Can't pay? Don't play: New ethical models of digital business
Dullroy, Joel
Reactions are emerging to online economic disparity. Cooperatively-run startups and new forms of the mutual society may be an answer to exploitative digital business models. Social surges like the freelancers' rights movement are building real world political pressure. Companies that don't pay will be told they can't be in business.
 It's okay. I think we're trying to get the clicker working, but I can just do it without. Hello, everybody. My name is Joel Delroy. I come from Australia, but I live here in Berlin. I'm going to present in English if it's okay for you. All right. So does that scene look familiar? Yeah. That's what you saw when you arrived here at Republica today or a few days ago. So you were greeted by some smiling people who took your ticket, and they gave you a badge, and they took your coat, and they're running around today with t-shirts on, saying, helping hand. Well, those people are working for free. Today, while you're here at Republica, you're probably following a lot of Twitter handles like speakers like me at Joel Delroy. But also brands and organizations that you're interested in. And a lot of those tweets that you're reading are written by people who are working for free. Right now, you're probably logged onto your pads, or you've been reading news articles throughout the day on blogs and on news organizations. And a lot of those news articles are written by people who work for free. I bet that you're involved in a company or a business or an organization or some kind of project. And I bet in the last couple of months, you've been involved in a discussion about how to get this project finished. And somebody in that conversation has probably said these words, hey, let's get an intern. They can do it for free. Or for very little money without sick pay, without holidays, without retirement contributions, and without any kind of security. So my question to you all is, do you think this is sustainable? Because I argue that it is not. There's a social reaction brewing to this explosion of low and no pay work. And pretty soon, businesses that can't pay will be told, don't play. So today what I want to do is talk to you about the problems of the growth of the low and no pay work industry. I want to introduce you to some of those reactions that are already forming as people wake up to this problem. And I want to propose some solutions about what we can do to fix our broken self-employment system. And also maybe some points about how you can decide whether or not you ever should work for free, or whether you as an organization can and should take on workers who aren't paid. Because there are some cases where it might be all right to work for free. But we need to have some guidelines about that. So don't worry, Republican, you might be off the hook. You don't have to cut off my microphone just yet. All right, so what's the problem here we're dealing with? The problem is that in the last couple of years, there's been an explosion in the culture of free work. Businesses want more and more people to work for less and less, or for nothing at all, preferably. So this, of course, has always been an issue in the creative sector. And we've seen musicians, they've always had to sing for their supper, and artists have always been lowly paid. But it's gone beyond that creative sector to the media production industry and from there to every kind of profit-seeking business. It's part of most businesses' growth strategy these days to take on interns. And conferences like this, creative projects, they build it into their budgets. It's just expected. And we see startups which are funded by large VC deals, but they're actually staffed by armies of interns. So one step above the interns are the freelancers. Freelancers have free in their job title, but thankfully they're actually paid something most of the time. But it's usually not enough to help them with long-term planning and long-term security, things like retirement, health care, sick pay, these sorts of things, freelance wages usually can't accommodate. So we know that we've got 9 million freelancers in Europe at the moment, which is around 5% of the workforce. And it's growing all the time. More and more people are becoming freelancers one way or another. And it's moving from the traditional sectors that you know it in, to the industries and it's going across every industry. We've got teachers and medical staff and all sorts of industries that used to not have freelancers are suddenly finding themselves, you know, becoming freelancers. Well, there is a consequence for this, what I would call a rampant discarding of responsibility by employers. And the consequences are being borne by the individuals themselves. And we're seeing, just like in broader society, we're seeing a widening of inequality within organizations. So you've got workers who are paid well, or at least decently, sitting right beside people who are doing similar jobs for little or nothing, and certainly without any kind of long-term benefits or security. And the individuals who are affected by this, they're the ones who are going to have to carry the burden. And I've already talked to you about retirement and health care and those things, but it gets a bit more dire than that. Last year we saw the example of a young German man who exhausted himself to death while working as an intern at the Bank of America in London. And up until now, you might think that your jobs are secure and that your industry is secure, but this is going to start affecting every industry. And even more so when digitization and automation start taking off. As Tyler Cohen argued in his recent book, we're about to see society stratified into an upper class of technological well-paid elite and a mass of useless left-behinds. Now interestingly, his suggestion is for you to strive to become one of those elite or to make sure that your kids are by learning to code. Well, I would prefer to see some kind of reorganization of society to make sure that we don't leave anybody behind in the first place, but let's see if we can do that. All right. What's the reaction to all of this? Well, you might be surprised to learn that in these apathetic times, and despite 30 years of being told that we're all individuals, despite a dramatic decline in the credibility of trade unions, and despite Mr. Cohen's selfish suggestion that we all should just take care of ourselves, there are some people who are coming together to challenge businesses and governments that allow these conditions to exist. And I want to introduce you today to a few of those movements and campaigns that are actually trying to make a bit of a difference. And the first is in the sphere of the interns. So we're seeing a refusal trend. Don't work for free. People are being told that they shouldn't give their time for free. And this is a meme that's spreading a lot lately. We see a lot of internet campaigns, a lot of Facebook campaigns carrying this meme, blog posts are being written about it. People are sharing these really great, like, bitchy, but thinly professional email templates that you can copy, paste, and send to somebody if they ask you to work for free. And there's some great videos on the topic as well. This one's my favorite. It comes from Italy and it features a flamboyant creative media type and he's telling a plumber who just fixed his toilet that, oh, I'm sorry, there's no budget for this project. And the hashtag down the bottom is freelance, yes, idiot, no. So it doesn't really do much good just to say no when there's thousands of other interns out there who are willing to take your place. It just makes the boss send one more email. But what we're also seeing is interns getting coordinated to actually impact the businesses that are negatively affecting them. So we're seeing intern coordination, such as campaigns like this one. This is interns aware from the UK and there's many campaigns similar to it. And they're naming and shaming organizations that are exploiting their workers. Not just putting public pressure, but actually legal pressure as well. Interns have been able to successfully sue companies that have used them in the past as unpaid laborers. Because in many countries where there's a minimum wage, it's actually illegal to have an unpaid worker, even if that worker agrees to work for you for free. And it's been the case in the US and in the UK that interns have successfully sued companies for back wages, which is fantastic. We here in Germany are about to get a minimum wage. And I really hope that we start seeing companies here sued as well for their use of illegal unpaid workers if it comes to that. So for those companies that can't be sued, there's social pressure. This is from London. This is an art house cinema in central London. They got shut down by its workers because the cinema refused to pay a living wage. So there's social pressure on the streets, which is great. And also boycotts. Topshop in the UK is a popular fashion chain. And the boss of Topshop recently made some rather offensive comments about an intern who dared to ask to be paid. She's spoilt it for everybody. Presumably she spoilt it for me because my profits can't increase anymore. So people, please don't shop at Topshop if you're from the UK or go there. Let's teach this manner lesson. Now I think we're going to see more of this kind of naming and shaming of businesses. And I'd be wonderful if you're a business using free labor. Watch out, your name might end up in a public domain being named and shamed for exploiting your workers. And I was very happy to find the other day. Okay, this is another example. This one's from Germany actually. This happened a couple of weeks ago at the very respected Transmediale conference. Interns working at Transmediale posted these letters around the conference venue. And the letter details the pretty terrible conditions that they're being expected to work under. They're being asked, it's basically telling somebody who thought they had a full-time job that they're only going to get paid 135 euros a month. And that's pretty embarrassing. So I think it's fantastic that we're seeing this. And by the way, Transmediale is publicly funded. So maybe we should start thinking about having some kind of rules about public funded organizations or anybody who takes public money not being allowed to have exploitative work practices in the first place. We're also seeing international coordination. So this is the website of the International Coalition for Fair Internships. And lots of these different organizations and campaigns in different countries are getting together now and swapping tactics, which is great. So this stretches from Canada to Australia to Europe to the US. I hope we see more of this. So that's interns. But what about freelancers? What are we doing to try and get a better deal out of businesses and governments? Well, I'm glad you asked because I happen to be involved in the European Freelancers Campaign, as my T-shirt will tell you. And this is a pan-European effort to bring together lots of different organizations in European countries that are currently building pressure on the ground in their own local areas. So for example, we have the FAUGE-SD, which is the German Freelancers Association, the Verband der Gründe on Selbstständigen Deutschland. Now, the FAUGE-SD has been around for about two years. It's still quite a small organization, but it has actually already managed to sit down with government ministers and explain to them why their policies are so bad for freelancers. So if you're a German freelancer, please join this organization. It costs you about five euros a month, and it's a great investment in a long-term improvement in the freelance working environment. So there are similar organizations like this in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in France, and there's a couple in Spain as well. And now we're all getting together on a European level to coordinate and to try and pressure the government on an EU level because we've got the European elections coming up. And so we thought this is a great chance to send a message to parliamentarians to let them know that we're here, that we're a coordinated demographic, and that we have to be taken seriously. And to that end, we've set up an online campaign. So this is what we're currently doing. We've got a website running at Freelancers-Europe.org. And while I'm talking, please feel free to get out your laptops or your phones and enter that in, Freelancers-Europe.org, and add your name to support our cause. You'll find there that we have a five-point manifesto that we want to send to politicians. And I'll walk you through right now those five manifesto points. The first demand is recognized freelancers. So we want governments and bureaucrats to recognize us as a category of worker and as a category of business because often we don't exist. When you come to fill out a form, there's no box for you to tick. We fall between the cracks. We're in a gray zone. Nobody really knows about us or knows our needs. So we want to be recognized as a distinct category and have our needs understood. And we want to be remembered when policy is created that affects us. Once we're recognized, we want access. Now this means access to government services and funding. So, for example, there are many programs that are run by the EU that you can only apply for if you're a business or a nonprofit organization. We think that's unfair because Freelancers should also be able to apply for projects or for a pitch for funding. And they should be able to access services like the retraining program. The EU has a huge budget for retraining. And a lot of companies send their workers to retraining programs. And they're able to get reimbursed partially by the EU. But Freelancers can't do that. Well, that's unfair. We should be able to have access to the same services. Count us. We want reliable statistics about how many Freelancers there actually are. That nine million figure that I told you before, that is an estimation that Freelancs organizations themselves had to come up with by crunching some data. Because there are no reliable statistics. Many countries fail to actually collect statistics about independent workers. Or they're collected in a strange way. So we just want better statistics. We want to know how many of us there are. We want studies and surveys and sensors that are done to actually understand us as a demographic. Because if you don't get counted, you don't count. Give us a voice. We want governments to sit down with us whenever they draft policy. And talk to our representative organizations. We want a seat at the table. Just like when they have a policy, they'll go and ask the trade unions what they think of it. And they'll go and ask big businesses what they think of the new policy. Well, they should come to Freelancers as well and say, what do you think of this policy? How is it going to affect you? So give us a voice. Give us a seat at the table. And finally, treat us fairly. So this one is more aimed at governments. So our businesses rather than governments, we want businesses to write fair contracts and pay us on time. So those are our five demands. Recognize us, give us access, count us, give us a voice, treat us fairly. They're quite simple demands and they're quite achievable demands. And you might also notice that they don't include some of the sort of really big questions like retirement and health care. And that's for a reason. The reason is that we're targeting EU politicians with this particular campaign. And many of those really tough issues are actually decided at a national level. So it'll be up to national organizations like the file GST to campaign on those issues within their own borders. Of course, the Freelancers movement across Europe will support each of those organizations and will come up with model legislation that we can hopefully get spread across Europe. And we'll come up with strategies to get those things implemented. But for this particular campaign, we're focusing on these five demands and we need 10,000 people to support us. So then we can actually go to Brussels and say, we're here, we're a demographic that needs to be taken seriously. And we've got some genuinely good ideas about how we can fix the self-employment system. But beyond these demands, what we're really doing here is we're building a network where we're creating the groundwork for an ongoing larger, well, I wouldn't say organization, but certainly a network of individuals and organizations. So that in the future, if we ever have a problem, if ever we find out there's some kind of law that gets introduced, we can easily spring our network into action, send messages through our channels and get that law shut down. But you know what, beyond just reacting to laws or reacting to the current situation, what we can also do is dream up our own solutions about how we can improve things. We can come up with our own ideas and put them in place without even waiting for anybody to help us out. I'm going to talk about a few of the solutions that are possible. So let's start with a bit of inspiration from Sarah Horowitz. Now, Sarah Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union in the US, which is a very strong organization. It's not actually a union, despite what its name sounds like. It's a nonprofit organization, but it does a great job of providing services to its members. And Sarah Horowitz is a big believer in what she calls new mutualism. And by that she means a revival of an old-fashioned idea that existed in the 1800s and early 1900s, called the Mutual Society. Now, Mutual Society was an organization set up by individuals who paid in a little bit of money each month, and they got support and services as a result. So Mutual Societies would provide things like health support for their members. So you could go and see the Mutual Society doctor, you and your family, or they had funeral services because funeral costs used to be a big burden for people, and so they would pay for somebody's funeral, or unemployment support when you had hard times. They had building societies so that they could build affordable housing for their members. Well, what happened to these things? Well, a lot of them were wiped out by the wars of the 20th century, and a lot of them became obsolete as social democratic governments started bringing in welfare systems and public housing and public health care. And that was a good thing. But now we're back full circle to a period where the government is in full retreat, the welfare state is being eroded, big businesses in charge of all of this, and so it's not going to change anytime soon, and we have a lot of individuals who are living without support. So what should we do? Well, I like Sarah Horowitz's idea of going back to these old-fashioned ideas of Mutual Societies, where we can actually create our own support structures and help each other out. And we're already starting to see some of this occur in Europe. I just found out about one organization called SmartEU. They come out of Belgium, and they were started by a bunch of artists in Belgium, and they are a non-profit organization, and they're trying to set up a kind of mutual or cooperative across Europe for freelancers and the self-employed, and they're going to provide collective services. And one of the services they're providing is a mutual guarantee fund, where you pay a little bit in with every invoice that you issue, and if ever one of your invoices bounce, if ever somebody fails to pay you, which is a big problem for freelancers, well, the mutual guarantee fund is going to pay you the money that you're owed, and then it'll use its own internal debt collection society to go after the person who's failed to pay, which is a great idea. So I haven't really had a chance to fully investigate this whole strategy, but whether it's this organization or another one, we are going to see more of these emerging, these ideas, these mutual support organizations, and we should build them if they don't exist. All right, what about cooperatives? Cooperatives are another great vehicle freelancers can use to support each other, and there's a few interesting examples. You know, cooperatives, of course, I'm sure you're all aware, are businesses run and owned by the workers. So it's a great way for freelancers to come together, pool their resources, and help each other out. So here in Berlin, we've got two really good examples of cooperatives. One is called Functional Aesthetics. It's a design, a creative design agency, a digital agency, and you can find them sitting at Betahouse, and you can go and say hello if you like. Functional Aesthetics was started by two freelancers, and now it's expanded to many more, and they pitch for clients collectively so they can get bigger projects than they would be able to individually, and they also offer each other support services like administration and billing and invoicing. They do those services collectively. They also have a very interesting proposal about having some kind of wage leveling so that the highest paid freelancer is not paid quite as much as they normally would be, and the lowest is paid a little bit more. So it's a really egalitarian idea. If you're a forward-thinking, egalitarian freelancer, please think of joining or starting an organization similar to Functional Aesthetics. Another great example of a cooperative is Fairknoppeli, which I'm sure some of you are aware of. It's based here in Berlin. It's an eBay-style marketplace. It's a cooperative. You can become a member by paying 50 euros a month, and that gives you a vote at the AGM and a share of dividends. Now, Fairknoppeli is going through some hard times at the moment, and they've had to ask some of their full-time staff to become freelancers. But at least those freelancers retain their cooperative membership, so if things pick up, they still stand to benefit, which is more than you can say for most freelancers or interns working at a startup. So this is why I believe cooperatives are a far better solution. So one problem with the cooperative, or several problems, especially here in Germany, is that they're quite hard to set up. There's a lot of paperwork involved, a lot of bureaucracy, and it's actually really difficult to get a cooperative off the ground here in Germany. Added to that, it's very difficult to get any funding if you're a cooperative because investors don't like them very much. So what I would like to see is the development of new business models that combine the entrepreneurial incentive of a game Bihar and the fairness of a cooperative. So for example, Functional Aesthetics, the agency I talked about before, that's a game Bihar that is one-third owned by its founders, one-third by investors, and there's a portion set aside for people who set up branch operations in different cities. I would like to see the freelancers and the workers themselves also reserve the portion of the company, the actual ownership of the company. But what about this? What about users? What if the users of online platforms were given a share in the companies and the platforms that they actually use every day? This is especially relevant for things like collaborative consumption platforms, the sharing economy. We're seeing explosion in these types of websites. We also have a lot of job websites for freelancers, where you can go and get a translation job, we get a couple of euros for it, a lot of these freelance job marketplaces. Well, these types of platforms can and should reserve a share for the users. So let's talk about a freelance job platform. Imagine if every time you transacted a job over one of those platforms, you earned a tiny share in that platform. That way, you wouldn't only be exploited by the platform, which by the way, all they're doing is driving down wages to match freelance wages in developing countries. You wouldn't just be exploited by it, but you'd actually benefit from its existence, and you'd be more likely to actually want to use it. So the idea of giving away a share to users is something that I think we'll see in the next few years, and I think it's a really smart thing for a website to do, because it retains loyalty. It would make people more likely to actually come back and continue using your website. So I want to give credit to Zachary Adam Green, who actually came up with this idea and blogged about it at falcfinger.net late last year. He said, it makes absolutely no sense that these job-finding platforms are not at the very least cooperatively owned enterprises, and I would agree. All right, so we've talked about the problem of free work. We've seen some of the reactions, freelancers and interns getting organized. We've seen some solutions, mutual societies, and new models of cooperatives and businesses. But let's go back to where we all started, this whole discussion, and let's have a chat about when is it okay to work for free? Because there may be some circumstances where you as an organization really can't afford to pay your staff, and you as an individual have to decide whether or not you are going to give your time to that organization. So let's have a chat about that. So these are my proposals about when it might be okay to work for free. It's okay to work for free when you get something out of it. So all the helping hands here at Republica, they're getting free tickets to Republica for the time that they're not working. And I had a chat to a few of them, and they told me that they think it's a pretty good deal, that they're happy with that exchange. So if you actually get genuine, valuable goods and services out of your time, then it might be okay to work for free. It's okay to work for free when the company has total transparency. Free-seeking companies should be forced to publish their accounts publicly. Everybody should know how much everyone from the CEO down is getting paid in that organization. Because an intern, everybody knows how much the intern is getting paid. Well, it's only fair that the intern gets to know how much the CEO and everyone else in the company gets paid too. So they can make an educated decision about whether to give their time to that organization. So maybe you can actually even try this. Next time someone asks you to work for free, turn around and ask them, how much are you getting paid? And how much is your boss getting paid? And where are the profits going? And maybe once you've heard their reaction, you can judge whether or not you think that organization is worth your time. Give it a go. Please. I'd love to hear your results about how that works out. At least it'll make a few people embarrassed. So maybe that'll change things. It's okay to work for free if the organization you're working for gives you shares, real shares, valuable shares. Phantom shares are also okay, but as long as they're linked to actual real value in the company. Or if that organization becomes a cooperative and you become a part owner of that actual structure. Now, why should a company do this? Well, my argument is that if you can't afford to pay your staff, you're not a business. You don't have a business model. So quit pretending to be a business and become some kind of worker owned enterprise instead. Now, I don't think it's okay that these sort of suggestions are merely suggestions or that they're dependent on the good will of people. I think they should be enforced by law. And that's why we need a coordinated organized effort of freelancers and interns. We need to come together, find collective goals, create effective campaigns, and send a message to businesses and governments. And that message is, can't pay, don't play. Now, I should point out that these sorts of suggestions that I've been making are not the agenda of the European Freelancers movement at the moment. They're my personal opinions. The Freelancers movement is working on goals that are decided between the organizations. And its future direction is going to be shaped democratically by everybody involved in it. But I personally hope that freelancers and interns seize the opportunity to radically reshape the business and working environment. Because for too long, businesses have been proving themselves greedy and they've been proving that they're too eager to exploit. Governments have proven that they're inept. Governments have proven that they don't have a clue about the realities of working in the flexible work world. So it's up to us, the coordinated freelancers and interns of Europe, to get together and tell them how to fix their problems and build solutions together when they fail to. So thank you very much. Thank you. John, actually, thank you for these thoughts. And I think there's a lot to reflect on, but because we stole five minutes in the beginning, we would like to add five minutes. Thank you. So and maybe somebody wants to open his mind and have a question or statement. Please come over here so the camera can put you a little bit in the light also. And yeah, five more minutes. And thank you, Joel, for this insight. Thanks for the lecture. It was very interesting. My question is, do we have to think about automation? That there's many work done by machines now that has been done by humans in the past. And it's the consequence of it that we are doing now in the service industry, like working nurseries, cutting hair, things that we want humans to do. That's the work that remains, or consultancy and things which are based on thoughts, on trust, on things like that. And doesn't it mean that this remaining work for the humans is less worth because there are many people doing it. We basically don't need them. So in Europe we see lots of young people, they are not needed. And what is your answer to it? You're definitely right. We're going to see automation affect a lot of industries and a lot of people who previously thought that they worked in secure environments and secure jobs are going to find that that's not the case at all. I mean, we're seeing predictions that that's going to affect everything from the legal industry down, you know, really high paid industries are going to be affected by this. And those people are going to suddenly find themselves in a precarious position, which is going to make it even more necessary for us to completely rethink the idea of our citizenship and our interaction in society. I think we need to decouple the idea of social benefits, the idea of, not even welfare, but this social security, the benefits that you receive as a citizen. That has to be decoupled from the fixed working contract like it is now, and it should float around and follow you between jobs. So no matter how you earn money, you should be able to contribute to society. And whenever you hit hard times, you should be able to get support for that. No matter whether you're a freelancer or a worker or not, we need to get rid of this idea that only people who work in certain conditions get benefits and other people who work in different conditions don't. It should be just level. Everyone works, everyone contributes, everyone should get support. And as for automation, I mean, it's going to be a big problem and it's going to force all of us to really ask some hard questions. And people have suggested that perhaps things like the minimum basic income, the citizens income, the Gundine common, might become a goal for something for the freelancers movement. Well, I personally think that that could happen and it could end up being one of our platforms, but that's a little bit down the track. We are the ones currently experiencing what the majority of people who experience in a few years' time. So we're doing the thinking about this now, but I'm pretty sure that the rest of society is going to have to catch up and join us in rethinking the way that all of these systems work. One more question, anybody? So you all have to do some hard thinking now. And please visit this website, freelancers-europe.org, please sign up our little five point manifesto. It just takes a couple of seconds and you'll be supporting freelancers trying to reshape society for the better. Thank you Joel. Thank you for...
 It's okay.  I think we're trying to get the clicker working, but I can just do it without.  Hello, everybody.  My name is Joel Delroy.  I come from Australia, but I live here in Berlin.  I'm going to present in English if it's okay for you.  All right.  So does that scene look familiar?  Yeah.  That's what you saw when you arrived here at Republica today or a few days ago.  So you were greeted by some smiling people who took your ticket, and they gave you a badge,  and they took your coat, and they're running around today with t-shirts on,  saying, helping hand.  Well, those people are working for free.  Today, while you're here at Republica, you're probably following a lot of  Twitter handles like speakers like me at Joel Delroy.  But also brands and organizations that you're interested in.  And a lot of those tweets that you're reading are written by people who are working for free.  Right now, you're probably logged onto your pads, or you've been reading news articles  throughout the day on blogs and on news organizations.  And a lot of those news articles are written by people who work for free.  I bet that you're involved in a company or a business or an organization or some kind of project.  And I bet in the last couple of months, you've been involved in a discussion  about how to get this project finished.  And somebody in that conversation has probably said these words,  hey, let's get an intern.  They can do it for free.  Or for very little money without sick pay, without holidays,  without retirement contributions, and without any kind of security.  So my question to you all is, do you think this is sustainable?  Because I argue that it is not.  There's a social reaction brewing to this explosion of low and no pay work.  And pretty soon, businesses that can't pay will be told, don't play.  So today what I want to do is talk to you about the problems of the growth  of the low and no pay work industry.  I want to introduce you to some of those reactions that are already forming  as people wake up to this problem.  And I want to propose some solutions about what we can do to fix our broken  self-employment system.  And also maybe some points about how you can decide whether or not  you ever should work for free, or whether you as an organization can  and should take on workers who aren't paid.  Because there are some cases where it might be all right to work for free.  But we need to have some guidelines about that.  So don't worry, Republican, you might be off the hook.  You don't have to cut off my microphone just yet.  All right, so what's the problem here we're dealing with?  The problem is that in the last couple of years, there's been an explosion  in the culture of free work.  Businesses want more and more people to work for less and less,  or for nothing at all, preferably.  So this, of course, has always been an issue in the creative sector.  And we've seen musicians, they've always had to sing for their supper,  and artists have always been lowly paid.  But it's gone beyond that creative sector to the media production industry  and from there to every kind of profit-seeking business.  It's part of most businesses' growth strategy these days to take on interns.  And conferences like this, creative projects, they build it into their budgets.  It's just expected.  And we see startups which are funded by large VC deals,  but they're actually staffed by armies of interns.  So one step above the interns are the freelancers.  Freelancers have free in their job title,  but thankfully they're actually paid something most of the time.  But it's usually not enough to help them with long-term planning  and long-term security, things like retirement, health care, sick pay,  these sorts of things, freelance wages usually can't accommodate.  So we know that we've got 9 million freelancers in Europe at the moment,  which is around 5% of the workforce.  And it's growing all the time.  More and more people are becoming freelancers one way or another.  And it's moving from the traditional sectors that you know it in,  to the industries and it's going across every industry.  We've got teachers and medical staff and all sorts of industries  that used to not have freelancers are suddenly finding themselves,  you know, becoming freelancers.  Well, there is a consequence for this,  what I would call a rampant discarding of responsibility by employers.  And the consequences are being borne by the individuals themselves.  And we're seeing, just like in broader society,  we're seeing a widening of inequality within organizations.  So you've got workers who are paid well, or at least decently,  sitting right beside people who are doing similar jobs for little or nothing,  and certainly without any kind of long-term benefits or security.  And the individuals who are affected by this,  they're the ones who are going to have to carry the burden.  And I've already talked to you about retirement and health care and those things,  but it gets a bit more dire than that.  Last year we saw the example of a young German man  who exhausted himself to death while working as an intern at the Bank of America in London.  And up until now, you might think that your jobs are secure  and that your industry is secure,  but this is going to start affecting every industry.  And even more so when digitization and automation start taking off.  As Tyler Cohen argued in his recent book,  we're about to see society stratified into an upper class of technological well-paid elite  and a mass of useless left-behinds.  Now interestingly, his suggestion is for you to strive to become one of those elite  or to make sure that your kids are by learning to code.  Well, I would prefer to see some kind of reorganization of society  to make sure that we don't leave anybody behind in the first place,  but let's see if we can do that.  All right. What's the reaction to all of this?  Well, you might be surprised to learn that in these apathetic times,  and despite 30 years of being told that we're all individuals,  despite a dramatic decline in the credibility of trade unions,  and despite Mr. Cohen's selfish suggestion that we all should just take care of ourselves,  there are some people who are coming together to challenge businesses and governments  that allow these conditions to exist.  And I want to introduce you today to a few of those movements and campaigns  that are actually trying to make a bit of a difference.  And the first is in the sphere of the interns.  So we're seeing a refusal trend.  Don't work for free.  People are being told that they shouldn't give their time for free.  And this is a meme that's spreading a lot lately.  We see a lot of internet campaigns, a lot of Facebook campaigns  carrying this meme, blog posts are being written about it.  People are sharing these really great, like, bitchy,  but thinly professional email templates that you can copy, paste,  and send to somebody if they ask you to work for free.  And there's some great videos on the topic as well.  This one's my favorite.  It comes from Italy and it features a flamboyant creative media type  and he's telling a plumber who just fixed his toilet that,  oh, I'm sorry, there's no budget for this project.  And the hashtag down the bottom is freelance, yes, idiot, no.  So it doesn't really do much good just to say no when there's thousands  of other interns out there who are willing to take your place.  It just makes the boss send one more email.  But what we're also seeing is interns getting coordinated  to actually impact the businesses that are negatively affecting them.  So we're seeing intern coordination, such as campaigns like this one.  This is interns aware from the UK and there's many campaigns similar to it.  And they're naming and shaming organizations that are exploiting their workers.  Not just putting public pressure, but actually legal pressure as well.  Interns have been able to successfully sue companies  that have used them in the past as unpaid laborers.  Because in many countries where there's a minimum wage,  it's actually illegal to have an unpaid worker,  even if that worker agrees to work for you for free.  And it's been the case in the US and in the UK that interns have successfully  sued companies for back wages, which is fantastic.  We here in Germany are about to get a minimum wage.  And I really hope that we start seeing companies here sued as well  for their use of illegal unpaid workers if it comes to that.  So for those companies that can't be sued, there's social pressure.  This is from London. This is an art house cinema in central London.  They got shut down by its workers because the cinema refused to pay a living wage.  So there's social pressure on the streets, which is great.  And also boycotts. Topshop in the UK is a popular fashion chain.  And the boss of Topshop recently made some rather offensive comments  about an intern who dared to ask to be paid.  She's spoilt it for everybody. Presumably she spoilt it for me  because my profits can't increase anymore.  So people, please don't shop at Topshop if you're from the UK or go there.  Let's teach this manner lesson.  Now I think we're going to see more of this kind of naming and shaming of businesses.  And I'd be wonderful if you're a business using free labor.  Watch out, your name might end up in a public domain being named and shamed  for exploiting your workers.  And I was very happy to find the other day.  Okay, this is another example. This one's from Germany actually.  This happened a couple of weeks ago at the very respected Transmediale conference.  Interns working at Transmediale posted these letters around the conference venue.  And the letter details the pretty terrible conditions that they're being expected to work under.  They're being asked, it's basically telling somebody who thought they had a full-time job  that they're only going to get paid 135 euros a month.  And that's pretty embarrassing. So I think it's fantastic that we're seeing this.  And by the way, Transmediale is publicly funded.  So maybe we should start thinking about having some kind of rules about public funded organizations  or anybody who takes public money not being allowed to have exploitative work practices in the first place.  We're also seeing international coordination.  So this is the website of the International Coalition for Fair Internships.  And lots of these different organizations and campaigns in different countries are getting together now  and swapping tactics, which is great.  So this stretches from Canada to Australia to Europe to the US.  I hope we see more of this. So that's interns.  But what about freelancers? What are we doing to try and get a better deal out of businesses and governments?  Well, I'm glad you asked because I happen to be involved in the European Freelancers Campaign, as my T-shirt will tell you.  And this is a pan-European effort to bring together lots of different organizations in European countries  that are currently building pressure on the ground in their own local areas.  So for example, we have the FAUGE-SD, which is the German Freelancers Association, the Verband der Gründe  on Selbstständigen Deutschland.  Now, the FAUGE-SD has been around for about two years.  It's still quite a small organization, but it has actually already managed to sit down with government ministers  and explain to them why their policies are so bad for freelancers.  So if you're a German freelancer, please join this organization.  It costs you about five euros a month, and it's a great investment in a long-term improvement in the freelance working environment.  So there are similar organizations like this in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in France, and there's a couple in Spain as well.  And now we're all getting together on a European level to coordinate and to try and pressure the government on an EU level  because we've got the European elections coming up.  And so we thought this is a great chance to send a message to parliamentarians to let them know that we're here,  that we're a coordinated demographic, and that we have to be taken seriously.  And to that end, we've set up an online campaign.  So this is what we're currently doing.  We've got a website running at Freelancers-Europe.org.  And while I'm talking, please feel free to get out your laptops or your phones and enter that in, Freelancers-Europe.org,  and add your name to support our cause.  You'll find there that we have a five-point manifesto that we want to send to politicians.  And I'll walk you through right now those five manifesto points.  The first demand is recognized freelancers.  So we want governments and bureaucrats to recognize us as a category of worker and as a category of business  because often we don't exist.  When you come to fill out a form, there's no box for you to tick.  We fall between the cracks.  We're in a gray zone.  Nobody really knows about us or knows our needs.  So we want to be recognized as a distinct category and have our needs understood.  And we want to be remembered when policy is created that affects us.  Once we're recognized, we want access.  Now this means access to government services and funding.  So, for example, there are many programs that are run by the EU that you can only apply for if you're a business or a nonprofit organization.  We think that's unfair because Freelancers should also be able to apply for projects or for a pitch for funding.  And they should be able to access services like the retraining program.  The EU has a huge budget for retraining.  And a lot of companies send their workers to retraining programs.  And they're able to get reimbursed partially by the EU.  But Freelancers can't do that.  Well, that's unfair.  We should be able to have access to the same services.  Count us.  We want reliable statistics about how many Freelancers there actually are.  That nine million figure that I told you before, that is an estimation that Freelancs organizations themselves  had to come up with by crunching some data.  Because there are no reliable statistics.  Many countries fail to actually collect statistics about independent workers.  Or they're collected in a strange way.  So we just want better statistics.  We want to know how many of us there are.  We want studies and surveys and sensors that are done to actually understand us as a demographic.  Because if you don't get counted, you don't count.  Give us a voice.  We want governments to sit down with us whenever they draft policy.  And talk to our representative organizations.  We want a seat at the table.  Just like when they have a policy, they'll go and ask the trade unions what they think of it.  And they'll go and ask big businesses what they think of the new policy.  Well, they should come to Freelancers as well and say, what do you think of this policy?  How is it going to affect you?  So give us a voice.  Give us a seat at the table.  And finally, treat us fairly.  So this one is more aimed at governments.  So our businesses rather than governments, we want businesses to write fair contracts and pay us on time.  So those are our five demands.  Recognize us, give us access, count us, give us a voice, treat us fairly.  They're quite simple demands and they're quite achievable demands.  And you might also notice that they don't include some of the sort of really big questions like retirement and health care.  And that's for a reason.  The reason is that we're targeting EU politicians with this particular campaign.  And many of those really tough issues are actually decided at a national level.  So it'll be up to national organizations like the file GST to campaign on those issues within their own borders.  Of course, the Freelancers movement across Europe will support each of those organizations and will come up with model legislation that we can hopefully get spread across Europe.  And we'll come up with strategies to get those things implemented.  But for this particular campaign, we're focusing on these five demands and we need 10,000 people to support us.  So then we can actually go to Brussels and say, we're here, we're a demographic that needs to be taken seriously.  And we've got some genuinely good ideas about how we can fix the self-employment system.  But beyond these demands, what we're really doing here is we're building a network where we're creating the groundwork for an ongoing larger,  well, I wouldn't say organization, but certainly a network of individuals and organizations.  So that in the future, if we ever have a problem, if ever we find out there's some kind of law that gets introduced,  we can easily spring our network into action, send messages through our channels and get that law shut down.  But you know what, beyond just reacting to laws or reacting to the current situation,  what we can also do is dream up our own solutions about how we can improve things.  We can come up with our own ideas and put them in place without even waiting for anybody to help us out.  I'm going to talk about a few of the solutions that are possible.  So let's start with a bit of inspiration from Sarah Horowitz.  Now, Sarah Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union in the US, which is a very strong organization.  It's not actually a union, despite what its name sounds like.  It's a nonprofit organization, but it does a great job of providing services to its members.  And Sarah Horowitz is a big believer in what she calls new mutualism.  And by that she means a revival of an old-fashioned idea that existed in the 1800s and early 1900s,  called the Mutual Society.  Now, Mutual Society was an organization set up by individuals who paid in a little bit of money each month,  and they got support and services as a result.  So Mutual Societies would provide things like health support for their members.  So you could go and see the Mutual Society doctor, you and your family,  or they had funeral services because funeral costs used to be a big burden for people,  and so they would pay for somebody's funeral, or unemployment support when you had hard times.  They had building societies so that they could build affordable housing for their members.  Well, what happened to these things?  Well, a lot of them were wiped out by the wars of the 20th century,  and a lot of them became obsolete as social democratic governments started bringing in welfare systems  and public housing and public health care.  And that was a good thing.  But now we're back full circle to a period where the government is in full retreat,  the welfare state is being eroded, big businesses in charge of all of this,  and so it's not going to change anytime soon,  and we have a lot of individuals who are living without support.  So what should we do?  Well, I like Sarah Horowitz's idea of going back to these old-fashioned ideas of Mutual Societies,  where we can actually create our own support structures and help each other out.  And we're already starting to see some of this occur in Europe.  I just found out about one organization called SmartEU.  They come out of Belgium, and they were started by a bunch of artists in Belgium,  and they are a non-profit organization,  and they're trying to set up a kind of mutual or cooperative across Europe for freelancers and the self-employed,  and they're going to provide collective services.  And one of the services they're providing is a mutual guarantee fund,  where you pay a little bit in with every invoice that you issue,  and if ever one of your invoices bounce, if ever somebody fails to pay you,  which is a big problem for freelancers,  well, the mutual guarantee fund is going to pay you the money that you're owed,  and then it'll use its own internal debt collection society to go after the person who's failed to pay,  which is a great idea.  So I haven't really had a chance to fully investigate this whole strategy,  but whether it's this organization or another one,  we are going to see more of these emerging, these ideas, these mutual support organizations,  and we should build them if they don't exist.  All right, what about cooperatives?  Cooperatives are another great vehicle freelancers can use to support each other,  and there's a few interesting examples.  You know, cooperatives, of course, I'm sure you're all aware, are businesses run and owned by the workers.  So it's a great way for freelancers to come together, pool their resources, and help each other out.  So here in Berlin, we've got two really good examples of cooperatives.  One is called Functional Aesthetics.  It's a design, a creative design agency, a digital agency,  and you can find them sitting at Betahouse, and you can go and say hello if you like.  Functional Aesthetics was started by two freelancers, and now it's expanded to many more,  and they pitch for clients collectively so they can get bigger projects than they would be able to individually,  and they also offer each other support services like administration and billing and invoicing.  They do those services collectively.  They also have a very interesting proposal about having some kind of wage leveling  so that the highest paid freelancer is not paid quite as much as they normally would be,  and the lowest is paid a little bit more.  So it's a really egalitarian idea.  If you're a forward-thinking, egalitarian freelancer, please think of joining  or starting an organization similar to Functional Aesthetics.  Another great example of a cooperative is Fairknoppeli, which I'm sure some of you are aware of.  It's based here in Berlin.  It's an eBay-style marketplace. It's a cooperative.  You can become a member by paying 50 euros a month,  and that gives you a vote at the AGM and a share of dividends.  Now, Fairknoppeli is going through some hard times at the moment,  and they've had to ask some of their full-time staff to become freelancers.  But at least those freelancers retain their cooperative membership,  so if things pick up, they still stand to benefit,  which is more than you can say for most freelancers or interns working at a startup.  So this is why I believe cooperatives are a far better solution.  So one problem with the cooperative, or several problems,  especially here in Germany, is that they're quite hard to set up.  There's a lot of paperwork involved, a lot of bureaucracy,  and it's actually really difficult to get a cooperative off the ground here in Germany.  Added to that, it's very difficult to get any funding if you're a cooperative  because investors don't like them very much.  So what I would like to see is the development of new business models  that combine the entrepreneurial incentive of a game Bihar  and the fairness of a cooperative.  So for example, Functional Aesthetics, the agency I talked about before,  that's a game Bihar that is one-third owned by its founders,  one-third by investors, and there's a portion set aside  for people who set up branch operations in different cities.  I would like to see the freelancers and the workers themselves  also reserve the portion of the company, the actual ownership of the company.  But what about this? What about users?  What if the users of online platforms were given a share in the companies  and the platforms that they actually use every day?  This is especially relevant for things like collaborative consumption platforms,  the sharing economy. We're seeing explosion in these types of websites.  We also have a lot of job websites for freelancers,  where you can go and get a translation job,  we get a couple of euros for it, a lot of these freelance job marketplaces.  Well, these types of platforms can and should reserve a share for the users.  So let's talk about a freelance job platform.  Imagine if every time you transacted a job over one of those platforms,  you earned a tiny share in that platform.  That way, you wouldn't only be exploited by the platform,  which by the way, all they're doing is driving down wages  to match freelance wages in developing countries.  You wouldn't just be exploited by it, but you'd actually benefit from its existence,  and you'd be more likely to actually want to use it.  So the idea of giving away a share to users is something that I think  we'll see in the next few years, and I think it's a really smart thing  for a website to do, because it retains loyalty.  It would make people more likely to actually come back and continue using your website.  So I want to give credit to Zachary Adam Green,  who actually came up with this idea and blogged about it at falcfinger.net late last year.  He said, it makes absolutely no sense that these job-finding platforms  are not at the very least cooperatively owned enterprises,  and I would agree.  All right, so we've talked about the problem of free work.  We've seen some of the reactions, freelancers and interns getting organized.  We've seen some solutions, mutual societies, and new models of cooperatives and businesses.  But let's go back to where we all started, this whole discussion,  and let's have a chat about when is it okay to work for free?  Because there may be some circumstances where you as an organization  really can't afford to pay your staff,  and you as an individual have to decide whether or not you are going to give your time to that organization.  So let's have a chat about that.  So these are my proposals about when it might be okay to work for free.  It's okay to work for free when you get something out of it.  So all the helping hands here at Republica,  they're getting free tickets to Republica for the time that they're not working.  And I had a chat to a few of them, and they told me that they think it's a pretty good deal,  that they're happy with that exchange.  So if you actually get genuine, valuable goods and services out of your time,  then it might be okay to work for free.  It's okay to work for free when the company has total transparency.  Free-seeking companies should be forced to publish their accounts publicly.  Everybody should know how much everyone from the CEO down is getting paid in that organization.  Because an intern, everybody knows how much the intern is getting paid.  Well, it's only fair that the intern gets to know how much the CEO and everyone else in the company gets paid too.  So they can make an educated decision about whether to give their time to that organization.  So maybe you can actually even try this.  Next time someone asks you to work for free, turn around and ask them,  how much are you getting paid? And how much is your boss getting paid?  And where are the profits going?  And maybe once you've heard their reaction, you can judge whether or not you think that organization is worth your time.  Give it a go. Please. I'd love to hear your results about how that works out.  At least it'll make a few people embarrassed. So maybe that'll change things.  It's okay to work for free if the organization you're working for gives you shares, real shares, valuable shares.  Phantom shares are also okay, but as long as they're linked to actual real value in the company.  Or if that organization becomes a cooperative and you become a part owner of that actual structure.  Now, why should a company do this?  Well, my argument is that if you can't afford to pay your staff, you're not a business.  You don't have a business model. So quit pretending to be a business and become some kind of worker owned enterprise instead.  Now, I don't think it's okay that these sort of suggestions are merely suggestions or that they're dependent on the good will of people.  I think they should be enforced by law.  And that's why we need a coordinated organized effort of freelancers and interns.  We need to come together, find collective goals, create effective campaigns, and send a message to businesses and governments.  And that message is, can't pay, don't play.  Now, I should point out that these sorts of suggestions that I've been making are not the agenda of the European Freelancers movement at the moment.  They're my personal opinions. The Freelancers movement is working on goals that are decided between the organizations.  And its future direction is going to be shaped democratically by everybody involved in it.  But I personally hope that freelancers and interns seize the opportunity to radically reshape the business and working environment.  Because for too long, businesses have been proving themselves greedy and they've been proving that they're too eager to exploit.  Governments have proven that they're inept. Governments have proven that they don't have a clue about the realities of working in the flexible work world.  So it's up to us, the coordinated freelancers and interns of Europe, to get together and tell them how to fix their problems and build solutions together when they fail to.  So thank you very much.  Thank you.  John, actually, thank you for these thoughts.  And I think there's a lot to reflect on, but because we stole five minutes in the beginning, we would like to add five minutes.  Thank you.  So and maybe somebody wants to open his mind and have a question or statement.  Please come over here so the camera can put you a little bit in the light also.  And yeah, five more minutes.  And thank you, Joel, for this insight.  Thanks for the lecture.  It was very interesting.  My question is, do we have to think about automation?  That there's many work done by machines now that has been done by humans in the past.  And it's the consequence of it that we are doing now in the service industry, like working nurseries, cutting hair, things that we want humans to do.  That's the work that remains, or consultancy and things which are based on thoughts, on trust, on things like that.  And doesn't it mean that this remaining work for the humans is less worth because there are many people doing it.  We basically don't need them.  So in Europe we see lots of young people, they are not needed.  And what is your answer to it?  You're definitely right.  We're going to see automation affect a lot of industries and a lot of people who previously thought that they worked in secure environments and secure jobs are going to find that that's not the case at all.  I mean, we're seeing predictions that that's going to affect everything from the legal industry down, you know, really high paid industries are going to be affected by this.  And those people are going to suddenly find themselves in a precarious position, which is going to make it even more necessary for us to completely rethink the idea of our citizenship and our interaction in society.  I think we need to decouple the idea of social benefits, the idea of, not even welfare, but this social security, the benefits that you receive as a citizen.  That has to be decoupled from the fixed working contract like it is now, and it should float around and follow you between jobs.  So no matter how you earn money, you should be able to contribute to society.  And whenever you hit hard times, you should be able to get support for that.  No matter whether you're a freelancer or a worker or not, we need to get rid of this idea that only people who work in certain conditions get benefits and other people who work in different conditions don't.  It should be just level.  Everyone works, everyone contributes, everyone should get support.  And as for automation, I mean, it's going to be a big problem and it's going to force all of us to really ask some hard questions.  And people have suggested that perhaps things like the minimum basic income, the citizens income, the Gundine common, might become a goal for something for the freelancers movement.  Well, I personally think that that could happen and it could end up being one of our platforms, but that's a little bit down the track.  We are the ones currently experiencing what the majority of people who experience in a few years' time.  So we're doing the thinking about this now, but I'm pretty sure that the rest of society is going to have to catch up and join us in rethinking the way that all of these systems work.  One more question, anybody?  So you all have to do some hard thinking now.  And please visit this website, freelancers-europe.org, please sign up our little five point manifesto.  It just takes a couple of seconds and you'll be supporting freelancers trying to reshape society for the better.  Thank you Joel. Thank you for...
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It's okay. I think we're trying to get the clicker working, but I can just do it without. Hello, everybody. My name is Joel Delroy. I come from Australia, but I live here in Berlin. I'm going to present in English if it's okay for you. All right. So does that scene look familiar? Yeah. That's what you saw when you arrived here at Republica today or a few days ago. So you were greeted by some smiling people who took your ticket, and they gave you a badge, and they took your coat, and they're running around today with t-shirts on, saying, helping hand. Well, those people are working for free. Today, while you're here at Republica, you're probably following a lot of Twitter handles like speakers like me at Joel Delroy. But also brands and organizations that you're interested in. And a lot of those tweets that you're reading are written by people who are working for free. Right now, you're probably logged onto your pads, or you've been reading news articles throughout the day on blogs and on news organizations. And a lot of those news articles are written by people who work for free. I bet that you're involved in a company or a business or an organization or some kind of project. And I bet in the last couple of months, you've been involved in a discussion about how to get this project finished. And somebody in that conversation has probably said these words, hey, let's get an intern. They can do it for free. Or for very little money without sick pay, without holidays, without retirement contributions, and without any kind of security. So my question to you all is, do you think this is sustainable? Because I argue that it is not. There's a social reaction brewing to this explosion of low and no pay work. And pretty soon, businesses that can't pay will be told, don't play. So today what I want to do is talk to you about the problems of the growth of the low and no pay work industry. I want to introduce you to some of those reactions that are already forming as people wake up to this problem. And I want to propose some solutions about what we can do to fix our broken self-employment system. And also maybe some points about how you can decide whether or not you ever should work for free, or whether you as an organization can and should take on workers who aren't paid. Because there are some cases where it might be all right to work for free. But we need to have some guidelines about that. So don't worry, Republican, you might be off the hook. You don't have to cut off my microphone just yet. All right, so what's the problem here we're dealing with? The problem is that in the last couple of years, there's been an explosion in the culture of free work. Businesses want more and more people to work for less and less, or for nothing at all, preferably. So this, of course, has always been an issue in the creative sector. And we've seen musicians, they've always had to sing for their supper, and artists have always been lowly paid. But it's gone beyond that creative sector to the media production industry and from there to every kind of profit-seeking business. It's part of most businesses' growth strategy these days to take on interns. And conferences like this, creative projects, they build it into their budgets. It's just expected. And we see startups which are funded by large VC deals, but they're actually staffed by armies of interns. So one step above the interns are the freelancers. Freelancers have free in their job title, but thankfully they're actually paid something most of the time. But it's usually not enough to help them with long-term planning and long-term security, things like retirement, health care, sick pay, these sorts of things, freelance wages usually can't accommodate. So we know that we've got 9 million freelancers in Europe at the moment, which is around 5% of the workforce. And it's growing all the time. More and more people are becoming freelancers one way or another. And it's moving from the traditional sectors that you know it in, to the industries and it's going across every industry. We've got teachers and medical staff and all sorts of industries that used to not have freelancers are suddenly finding themselves, you know, becoming freelancers. Well, there is a consequence for this, what I would call a rampant discarding of responsibility by employers. And the consequences are being borne by the individuals themselves. And we're seeing, just like in broader society, we're seeing a widening of inequality within organizations. So you've got workers who are paid well, or at least decently, sitting right beside people who are doing similar jobs for little or nothing, and certainly without any kind of long-term benefits or security. And the individuals who are affected by this, they're the ones who are going to have to carry the burden. And I've already talked to you about retirement and health care and those things, but it gets a bit more dire than that. Last year we saw the example of a young German man who exhausted himself to death while working as an intern at the Bank of America in London. And up until now, you might think that your jobs are secure and that your industry is secure, but this is going to start affecting every industry. And even more so when digitization and automation start taking off. As Tyler Cohen argued in his recent book, we're about to see society stratified into an upper class of technological well-paid elite and a mass of useless left-behinds. Now interestingly, his suggestion is for you to strive to become one of those elite or to make sure that your kids are by learning to code. Well, I would prefer to see some kind of reorganization of society to make sure that we don't leave anybody behind in the first place, but let's see if we can do that. All right. What's the reaction to all of this? Well, you might be surprised to learn that in these apathetic times, and despite 30 years of being told that we're all individuals, despite a dramatic decline in the credibility of trade unions, and despite Mr. Cohen's selfish suggestion that we all should just take care of ourselves, there are some people who are coming together to challenge businesses and governments that allow these conditions to exist. And I want to introduce you today to a few of those movements and campaigns that are actually trying to make a bit of a difference. And the first is in the sphere of the interns. So we're seeing a refusal trend. Don't work for free. People are being told that they shouldn't give their time for free. And this is a meme that's spreading a lot lately. We see a lot of internet campaigns, a lot of Facebook campaigns carrying this meme, blog posts are being written about it. People are sharing these really great, like, bitchy, but thinly professional email templates that you can copy, paste, and send to somebody if they ask you to work for free. And there's some great videos on the topic as well. This one's my favorite. It comes from Italy and it features a flamboyant creative media type and he's telling a plumber who just fixed his toilet that, oh, I'm sorry, there's no budget for this project. And the hashtag down the bottom is freelance, yes, idiot, no. So it doesn't really do much good just to say no when there's thousands of other interns out there who are willing to take your place. It just makes the boss send one more email. But what we're also seeing is interns getting coordinated to actually impact the businesses that are negatively affecting them. So we're seeing intern coordination, such as campaigns like this one. This is interns aware from the UK and there's many campaigns similar to it. And they're naming and shaming organizations that are exploiting their workers. Not just putting public pressure, but actually legal pressure as well. Interns have been able to successfully sue companies that have used them in the past as unpaid laborers. Because in many countries where there's a minimum wage, it's actually illegal to have an unpaid worker, even if that worker agrees to work for you for free. And it's been the case in the US and in the UK that interns have successfully sued companies for back wages, which is fantastic. We here in Germany are about to get a minimum wage. And I really hope that we start seeing companies here sued as well for their use of illegal unpaid workers if it comes to that. So for those companies that can't be sued, there's social pressure. This is from London. This is an art house cinema in central London. They got shut down by its workers because the cinema refused to pay a living wage. So there's social pressure on the streets, which is great. And also boycotts. Topshop in the UK is a popular fashion chain. And the boss of Topshop recently made some rather offensive comments about an intern who dared to ask to be paid. She's spoilt it for everybody. Presumably she spoilt it for me because my profits can't increase anymore. So people, please don't shop at Topshop if you're from the UK or go there. Let's teach this manner lesson. Now I think we're going to see more of this kind of naming and shaming of businesses. And I'd be wonderful if you're a business using free labor. Watch out, your name might end up in a public domain being named and shamed for exploiting your workers. And I was very happy to find the other day. Okay, this is another example. This one's from Germany actually. This happened a couple of weeks ago at the very respected Transmediale conference. Interns working at Transmediale posted these letters around the conference venue. And the letter details the pretty terrible conditions that they're being expected to work under. They're being asked, it's basically telling somebody who thought they had a full-time job that they're only going to get paid 135 euros a month. And that's pretty embarrassing. So I think it's fantastic that we're seeing this. And by the way, Transmediale is publicly funded. So maybe we should start thinking about having some kind of rules about public funded organizations or anybody who takes public money not being allowed to have exploitative work practices in the first place. We're also seeing international coordination. So this is the website of the International Coalition for Fair Internships. And lots of these different organizations and campaigns in different countries are getting together now and swapping tactics, which is great. So this stretches from Canada to Australia to Europe to the US. I hope we see more of this. So that's interns. But what about freelancers? What are we doing to try and get a better deal out of businesses and governments? Well, I'm glad you asked because I happen to be involved in the European Freelancers Campaign, as my T-shirt will tell you. And this is a pan-European effort to bring together lots of different organizations in European countries that are currently building pressure on the ground in their own local areas. So for example, we have the FAUGE-SD, which is the German Freelancers Association, the Verband der Gründe on Selbstständigen Deutschland. Now, the FAUGE-SD has been around for about two years. It's still quite a small organization, but it has actually already managed to sit down with government ministers and explain to them why their policies are so bad for freelancers. So if you're a German freelancer, please join this organization. It costs you about five euros a month, and it's a great investment in a long-term improvement in the freelance working environment. So there are similar organizations like this in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in France, and there's a couple in Spain as well. And now we're all getting together on a European level to coordinate and to try and pressure the government on an EU level because we've got the European elections coming up. And so we thought this is a great chance to send a message to parliamentarians to let them know that we're here, that we're a coordinated demographic, and that we have to be taken seriously. And to that end, we've set up an online campaign. So this is what we're currently doing. We've got a website running at Freelancers-Europe.org. And while I'm talking, please feel free to get out your laptops or your phones and enter that in, Freelancers-Europe.org, and add your name to support our cause. You'll find there that we have a five-point manifesto that we want to send to politicians. And I'll walk you through right now those five manifesto points. The first demand is recognized freelancers. So we want governments and bureaucrats to recognize us as a category of worker and as a category of business because often we don't exist. When you come to fill out a form, there's no box for you to tick. We fall between the cracks. We're in a gray zone. Nobody really knows about us or knows our needs. So we want to be recognized as a distinct category and have our needs understood. And we want to be remembered when policy is created that affects us. Once we're recognized, we want access. Now this means access to government services and funding. So, for example, there are many programs that are run by the EU that you can only apply for if you're a business or a nonprofit organization. We think that's unfair because Freelancers should also be able to apply for projects or for a pitch for funding. And they should be able to access services like the retraining program. The EU has a huge budget for retraining. And a lot of companies send their workers to retraining programs. And they're able to get reimbursed partially by the EU. But Freelancers can't do that. Well, that's unfair. We should be able to have access to the same services. Count us. We want reliable statistics about how many Freelancers there actually are. That nine million figure that I told you before, that is an estimation that Freelancs organizations themselves had to come up with by crunching some data. Because there are no reliable statistics. Many countries fail to actually collect statistics about independent workers. Or they're collected in a strange way. So we just want better statistics. We want to know how many of us there are. We want studies and surveys and sensors that are done to actually understand us as a demographic. Because if you don't get counted, you don't count. Give us a voice. We want governments to sit down with us whenever they draft policy. And talk to our representative organizations. We want a seat at the table. Just like when they have a policy, they'll go and ask the trade unions what they think of it. And they'll go and ask big businesses what they think of the new policy. Well, they should come to Freelancers as well and say, what do you think of this policy? How is it going to affect you? So give us a voice. Give us a seat at the table. And finally, treat us fairly. So this one is more aimed at governments. So our businesses rather than governments, we want businesses to write fair contracts and pay us on time. So those are our five demands. Recognize us, give us access, count us, give us a voice, treat us fairly. They're quite simple demands and they're quite achievable demands. And you might also notice that they don't include some of the sort of really big questions like retirement and health care. And that's for a reason. The reason is that we're targeting EU politicians with this particular campaign. And many of those really tough issues are actually decided at a national level. So it'll be up to national organizations like the file GST to campaign on those issues within their own borders. Of course, the Freelancers movement across Europe will support each of those organizations and will come up with model legislation that we can hopefully get spread across Europe. And we'll come up with strategies to get those things implemented. But for this particular campaign, we're focusing on these five demands and we need 10,000 people to support us. So then we can actually go to Brussels and say, we're here, we're a demographic that needs to be taken seriously. And we've got some genuinely good ideas about how we can fix the self-employment system. But beyond these demands, what we're really doing here is we're building a network where we're creating the groundwork for an ongoing larger, well, I wouldn't say organization, but certainly a network of individuals and organizations. So that in the future, if we ever have a problem, if ever we find out there's some kind of law that gets introduced, we can easily spring our network into action, send messages through our channels and get that law shut down. But you know what, beyond just reacting to laws or reacting to the current situation, what we can also do is dream up our own solutions about how we can improve things. We can come up with our own ideas and put them in place without even waiting for anybody to help us out. I'm going to talk about a few of the solutions that are possible. So let's start with a bit of inspiration from Sarah Horowitz. Now, Sarah Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union in the US, which is a very strong organization. It's not actually a union, despite what its name sounds like. It's a nonprofit organization, but it does a great job of providing services to its members. And Sarah Horowitz is a big believer in what she calls new mutualism. And by that she means a revival of an old-fashioned idea that existed in the 1800s and early 1900s, called the Mutual Society. Now, Mutual Society was an organization set up by individuals who paid in a little bit of money each month, and they got support and services as a result. So Mutual Societies would provide things like health support for their members. So you could go and see the Mutual Society doctor, you and your family, or they had funeral services because funeral costs used to be a big burden for people, and so they would pay for somebody's funeral, or unemployment support when you had hard times. They had building societies so that they could build affordable housing for their members. Well, what happened to these things? Well, a lot of them were wiped out by the wars of the 20th century, and a lot of them became obsolete as social democratic governments started bringing in welfare systems and public housing and public health care. And that was a good thing. But now we're back full circle to a period where the government is in full retreat, the welfare state is being eroded, big businesses in charge of all of this, and so it's not going to change anytime soon, and we have a lot of individuals who are living without support. So what should we do? Well, I like Sarah Horowitz's idea of going back to these old-fashioned ideas of Mutual Societies, where we can actually create our own support structures and help each other out. And we're already starting to see some of this occur in Europe. I just found out about one organization called SmartEU. They come out of Belgium, and they were started by a bunch of artists in Belgium, and they are a non-profit organization, and they're trying to set up a kind of mutual or cooperative across Europe for freelancers and the self-employed, and they're going to provide collective services. And one of the services they're providing is a mutual guarantee fund, where you pay a little bit in with every invoice that you issue, and if ever one of your invoices bounce, if ever somebody fails to pay you, which is a big problem for freelancers, well, the mutual guarantee fund is going to pay you the money that you're owed, and then it'll use its own internal debt collection society to go after the person who's failed to pay, which is a great idea. So I haven't really had a chance to fully investigate this whole strategy, but whether it's this organization or another one, we are going to see more of these emerging, these ideas, these mutual support organizations, and we should build them if they don't exist. All right, what about cooperatives? Cooperatives are another great vehicle freelancers can use to support each other, and there's a few interesting examples. You know, cooperatives, of course, I'm sure you're all aware, are businesses run and owned by the workers. So it's a great way for freelancers to come together, pool their resources, and help each other out. So here in Berlin, we've got two really good examples of cooperatives. One is called Functional Aesthetics. It's a design, a creative design agency, a digital agency, and you can find them sitting at Betahouse, and you can go and say hello if you like. Functional Aesthetics was started by two freelancers, and now it's expanded to many more, and they pitch for clients collectively so they can get bigger projects than they would be able to individually, and they also offer each other support services like administration and billing and invoicing. They do those services collectively. They also have a very interesting proposal about having some kind of wage leveling so that the highest paid freelancer is not paid quite as much as they normally would be, and the lowest is paid a little bit more. So it's a really egalitarian idea. If you're a forward-thinking, egalitarian freelancer, please think of joining or starting an organization similar to Functional Aesthetics. Another great example of a cooperative is Fairknoppeli, which I'm sure some of you are aware of. It's based here in Berlin. It's an eBay-style marketplace. It's a cooperative. You can become a member by paying 50 euros a month, and that gives you a vote at the AGM and a share of dividends. Now, Fairknoppeli is going through some hard times at the moment, and they've had to ask some of their full-time staff to become freelancers. But at least those freelancers retain their cooperative membership, so if things pick up, they still stand to benefit, which is more than you can say for most freelancers or interns working at a startup. So this is why I believe cooperatives are a far better solution. So one problem with the cooperative, or several problems, especially here in Germany, is that they're quite hard to set up. There's a lot of paperwork involved, a lot of bureaucracy, and it's actually really difficult to get a cooperative off the ground here in Germany. Added to that, it's very difficult to get any funding if you're a cooperative because investors don't like them very much. So what I would like to see is the development of new business models that combine the entrepreneurial incentive of a game Bihar and the fairness of a cooperative. So for example, Functional Aesthetics, the agency I talked about before, that's a game Bihar that is one-third owned by its founders, one-third by investors, and there's a portion set aside for people who set up branch operations in different cities. I would like to see the freelancers and the workers themselves also reserve the portion of the company, the actual ownership of the company. But what about this? What about users? What if the users of online platforms were given a share in the companies and the platforms that they actually use every day? This is especially relevant for things like collaborative consumption platforms, the sharing economy. We're seeing explosion in these types of websites. We also have a lot of job websites for freelancers, where you can go and get a translation job, we get a couple of euros for it, a lot of these freelance job marketplaces. Well, these types of platforms can and should reserve a share for the users. So let's talk about a freelance job platform. Imagine if every time you transacted a job over one of those platforms, you earned a tiny share in that platform. That way, you wouldn't only be exploited by the platform, which by the way, all they're doing is driving down wages to match freelance wages in developing countries. You wouldn't just be exploited by it, but you'd actually benefit from its existence, and you'd be more likely to actually want to use it. So the idea of giving away a share to users is something that I think we'll see in the next few years, and I think it's a really smart thing for a website to do, because it retains loyalty. It would make people more likely to actually come back and continue using your website. So I want to give credit to Zachary Adam Green, who actually came up with this idea and blogged about it at falcfinger.net late last year. He said, it makes absolutely no sense that these job-finding platforms are not at the very least cooperatively owned enterprises, and I would agree. All right, so we've talked about the problem of free work. We've seen some of the reactions, freelancers and interns getting organized. We've seen some solutions, mutual societies, and new models of cooperatives and businesses. But let's go back to where we all started, this whole discussion, and let's have a chat about when is it okay to work for free? Because there may be some circumstances where you as an organization really can't afford to pay your staff, and you as an individual have to decide whether or not you are going to give your time to that organization. So let's have a chat about that. So these are my proposals about when it might be okay to work for free. It's okay to work for free when you get something out of it. So all the helping hands here at Republica, they're getting free tickets to Republica for the time that they're not working. And I had a chat to a few of them, and they told me that they think it's a pretty good deal, that they're happy with that exchange. So if you actually get genuine, valuable goods and services out of your time, then it might be okay to work for free. It's okay to work for free when the company has total transparency. Free-seeking companies should be forced to publish their accounts publicly. Everybody should know how much everyone from the CEO down is getting paid in that organization. Because an intern, everybody knows how much the intern is getting paid. Well, it's only fair that the intern gets to know how much the CEO and everyone else in the company gets paid too. So they can make an educated decision about whether to give their time to that organization. So maybe you can actually even try this. Next time someone asks you to work for free, turn around and ask them, how much are you getting paid? And how much is your boss getting paid? And where are the profits going? And maybe once you've heard their reaction, you can judge whether or not you think that organization is worth your time. Give it a go. Please. I'd love to hear your results about how that works out. At least it'll make a few people embarrassed. So maybe that'll change things. It's okay to work for free if the organization you're working for gives you shares, real shares, valuable shares. Phantom shares are also okay, but as long as they're linked to actual real value in the company. Or if that organization becomes a cooperative and you become a part owner of that actual structure. Now, why should a company do this? Well, my argument is that if you can't afford to pay your staff, you're not a business. You don't have a business model. So quit pretending to be a business and become some kind of worker owned enterprise instead. Now, I don't think it's okay that these sort of suggestions are merely suggestions or that they're dependent on the good will of people. I think they should be enforced by law. And that's why we need a coordinated organized effort of freelancers and interns. We need to come together, find collective goals, create effective campaigns, and send a message to businesses and governments. And that message is, can't pay, don't play. Now, I should point out that these sorts of suggestions that I've been making are not the agenda of the European Freelancers movement at the moment. They're my personal opinions. The Freelancers movement is working on goals that are decided between the organizations. And its future direction is going to be shaped democratically by everybody involved in it. But I personally hope that freelancers and interns seize the opportunity to radically reshape the business and working environment. Because for too long, businesses have been proving themselves greedy and they've been proving that they're too eager to exploit. Governments have proven that they're inept. Governments have proven that they don't have a clue about the realities of working in the flexible work world. So it's up to us, the coordinated freelancers and interns of Europe, to get together and tell them how to fix their problems and build solutions together when they fail to. So thank you very much. Thank you. John, actually, thank you for these thoughts. And I think there's a lot to reflect on, but because we stole five minutes in the beginning, we would like to add five minutes. Thank you. So and maybe somebody wants to open his mind and have a question or statement. Please come over here so the camera can put you a little bit in the light also. And yeah, five more minutes. And thank you, Joel, for this insight. Thanks for the lecture. It was very interesting. My question is, do we have to think about automation? That there's many work done by machines now that has been done by humans in the past. And it's the consequence of it that we are doing now in the service industry, like working nurseries, cutting hair, things that we want humans to do. That's the work that remains, or consultancy and things which are based on thoughts, on trust, on things like that. And doesn't it mean that this remaining work for the humans is less worth because there are many people doing it. We basically don't need them. So in Europe we see lots of young people, they are not needed. And what is your answer to it? You're definitely right. We're going to see automation affect a lot of industries and a lot of people who previously thought that they worked in secure environments and secure jobs are going to find that that's not the case at all. I mean, we're seeing predictions that that's going to affect everything from the legal industry down, you know, really high paid industries are going to be affected by this. And those people are going to suddenly find themselves in a precarious position, which is going to make it even more necessary for us to completely rethink the idea of our citizenship and our interaction in society. I think we need to decouple the idea of social benefits, the idea of, not even welfare, but this social security, the benefits that you receive as a citizen. That has to be decoupled from the fixed working contract like it is now, and it should float around and follow you between jobs. So no matter how you earn money, you should be able to contribute to society. And whenever you hit hard times, you should be able to get support for that. No matter whether you're a freelancer or a worker or not, we need to get rid of this idea that only people who work in certain conditions get benefits and other people who work in different conditions don't. It should be just level. Everyone works, everyone contributes, everyone should get support. And as for automation, I mean, it's going to be a big problem and it's going to force all of us to really ask some hard questions. And people have suggested that perhaps things like the minimum basic income, the citizens income, the Gundine common, might become a goal for something for the freelancers movement. Well, I personally think that that could happen and it could end up being one of our platforms, but that's a little bit down the track. We are the ones currently experiencing what the majority of people who experience in a few years' time. So we're doing the thinking about this now, but I'm pretty sure that the rest of society is going to have to catch up and join us in rethinking the way that all of these systems work. One more question, anybody? So you all have to do some hard thinking now. And please visit this website, freelancers-europe.org, please sign up our little five point manifesto. It just takes a couple of seconds and you'll be supporting freelancers trying to reshape society for the better. Thank you Joel. Thank you for...
pay will be told, don't play. So today what I we're about to see society stratified into an companies that can't be sued, there's social European countries that are currently building businesses what they think of the new policy. is the development of new business models that cities. I would like to see the freelancers and solutions, mutual societies, and new models of