Peer2Politics

In the context of our foresight project on the “sharing economy” we carried out a second workshop on 25-26 February. Building on the relevant drivers of change identified in the 1st workshop in December 2015, a set of four future scenarios was developed to be further enriched and used as a basis for discussion. About 40 participants from “sharing economy” platforms, academia, international organisations, trade unions, agency work industry, think tanks, and Commission Services shared their views and ideas about future platform-mediated labour markets, a sector of the ‘sharing economy’ with potentially strong implications for the future of work, and the focus of this workshop.

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Ever since the implications of the ‘silicon chip’ for work first penetrated public awareness back in the 1970s, commentators have prophesied the end of the 20th century post-war model of stable, full-time, permanent employment. At first, attention focused on the deskilling effects of digitisation and the mass unemployment that might result from computerised automation. In the 1980s attention shifted to the potential of communications technologies to relocate employment in the form of teleworking. By the 1990s, when global telecommunications networks were in place and the Internet was born, the discourse opened up to encompass worries about offshore outsourcing of digitised services. Now, in the 21st century, there are similar fears: on the one hand, a resurfacing of concerns that the use of robots will destroy skilled jobs, and, on the other, apprehension about the implications of a development for which there is not yet even an agreed name: the exponentially spreading use of online platforms for managing work.