Innovating the Labor Movement

Experiment. Reflect. Re-assess. Repeat

At The Workers Lab we have been experimenting with the ways that technology can be used to build power for workers. We’ve built a mobile game in partnership with the Restaurant Opportunity Center United as a training tool for low-wage restaurant workers. We’ve supported the creation of a digital platform, Together We Work, to explore the ways digital tools are being used by young people at work. Our latest endeavor is the creation of an app called WorkerReport designed to support people fighting wage theft and health and safety violations where they work. We are taking a step back now to reflect and re-assess as we believe in transparency and the value of shared learning, regardless of success or setbacks.

The idea for WorkerReport began with conversations with leaders in the #fightfor15 movement. As cities across the country fought to pass higher minimum wages there was a concern that the inability to enforce existing laws would undermine future efforts. If we can’t even get employees the wages they already earn and deserve, leaders asked, how can we ensure that the additional gains we are asking for will be enforced?

Wage theft is estimated to cost American workers over $50 billion a year, more than three times the amount from all of the robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts combined. Simply put, the largest heist in America is from its workers and only a fraction of stolen wages are able to be recovered through legal enforcement. In 2012, for example, the Department of Labor recovered $300 million in unpaid wages, an impressive sum but still not enough to protect the workers who fall through the cracks, workers like Anna.

Anna was working in Seattle as a janitor when her employer stopped paying her. One month went by, then two. By the third month without a paycheck Anna, a single mother from Mexico, found herself looking at an eviction notice from her landlord. She was behind rent and had not been paid the nearly $5,000 she’d rightfully earned.

Fortunately, Anna was able to receive her wages and keep her apartment by enlisting the legal support of Fair Work Center, a worker center in Seattle. Yet for every Anna there are others, especially women, people of color, immigrants and refugees, who are not able to access the resources they need. Could technology play a role in filling this critical gap at scale? This is what we set out to understand by launching WorkerReport.

As the R&D lab for new models of building power for workers, The Workers Lab is well positioned to experiment. To build and launch WorkerReport we partnered with the National Employment Law Project and the Ford Foundation to explore the following questions:

• Can technology play a role in building power for non-unionized workers?
• How do we design an app that a wide-range of workers will use?
• Can worker centers use one app to educate and organize workers while enforcing the law?

Last summer, we issued a call for proposals and ultimately decided on partnering with the three worker centers in Oakland, CA Seattle, WA and San Jose, CA:

East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy,

Fair Work Center

Santa Clara County Wage Theft Coalition.

A team of developers from See Click Fix built the actual app and in August the three centers began handing out WorkerReport flyers and educating their clients one on one. Four months since the launch, have we learned that an app can be effective in fighting wage theft for workers?

The early answer: no.

To date we have seen little adoption of the WorkerReport app and have hypothesized a few reasons why this is the case.

Firstly, apps are not a panacea. Tech is more sophisticated than ever before, but it can’t solve everything. For example, one root of the wage theft problem is a cultural norm that jobs are supposed to be bad. If a worker assumes that they will be treated poorly and will be generally miserable at work, it doesn’t matter what fancy tech tool they have because they don’t see anything wrong. Reality is meeting expectation. We would have to change the expectation of work itself before an app could be useful. Shifting culture is certainly beyond the scope of tech alone.

Secondly, even within the realm of tech use there are limitations. Most mobile apps are being deleted after only a few uses and on average over 50% of apps are used less than 10 times. Compound that with the fact that little is known about mobile app usage amongst immigrant and refugee communities and you have a low likelihood that individual users would adopt WorkerReport en masse.

Thirdly, our focus on partnering with worker centers was incorrect. Our initial approach was to partner with local worker centers for distribution directly to workers as the end users. However worker centers alone do not have the scale or brand trust required for effective distribution and marketing of apps. We chose these organizations over public sector partners assuming that they would perform better although now we are more critical of the privatization of public functions. Perhaps government partners could be a more suitable alternative. Or perhaps a more effective investment would be to directly fund organizers to demand greater enforcement from government.

Or not.

Regardless of the outcome, we will continue to share our insights and experiment with new ways of building power for workers. Then we’ll reflect, re-assess and repeat.