Work

The UK Data and the Future of Work report by Hettie O’Brien and Mathew Lawrence offers the following Policy Recommendations

Waged labour is defined by sharp asymmetries of power between workers and employers. This imbalance – which reflects and reproduces stark background inequalities of power and resources in our society – structures the nature and purpose of work, hardwires relations of domination and exploitation into the labour market, and enables the upwards extraction and concentration of surplus value from labour to capital. Work in the platform economy – defined on unequal terms, with minimal scope for collective bargaining, and without the hard-won protections of the employment relationship – sharply intensifies these processes.

The effects of Covid-19 have both exposed and amplified long-standing inequalities in work. Its impacts have been unevenly felt, with working class and ethnic minority people hardest hit economically and in health terms – the virus may not discriminate, but how we organise our society does, both structurally and systematically. What’s more, as much of the economy has gone into economic hibernation, emerging fitfully to an uncertain future, the platform giants have thrived. Absent change, Covid-19 is likely to lead to a dramatic upwards shift in ownership and control within the economy, consolidating among the tech monopolies and other major corporations. This consolidation of power will inevitably have important and further disequalising consequences for the organisation of work and the distribution of wealth.

Yet the crisis has also reminded us what forms of work are truly essential: the work of producing and sustaining life, that is too often undervalued and ignored, deliberately made invisible and insecure. A new common sense is rapidly emerging, one that insists we can and must build back better, not just by reinflating the old economy, with its insecurities and structural inequalities, but by building a new economy that is reparative, sustainable, and just by design. This would meet a systems crisis with an agenda for systemic change. In place of the economics of enclosure and extraction, a 21st century commons founded on stewardship; in place of concentrated economic power, a new ecosystem of democratic ownership, governance and control to reimagine how we create and distribute wealth; against austerity, an ambitious mission-oriented investing state, new models of public ownership and a reimagined household economy that challenges sharp hierarchies and injustices.

We are in a moment of rupture, our future undetermined. The need for a new settlement is clear; on what foundations, in whose interest it will be built, remains to be decided, the subject of politics and struggle in all its dimensions. There is no guarantee the crisis will not be resolved on terms that deepen inequality and further hollow out the capacity of democratic action to decide and order our collective futures. If this is to be a generative moment, transformation must centre a politics of work that actively extends democracy, secures dignity for everyone, and ensures we share in the wealth we create in common.

Securing a future of good work for all requires overcoming the inequalities that structure work. Work reimagined should bring to life an “alternative vision of wealth and experiment in ways in which human labour can be employed for the production of solidarities, mutual pleasures, and beauty,” shaped by “accountable procedures, open to participation and responsive to needs.” The extension of social control over economic institutions can ensure people have “broadly equal access to the necessary means to participate meaningfully in decisions” affecting their lives, with workplaces reorganised as spaces to pursue “people’s development and exercise of their creative and productive capacities in cooperation with others.” And it means centring and supporting new forms of labour and value, rooted in solidarity, care and creation. As Alyssa Battistoni writes, work should be “oriented toward sustaining and improving human life as well as the lives of other species who share our world.”

Three foundational steps are required to secure this alternative future of work.

First, to overcome the power imbalance that structures work and leaves too many insecure, we need a new deal at work that guarantees vital protections and security for all workers. This should include both stronger and properly enforced employment rights for all and unions with a strengthened ability to negotiate better terms and conditions for workers. The decriminalisation of work for migrants, as outlined by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, should be a crucial part of this agenda, ensuring that employment rights are respected regardless of citizenship.

Second, to address the background inequalities of resource that structure the asymmetrical terms on which work is organised, we need to guarantee a minimum income for all through a comprehensive social security system and an ambitious universal basic services agenda, ensuring people can live freely and well outside of the market, with the power and security to exit from bad forms of work.

Third, to reshape the company from a space of private control to a social institution in which workers and society have a genuine stake and a say, we need to reallocate and democratise coordination rights within the firm.

Finally, we need to adopt specific measures that reimagine the use of platform technologies to better support the capacity of workers to organise, bargain, and creatively experiment, rather than erode their rights and undermine collective power. First, by ensuring the collection and use of data at work and the development and application of digital technologies within the workplace is determined by collective bargaining agreement. Second, by establishing sectoral ‘data trusts’ to provide workers and trade unions with the information needed to bargain and organise more effectively. And finally, by developing democratic and universal digital infrastructures, including the scaling of co-operative and worker-owned platforms, that enhance the ability of workers to organise for better terms, conditions and pay. 

Guaranteed rights, universal security, democratised workplaces 

1. Securing worker rights: an emergency response 

As part of a package of emergency Covid-19 recovery legislation, a comprehensive new set of labour rights should be introduced. This should include specific measures to guarantee rights and securities to platform workers as well as steps to rebalance power at work more broadly to ensure we emerge from the crisis with a fairer, more secure, and equitable world of work. As the TUC and the Institute of Employment Rights  among others have argued for, this should include:

• The creation of a new ‘worker’ definition to cover all existing employees and workers, including agency workers, dependent contractors, and people on zero-hours contracts, helping end bogus self-employment and raising the floor for all, regardless of status. All workers should benefit from a guaranteed, strong set of rights from day one. These should include statutory redundancy pay, family-friendly rights including maternity, paternity and adoption leave, holiday pay, protection from unfair dismissal, a clear setting out of their pay and conditions including hours, the payment for breaks during shifts, and union rights. 

• As the TUC set out in their response to the Taylor Review, there should be a statutory presumption that all individuals qualify as employees unless the employer can demonstrate in an employment tribunal that they are genuinely self-employed. 

• An end to zero-hours contracts, replaced with contracts that provide a minimum number of guaranteed hours and have a premium rate for overtime. 

• A new duty to provide harassment-free workplaces and the inclusion of socio-economic status in protected characteristics. 

• Stronger and more equitable family-friendly rights, including two month paternity leave on full pay and three months leave to be shared flexibly between parents or carers, for when the child is slightly older; the right to request flexible working to enable people to better balance work and family life; and stronger protections against unfair dismissal for all workers; statutory bereavement leave; 

• Tribunal fees should be abolished so that all workers can enforce their rights and help rebalance power at work. Agencies enforcing worker rights should be properly resourced and support all workers, including undocumented workers. 

• The successful sectoral licensing approach of the Gangmasters Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) should be extended to types of occupation that suffer from high levels of exploitation and insecurity, including key sections of the platform economy. 

• Employers should be required to devise and implement, with the input of the workforce, plans to eradicate pay gaps based on gender, race, and/or disability, with fines for those who have not eradicated such pay inequalities. Alongside new rights, action is needed to reform the legal framework which governs trade union rights, which as the Institute for Employment Relations have found, “are the most restrictive in the Western World. This is indisputable in relation to the right to trade union autonomy, right to strike, and the right to bargain collectively.” As a result, collective bargaining coverage in the UK has collapsed, covering just 14.7% of workers in the private sector and only 26% of workers overall. To address this, a new framework to expand collective bargaining at both a sectoral and enterprise should be introduced that will improve working conditions and pay, reduce wage inequality, support good employers, improve productivity, and strengthen workplace democracy. Strengthening collective bargaining – at both a sectoral and enterprise level – is vital in a changing world of work. It will enable both workers and companies to adapt to new forms of work. It would ensure the collective voice of workers shapes the design of company strategies, particularly those that relate to the deployment of new technologies and ensure the gains of new technologies are fairly shared among capital and labour. 

• Giving trade unions right of entry to organise, recruit and represent their members in the workplace – and across multisite organisations – to accelerate the recent uptick in union membership. This should include a ‘digital right of access’ to enable unions to communicate with workers electronically, including organising platform workers. Union representatives should have the right to facility time (paid time off) for union work, including organising, recruiting, and representing members. 

• The threshold for union recognition in a workplace should be lowered to 10% union membership and evidence of majority support through signatures or a card check. 

• Prohibit union-busting and repeal the 2016 Trade Union Act, which makes collective bargaining more difficult. 

• Re-establish sectoral collective bargaining with bargaining to cover pay and conditions, working time and holidays, dispute settlement, job security, health and safety, gender equality, workplace equalities relating to ethnicity, class and other protected characteristics, pensions, and training and development. A new Sectoral Employment Commission (SEC), which can identify categories of work and initiate negotiations between the two sides of industry over the baseline terms and conditions of the sector for all workers and employers within the industry, should be created. Sector negotiating bodies should include an equal number of employers and trade union representatives. Sectoral bargaining should be rolled out in key sectors of the everyday economy to begin, including care, hospitality, retail, manufacturing, agriculture, telecommunications, and transport and logistics. Where sectors are primarily overseen by devolved administrations, sectoral bargaining should be organised on the same scale. Sectoral bargaining mechanisms in these sectors should also cover work organised through platforms. 

• As part of a renewal of collective bargaining, Acas’ duty to promote collective bargaining should be restored and public procurement rules should favour contracts that use negotiated terms and conditions. 

• Sectoral bargaining should also be mandated to negotiate reductions in working time without loss of pay, ensuring the benefits of increases in productivity are fairly shared. 

• Alongside sectoral bargaining, a revival of enterprise level bargaining is needed, focusing on how day to day practices are organised at work as well as specific contractual terms and conditions, which it is important workers have a collective ability to influence, over and above the high base-line of terms, conditions and equitable wage growth established by sectoral bargaining. 

• Existing information and consultation rights should be expanded and consolidated into a new system of elected work councils which would have binding rights on workplace matters, including health and safety, negotiating economic and managerial change, working time and breaks. 

2. Guaranteeing economic security: providing a minimum income for all

The UK’s social security system is weak by international and historical comparison: “total out-of-work payments received by UK employees are on average around 34% of their previous in-work income – the third lowest among 35 OECD advanced economies. And at 15% of average earnings, the main adult unemployment payment is worth less than at any time since the 1948 creation of the welfare state.” In the midst of the deepest recession in 300 years, it is inadequate as a safety net and cannot provide the countervailing security that empowers people to only accept good, well-paid forms of work.

To address this, we therefore support calls for a temporary and generous minimum income guarantee that would, as Alfie Stirling and Sarah Arnold argue, put in place a “comprehensive, sufficient, non-conditional, non-means tested at the point of access, minimum income floor to catch everyone who is currently missed out by the job retention scheme and the self-employed income support scheme.” As set out by NEF this should build on the current social security system, based on the following pillars:

• Value: Every working age adult who is not covered by either the job retention scheme or the self-employed income support scheme will be entitled to a weekly payment worth £221 per week. 

• Administration: All working age adults would be entitled Existing claimants would experience an automatic top-up to their current benefits; new claimants will receive payment through the advance payment system for UC. 

• Entitlement: All working age adults who are eligible should be able to apply. 

• Cost: modelling from NEF suggests that an emergency minimum income guarantee scheme over three months would cost around £20 billion, funded by government borrowing.

The proposed design is a temporary, debt-funded response to the economic emergency, but a permanent minimum income guarantee programme – funded out of general taxation – would be a powerful alternative to the UK’s current and inadequate social security system, one that would reduce poverty and inequality and improve economic security, striking at a key power imbalance that shapes the UK’s labour market.

Alongside this, though beyond the scope of this paper, we support the extension of the universal basic services agenda that would progressively decommodify the building blocks of modern life, from broadband to transport, housing to food. This will require making and winning the case for a more progressive tax system and a new arrangement of ownership and control of foundational goods and services.

3. Democratising the firm: reallocating coordination rights

Work is shaped by how economic economic coordination rights are allocated and to whom, determining who has the authority to manage and decide. Today, economic co-ordination is primarily organised through the capitalist firm with co-ordination rights allocated on the basis of ownership of capital and where the purpose of activity is to maximise shareholder wealth. This is a sharply hierarchical, concentrated approach, with capital monopolising decision-making power. Economic coordination rights in the corporation are assigned exclusively to capital through shareholding; labour and other non-property holding stakeholders are excluded from the government of the company. Meanwhile the ability of workers to co-ordinate through trade unions and collective bargaining is limited and subject to legal and political pressure. In other words, property-holders are free to associate, combine, and coordinate; workers’ freedom to do the same is sharply circumscribed. That organised capital is granted extensive co-ordination rights relative to organised labour underpins the sharp asymmetries of power at work that structures the terms and conditions of employment and underpins wider inequalities of wealth and authority in the economy.

This is by design. Capitalism, as the labour law scholar Sanjukta Paul argues, is a mechanism for narrowly concentrating economic co-ordination among the owners and agents of capital. The alternative must challenge this concentration of power and control by reallocating and democratising economic coordination rights, both at the firm and economy-wide level. The platform economy exacerbates these trends. Platforms erode the traditional employment relationship, shifting insecurity and risk onto the worker and eroding the protections and rights of the employment relationship. At the same time, even as platform companies coordinate entire markets, setting the terms, conditions and prices of work, the ability of platform workers to organise is heavily restricted. ‘Big Tech’ - and other large companies - are legally privileged to co-ordinate on a vast scale, while the ability of workers to coordinate, both within firms and across sectors, is limited and narrow. This is not because of the technologies but rather the assemblage of laws and regulations that concentrate economic co-ordination rights overwhelmingly with the platform companies. As Paul argues,

… [O]wners/investors do not just benefit from combining the economic power of their capital. In markets where there is a price premium to be realized from coordination, they also benefit from combining the power of others’ labor. They coordinate the prices of services others perform, through the mechanism of the firm (and thereby realize any premium), while the service-providers themselves, if they are not employees, are barred by anti trust law from benefiting from the economic power of their own combination.

A central task in transforming work is therefore reallocating economic co-ordination rights within the firm and beyond, institutionalising alternative forms of economic association and control, scaling a more pluralistic landscape of genuinely inclusive, democratic and purposeful enterprise. This requires an act of unmasking. Too often the existing distribution of rights and powers within the firm is cast as a fixed, natural state, pre-existing politics. Yet the monopolisation of co-ordination rights by capital is not “natural” but constituted by law and politics. The corporation is not a Hayekian institution of ‘spontaneous ordering’, a space of private contract and property whose actions should be insulated entirely from democratic intervention, but rather one undergirded and made possible by public power, its rights and powers publicly granted, legally defined, and re-codable.

If coordination rights that structure all economic activity are publicly granted, allocated and sustained through law and public action, a form of privilege and social franchise, then it is possible to reimagine their allocation, constructing very different types of enterprise, governed by different logics, supporting different forms of work. The goal, then, is to reclaim enterprise as a social and generative institution of the commons: purposeful and democratically governed, where all its stakeholders have stake and a say, with workers having participation rights based on the reallocation and democratisation of coordination.

To that end, the following measures are required to reallocate and democratise economic coordination rights within the company. The following should apply to all enterprises regardless of legal form, size, across corporate groups, including foreign entities with their real seat in the UK:

• To reshape company purpose and end shareholder primacy, Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 should be amended to make the promotion of the long-term success of a company for the benefit of its key stakeholders, including employees, the primary duty of its directors, not the maximisation of shareholder interest. 

• To democratise corporate governance, 45% of a company board should be elected by the workforce, 45% by the shareholder body, with the remainder representing social and environmental interests. 

• To extend the economic franchise to workers, workers as a collective should be entitled to a minimum of 25% of the total voting rights in their company and have the right to be registered as a member of their company. 

• To give workers a share in the profits they help create, mandatory profit sharing for workers in companies above 50 employees should be introduced, as in France. 

• To democratise capital markets, there should be codetermination in capital and pension funds, with a prohibition on asset managers voting without instruction. 

4. The collection and use of data at work and the development and application of digital technologies within the workplace should be determined by collective bargaining agreement

In addition to negotiating wages and conditions, all collective bargaining agreements (both sectoral or enterprise-based) should be required to negotiate over the collection and use of data during work as well as the adoption and use of technologies that impact the experience of work.

The goal of including the use of digital technologies in collective bargaining agreements is to allow workers to shape the development and application of technologies which intimately pattern how they work as well as shaping the distribution of power between workforce and management. Without this countervailing force, technologies are likely to amplify existing inequalities in pay and conditions and weaken the protections afforded by the employment relationship.

Collective bargaining agreements should include the following:

• The right to have full transparency in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and how they intervene to shape working practices through the adoption of an algorithmic “black box”. This would be a device that records information about how AI and data-systems work and record all decisions (and decision-making trees). This data should be easily accessible, understandable, and uncomplicated, enabling workers to quickly understand how technical systems operate and their effects on working conditions. 

• The right for workers to collectively determine how data collecting technologies are introduced, including a final say on the introduction and use of surveillance and monitoring technologies, and ensure workers can co-determine the development and deployment of AI systems. 

• The right to co-design algorithmic systems that form decision-making processes and impact on working conditions, including ensuring algorithmic accountability. 

• The right to access and use data generated by workers to improve working conditions, including protecting “time sovereignty” – the ability to exercise control and balance over one’s own work time – and the use of data to strengthen the hand of the workforce during collective bargaining negotiations. 

• The right to a “human-in-command” approach, whereby workers can determine how legal control and responsibility over machines is exercised, including a right of explanation over machine-based decision-making processes. 

• The “right to disconnect”, based on the French model where a series of sectoral bargaining agreements have ensured workers are not required to send or answer emails outside of work hours, should be included in negotiations. 

• The right to ban certain forms of data collecting or analysis when it infringes on the privacy, rights, or wellbeing of the workforce.

Collective bargaining agreements must extend to those whose work is organised through digital platforms; these workers should also be recognised as employees. There is ample precedent for this. For example, in both Norway and Denmark, Deliveroo workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

Legislation to embed sectoral collective bargaining – including over the development and use of technologies and technical systems – should be accompanied by a review of employment law, integrating a new set of principles into the ethical use of AI and machine technologies into legislation. At an international level, the UK should lobby for a new International Labour Organization (ILO) instrument setting out minimum rights and protections for platform workers internationally. This should be ambitious; as a minimum, it should mandate that platform workers in the UK and globally enjoy the rights set out in the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. One analogy would be the Maritime Labour Convention, a global labour code for seafarers which helps guarantee decent conditions for workers who work across borders.

5. Establish sectoral ‘data trusts’ to provide workers and trade unions with the information needed to bargain and organise more effectively

The asymmetry in information between workers and employers – heightened by inequalities in access to data and the insights it generates – further cements power imbalances at work. To address this, relevant sets of data should be made accessible to workers and trade unions, at both the enterprise and sectoral level. By providing them with a better view of both individual and aggregate earnings, conditions and employment status, the pooling of data can enable workers to better understand their work and conditions and help unions better organise, campaign, enforce existing rights, and collectively bargain. As Worker Info Exchange argues, it can help workers in the platform economy gain employee status recognition or enable trade unions to use information as leverage for collective bargaining to improve pay and conditions.

To that end, sectoral data trusts should be established as part of the sectoral collective bargaining process, with the aim of creating an expanding data commons. One example of such an effort would be to establish data trusts – an autonomous legal body that acts as a custodian and steward of a specific data set, making sure that the data is shared safely and democratically. A Data Trust could help build the policy foundations for a process of data commoning – guaranteeing that collective data is anonymised, decommodified and working towards public interests, rather than serving the shareholders of platform monopolies.

As part of sectoral collective bargaining agreements, companies should be required to provide to the sector data trust a set of agreed datasets, such as wages, conditions, and employment status of the workforce, suitably anonymised with respect to privacy. Trade unions, individual workers, and civil society organisations would be able to request access to the data from the data trust. The trust should provide analytical support to help users analyse the data, generating insights that can help them intervene more effectively in the workplace.

The Open Data Institute has recently set out – based on three pilots – recommended best practice for how trusts could be established, governed, and populated with relevant data; these should inform how sectoral data trusts are established, their governance, and what forms of data are required and the terms of access and use. These principles should be drawn upon in the design and operation of sectoral data trusts.

In addition to the sectoral data trusts, the 2018 EU General Data Protection Regulation, enacted through national legislation in the UK, gives individuals significant powers to demand access to all of their personal data at work, as well as fairness and transparency in how their data is processed. However, to make these rights effective, support should be given to organisations helping individuals and groups enforce their data rights. To this end, a “Democratising Data Fund” should be created to help workers and civil society gain access to and better use data collected at work to improve pay and conditions.

6. Building a democratic and universal digital infrastructure

A new landscape of data trusts that protect privacy while enhancing the ability of workers to coordinate and bargain should be underpinned by a 21st century digital infrastructure that is democratic and universal. Delivering that will require moving beyond the “regulatory state” and market-oriented approaches that have dominated the development of the UK’s digital infrastructure in recent decades – and which have led to the slow roll-out of vital infrastructures like full fibre broadband, a deep digital divide, and sharp imbalances in power that benefit the owners of digital platforms at the expense of labour. Instead, a new set of institutional arrangements based on the democratic ownership and governance of digital, data and knowledge infrastructures is required to lay the foundations for a thriving society and democratic economy.

A democratic 21st century digital infrastructure – developed to meet the needs of people and planet – can open up a more innovative future that better serves workers and society, from the creation of national data funds and collective data banks to intervening around algorithmic systems; from reshaping platform work to socialising “feedback infrastructures”; to exploring how data infrastructure can be remade as sites of participation around both local and national issues. Reshaping the UK’s infrastructure – digital and physical – can drive wider changes in social, economic and ecological relations, changing the purpose of connectivity – challenging exploitative platforms and algorithms and supporting alternative ways to use digital technologies that are pro-labour.

Public policy should therefore seek to reshape how digital infrastructure is deployed and owned, as well as how data is produced and distributed, moving from conditions of private enclosure to a data commons. As Common Wealth have argued in Full Fibre Future and Democratic Digital Infrastructure, organising digital infrastructure – the rollout and maintenance of fibre optic connection and 5G in particular – should be a vital 21st century public infrastructure. To that end, the following is recommended: 

1. A new public infrastructure company should be tasked with rolling out a nationwide full fibre network by 2030 – delivering a digital network faster, cheaper, and more equitably than by private competition, and undercutting the incentive for network providers to support harmful forms of surveillance technologies. 

2. A publicly owned cloud service option should be examined, operating as an alternative to existing providers with an emphasis on data security and the ethical use of information. 

3. The development of a digital industrial strategy – with public investment and organised labour at its heart – to develop democratic technological sovereignty, including: 

• The introduction of documented open standards to ensure interoperability and inhibit the development of IP monopolies. 

• A new open software license regime for technical developments funded by public money. 

• Scaling alternative business models to democratise economic structures, such as platform cooperatives co-owned by workers and users.