Ms Uma Rani, Senior Economist at the ILO Research department participated at the third session of the Coop Academy session entitled “The cooperative model: the role of digital labour platforms in transforming the world of work” as a speaker. The session that took place on Friday 5th of March was organised within the framework partnership agreement between ICA and the European Union (#coops4dev).

 

Ms Rani started by presenting highlights from the 2021 edition of the ILO’s World Economic and Social Outlook report on “The role of digital labour platforms in transforming the world of work”. She noted this ILO flagship report explores how the contemporary platform economy is transforming the way work is organized, analyzing the impact of digital labour platforms on enterprises, workers and society as a whole. She underlined that the report offers a comprehensive picture of the experience of workers and businesses on online web-based and location-based platforms, drawing on surveys and interviews with some 12,000 workers and representatives of 85 businesses around the world, in multiple sectors.

In her presentation Ms Rani also elaborated on platform cooperative experiences. She provided examples from different countries (Belgium, US, UK) and groups of workers (including delivery workers, taxi drivers, care workers). Following group discussion, the participants to the session came back to the plenary for a question and answer session. The questions varied around the governance of platform cooperatives, the issues around regulatory frameworks, and access to open source and free applications.

You can watch the presentation and the question and answer session here. Ms Rani’s presentation is available here as a pdf file.