Power and accountability in the digital economy

Monday 6 November 2017
18:00 – 20:00
The Glass Room, 69 – 71 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H

Event hosted by Tactical Tech and Mozilla. 

The digital economy is transforming people’s experience of work, and poses questions of power, accountability and control. How is work changing in the digital economy? How should we be thinking about ownership and control, especially with the rise of platform capitalism? And what are the opportunities and mechanisms available for organising and fighting back? In this workshop, led by members of the New Economics Foundation, Co​-Worker​.org and the London School of Economics, we bring together activists, researchers and campaigners for a lively discussion with insight from the UK and the US.

About the Speakers

Stefan Baskerville is Principal Director for Unions and Business at the New Economics Foundation. His interests are in political economy, the future of work, organising and campaigns. In a previous role at Citizens UK, he was part of the team that ran the Living Wage campaign and established the Living Wage Foundation.

Duncan McCann is a researcher at the New Economics Foundation. His research focuses on creating a 21st century commons looking at how we re-structure societies’ principal institutions to meet the needs of people in the future. He has published work rethinking how the structure of money, land and the corporation could benefit everyone. His current research interests are in how we harness the positive potential of the digital economy and create collectively owned pools of wealth.

Michelle Miller is Co-Director of Coworker​.org, a global platform to advance change in the workplace facilitating campaigns at Starbucks and Netflix among many others. She is a nationally recognised leader on the future of emerging models of worker power. She is a 2014 Echoing Green Fellow, JM Kaplan Innovation Fellow and 2012 Fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for the Working Poor.

Dr Jamie Woodcock is a Fellow at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Working the Phones, a study of a call centre in the UK inspired by the workers’ inquiry. His current research involves developing this method in co-research projects with Deliveroo drivers and other digital workers in the so-called gig economy. His research interests focus on digital labour, the sociology of work, the gig economy and resistance.