oh, I get what you're saying now. And I think probably people who work in the sharing economy are too busy. I haven't heard from too many of them. And I don't think Airbnb is worried about professors like me bringing their enterprise down. So tell us a little bit about your research project about San Francisco and Philadelphia. So that is just getting up and running. You know, basically, we wrote this paper as a way of trying to clarify it. And from that, we started to understand that there was a really clear geography of both the solidarity and sharing economy. what's happening in Philadelphia and San Francisco, because the sharing economy doesn't have the same presence in Philadelphia as it does here. It's not an even comparison. But on the other hand,

I think doing the comparison and starting to think about the numbers and the concentration of wealth helped us understand that, right, I mean, San Francisco is one of the paradigmatic global cities that's emerged at this particular juncture in economic history. And I've started to understand that the sharing economy is only ever really going to thrive in places that are characterized by this kind of extreme wealth inequality. I don't think TaskRabbit is really going to take off in, say, Paducah, Kentucky, or even Airbnb. So to start to think about the particular geographies of this, and if you start to look at the cities that are fighting over how to regulate Airbnb,

it's all global cities that are short in real estate, in part because real estate in these cities has become considered the safest investment. That and contemporary art, right? People are just parking money in art and apartments everywhere. So we're starting to work on the geography of it, I think has helped me understand it being symptomatic of this moment in global capitalism, as opposed to a specific manifestation here in San Francisco. But like this moment in global capitalism, the structure is uneven. The problem is that there are places where there's too much money, and there are places where there's very little money circulating at this point. And so it's another reason why it's important to juxtapose the solidarity and sharing economy, because they're

both symptomatic of the same time that we're living through. They're just different answers for different people. And I want the people who are turning to the sharing economy as their only answer to start to consider the solidarity economy. But it's so hard to figure out how you do that. Where can people go if they want to find out more information about the solidarity economy or ways to get involved? Well, there's lots of different websites. Although I would caution people to be careful about which websites they're doing. There's some websites that look like they're solidarity economy websites, but really they're about pushing the sharing economy.

they're solidarity economy websites, but really they're about pushing the sharing economy. So what I found in doing internet research is actually you've got to be really careful, because the two groups try and present themselves in really similar terms. So it sounds like if we look at money as a river or as a stream, that it's best if the money continues to flow and it doesn't get stuck in stagnant pools and accumulate. And it sounds like the sharing economy perpetuates those pools, deepens them and keeps this concentration while drying out other lakes or other pools or rivers and creating one big river that's the giants. Whereas the solidarity economy goes through and kind of helps circulate that money and pass it around. That's a very nice image. Well, thank you so much for joining us today for this interview.

It's been wonderful. Thank you. You've been listening to an interview with Dr. Keeley McBride on Upstream, brought to you by Economics for Transition. To learn more about the work that we do, please visit www.economicsfortransition.org. Spookies rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our boats that break To the morning we run to shoreline Shoreline Calling us to speak Elsewhere Waves under the earth

And throbs Casting ghostly Shadows Tall like Niles Shadows, tight nighlands As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea

As we set fire to the sea Snowgates rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our boats that break Into the morning we run To the shoreline Calling us to speak the sight Blades under the earth and grows, casting mostly shadows, tall and giant.

As we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea Bye. Thank you.