Not All Platforms Are Evil
Platforms aren’t very popular these days. Uber is being challenged in court everywhere. Many people can’t forget the accusations of sexism levelled at Uber and employee Susan Fowler’s edifying story of sexual harassment — she even made it to FT Person of the Year!
Platforms conjure up apocalyptic images of a ruthless world where there is too little work left and whatever work is left is served up on a platform to whoever will be the lowest bidder. Thus the “platformization” of work is said to destroy our social compound, our institutions and the livelihood of workers. Platforms are accused of causing a race to the bottom that condemns workers to an insecure life of low-paid gigs. Some of these workers are even sentenced to brave the cold and the rain to deliver hot meals to rich carefree urbanites.
Of course that image is a gross exaggeration at best, an ideological distortion of reality at worst. Perhaps platformization is not so bad after all. But most of all, the problem with that picture is the oversimplification that comes with it.
Not all platforms are the same
Their business models vary. So does their strategic positioning. In fact, the world of platforms is as varied as that of companies. Saying that all platforms are evil is like saying that all companies are evil. Some people will go so far as to say that, but they generally place themselves at an extremity of the ideological spectrum.
Two-sided platforms (sellers and buyers) like Amazon, Alibaba, Airbnb, Uber, and the like have taken on many markets and transformed the economy in just a little more than a decade. Their ruthlessness and the speed of their development can be attributed to network effects. In the presence of such effects, theirs is a race to win all of their market. Growing fast is vital. In their pursuit of growth some of these platforms have brought about a deflationary spiral, whereby buyers have access to ever cheaper services.
As a result, with some of these platforms, workers have become a mere commodity. Unable to put forward their unique qualities, they have to compete with the lowest bidders. In IT services, the lowest bidders live in emerging countries where the cost of life is low. In other fields the lowest bidders are amateurs trying to complement their revenues. In transportation services, workers are also a commodity who don’t get to decide their prices: they may have a name and a grade but they are interchangeable. Yes, work platforms got their bad rep for a reason.
But what if commoditization was not inevitable? What if there were platforms that reversed the logic of commoditization? What if there was a bright upside-down to the dark world of online work platforms?
I’m a personal admirer of the platform Etsy that allows talented makers to put forward their unique craftsmanship. There’s an example of a platform that doesn’t deal in “commodities”. Another example is Airbnb, which now enables people to host unique “experiences”. I chose to work with another such platform, Malt, that empowers workers to bring out their uniqueness, so they can escape commoditization and make a living. Because in an increasingly commoditized world, brand is everything. And you can get help building that brand…
The task-centered approach has had mixed results
To disrupt their markets, i.e. offer cheaper and more widely available services, most platforms are task-oriented.
When you use Uber, for example, you buy a ride. If you want, you can refuse a driver because of his low grade, but in no way will you be encouraged to choose a driver based on his personality, the quality of his driving, the specific vehicle he drives or the languages he speaks. Drivers are fundamentally a fungible resource. They may have names and grades, but they are interchangeable. There are too few elements that can be personalised on the platform for them not to be interchangeable: they can’t fix their prices, they can’t bring out their specific skills (languages, specific knowledge, other services), they can’t exist as individuals.
Likewise with a lot of other platforms, you get to purchase a service or a task, not to hire a person for a service or a task. The idea is that the more these workers will be a commodity, the cheaper their services can be, the more buyers will be lured in and the faster the growth for the platform. That’s why the uniqueness of each worker matters very little. The value is in the customer, not the worker. Ultimately workers will be automated. Uber has made no secret of its intention to switch to self-driving cars in a not-too-distant future… Less fuss, really.
As for IT services, accounting and other theoretically more “skilled” tasks, platforms can achieve the same goal of commoditization thanks to the bargain of remote workers in emerging countries. India-based IT services are cheap. And there is no putting forward the uniqueness of individual workers because American and European customers aren’t even supposed to know the services they buy are performed by people so far from them. Or they don’t care because these workers are too far from them for their “uniqueness” to be relevant in any way.
The task-centered approach has had mixed results at best. Some platforms like Uber may have conquered large markets but their controversial commoditization of workers is one of the reasons there are so many attacks against them. Other platforms have tried to emulate Uber in other sectors but have failed because the approach didn’t quite fit. In cleaning services, for example, Taylorism, outsourcing and depreciation have shown their limits. Cleaning one’s house or office involves trust, reliability, skills and interpersonal relationships. Hence in that sector, no platform has hit the jackpot yet. I wrote at length about it in this article:
“Many platforms have tried to offer cleaning personnel on demand. But because they offered it as a commodity, a fungible resource to be as cheap as possible, they haven’t been very successful at it. Platforms like Handy have a high no show rate. And sending a different person each week just doesn’t work because no trust can be established. Both cleaners and customers, who have felt nothing but frustration, give renewed credence to the following universal truth: If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”
From task-centered to human-centered
Long-term, the deflationary spiral brought about by task-centered work platforms is destructive for workers. But at some point it is also not necessarily good business. Consumers have changed too. They will consume less and less fungible commodities and more and more unique experiences. They want to find meaning in what they buy. They are moving away from the world of Taylorism. That’s one of the reasons traditional retailers are suffering right now. They want more singularity and less mass consumption. The idea behind Etsy (“Shop for anything from creative people everywhere”) was precisely to provide unique individuals with a platform to sell their creations.
I personally believe that the future of work can be bright only if individual workers, whatever their skills, are empowered to leverage their uniqueness. A lot of tomorrow’s jobs will consist in caring for other people: these may sometimes be regarded as “low-skilled”, but they are the least automatable jobs and involve trust, emotions, relationships… (In truth they also involve skills, but that’s another subject, which I also wrote about in the article about the “cleaning craft”).
As far as “skilled” jobs are concerned, those that are not outsourced or automated by sophisticated software will also be saved by “uniqueness”. The workers who will learn to leverage their unique personalities, networks, and stories will have a bright future. More and more of them will be freelancers because once you’ve learned how to leverage your uniqueness you might as well be free too. And because freelancing is the best way to leverage your uniqueness.
Malt’s founders insist “100% remote” is not the way of the future of work, not because they believe in 9-to-5 jobs with no possibility of parole, but because they believe that as a worker you must have grown some local roots to leverage your uniqueness. Malt is a platform that is “human-centered” so workers can be empowered rather than commoditized. They can find help (with the platform and the community) to create their brand, grow their reputation, increase their reach…so they can also raise their prices and become “stars”.
“In four years we have developed a model that is radically different from what other marketplaces offer. Most of the other marketplaces offer tasks or services on demand, rather than talents on demand, which leads to ever lower prices and more and more inefficient offshoring. We are human-centered, not task-centered. We believe freelancers who share your geography and who you truly interact with will do a better job.”
Meanwhile, companies that buy the services of freelancers on human-centered platforms are happy to establish human relationships based on trust, to hire individuals for their uniqueness and benefit from their creativity, to find the most-talented workers who will help them be more innovative and stay on top of the game. And yes, often they will accept to pay a little bit more for that.
Because it is human-centered (and therefore also relationship-centered), Malt is not yet a global platform: the 60,000 freelancers and 30,000 companies who use the platform in France make it a strong local actor in the country. Malt launched in Spain just a few months ago and aims to export its model to other European countries in the coming months and years. What its French success proves is that the model is not only viable but also satisfies needs that had not been satisfied before.
Fixing one’s prices and building a career
Not all platforms are the same. Besides the possibility of putting forward your singularity, another key criterion to distinguish between platforms is also the ability to fix the price of what you’re selling. In fact the two things really go together. Deliveroo riders do not fix their prices: they are absolutely interchangeable.
On human-centered platforms workers get to fix their prices. Their starting price may be lower than the stars in their fields, but once they build a reputation, they will raise them. Though each worker is unique, they can get an idea of market prices by looking at what their peers are doing in their field. All those who are bad at estimating their worth (often women: I recommend the excellent book Why Women Don’t Ask) and have a tendency to charge less than they are worth can learn to adjust their prices.
Not seeing the wood for the trees: focusing only on Uber prevents us from seeing the platforms that will make the future of work more human. Rather than treating workers as commodities, some platforms are committed to helping them build a career and become stars, helping their members leverage a community and defend their interests. They aim at promoting quality and human relationships at work. Those platforms that aren’t “evil” have a secret: they heed the fact that Taylorism is dead.
After all, aren’t interchangeability and fungibility better suited for AI and robots? Too much time and energy have been spent discussing AI singularity. It’s high time we understood that the future of work lies in human singularity instead.
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