The implications of the so-called “sharing economy” have
been hotly debated in the news media, and the research world is now
beginning to weigh in with deeper analysis. One central area of argument
relates to whether the sharing economy is simply bringing more wage-earning
opportunities to more people, or whether its net effect is the displacement of
traditionally secure jobs and the creation of a land of part-time, low-paid
work. It’s a debate that continues to play out across communities in the United
States, forcing reporters to weigh competing claims and varying in tone from
boosterism to warnings of the new economy’s “dark side.”
While the conclusions are anything but
clear, even as more data pour in, it is worth digging into the available
literature and knowing the centers of research debate and lines of argument.
A January 2015 paper co-authored by Princeton’s Alan
Krueger — the former
Chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers — based on
Uber’s internal data finds clear benefits for “driver-partners” and notes the
new financial opportunities created for tens of thousands of workers. Those
conclusions have been critiqued by,
for example, the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. In
any case, the Krueger paper also argues that “the availability of modern
technology, like the Uber app, provides many advantages and lower prices for
consumers compared with the traditional taxi cab dispatch system, and
this has boosted demand for ride services, which, in turn, has
increased total demand for workers with the requisite skills to work as
for-hire drivers, potentially raising earnings for all workers with such
skills.”
A 2014 paper by Annette Bernhardt of University of
California, Berkeley, also signals a cautionary note about any claims of
radical recent change being wrought across the U.S. economy:
[We] all share a strong intuition that the
nature of work has fundamentally changed, contributing to the
deterioration of labor standards. Yet at least with aggregate national data, it
has been hard to find evidence of a strong, unambiguous shift toward
nonstandard or contingent forms of work – especially in contrast to the
dramatic increase in wage inequality. This is not to say that there have
been no changes in the workplace. But as this paper has emphasized, for
enforcement agencies and policymakers, it may be more fruitful to focus on
specific industries and regions in assessing when and where pernicious forms of
nonstandard work have grown, and which groups of workers have
been most impacted.
It is also true that the rise of independent workers, and associated job insecurity,
long predates the recent rise of the sharing economy, although their percentage
of all U.S. workers is expected to
grow from about one-third currently to 40% by 2020, according to some
estimates.
A 2015 report from
the Center for American Progress notes the heated debate in Britain over “zero hours contracts”
and charges that highly insecure and contingent employment leads to the
exploitation of workers. The report — co-authored by Harvard’s Lawrence
Summers, a top official in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and Ed
Balls, a British Labour Party MP — notes that “technology has allowed a sharing economy to develop in the
United States; many of these jobs offer flexibility to workers, many of whom
are working a second job and using it to build income or are parents looking
for flexible work schedules. At the same time, when these jobs are the only source
of income for workers and they provide no benefits, that leaves workers or the
state to pay these costs.”
Meanwhile, scholars such as Juliet
Schor of Boston College have been examining how
workers might regain bargaining power despite an increasingly app-based, decentralized system of distributed labor. “While the
for-profit companies may be ‘acting badly,'” she writes in an October 2014
essay, “these new technologies of peer-to-peer economic activity are
potentially powerful tools for building a social movement centered on genuine
practices of sharing and cooperation in the production and consumption of goods
and services. But achieving that potential will require democratizing the
ownership and governance of the platforms.”
Fights over rules and regulations
In
October 2014 the New York State Attorney General released a report into Airbnb’s operations
that concluded that 72% of the site’s rentals violated state zoning regulations or
other laws. The company’s business model is built around allowing people to
rent out rooms or entire apartments on a short-term basis, and the report is
the latest in a series of ongoing battles Airbnb is engaged in with regulators
across the world.
Berlin has
banned regular short-term rentals in the most popular parts of the city without prior
permission from the authorities. Paris passed a
law in February 2014 to allow city inspectors to check rental homes whose owners are suspected of renting them
out to visitors illegally. Airbnb has countered with its own reports on
the benefits of short-term stays on local housing markets, arguing that the
company’s service benefits local economies.
Also known as collaborative consumption or
peer-to-peer (P2P), the sharing economy challenges traditional notions of
private ownership and is instead based on the shared production or consumption
of goods and services. Its origins were in not-for-profit initiatives such as
Wikipedia (2001) and Couchsurfing and Freecycle (both 2003). Advances in
information technology enabled the creation of large-scale bike-share systems (the
first was in Lyon, France, in 2005), and these have subsequently expanded
to the United States and
around the world.
Social media and mobile technology have
enabled the latest
expansion of the sharing economy and turned it into a big business: Airbnb allows individuals to share their homes,
while Lyft and Uber transform
private cars into common resources. All these are for-profit services, but they
take only a fraction of the fees levied, passing the rest on to the owners: In
2013 it was estimated that revenues passing through the sharing economy into
people’s wallets exceeded $3.5 billion, up 25% from the previous year. Airbnb has
exceeded 10 millionguest-stays
since its launch and now has more than half a million properties listed.
Meanwhile Uber has said that it is doubling its revenue every
six months.
As a 2014 article in Harvard Business Review noted, the interests of
sharing-economy firms and city governments are often aligned, but failing to
engage early on with potential regulators can raise the suspicion that
companies are trying to exploit loopholes rather than develop a legitimate
business model. For example, courts in Frankfurt recently upheld a national ban on
Uber, and the service has been banned in several Canadian cities as
well. At the heart of many of these debates is whether Uber is, as it claims,
operating as a pure technology company, providing a match-making service to
willing participants, or whether it is operating in effect as an unlicensed
taxi service, which was the conclusion of Calgary’s city council. Moreover, a Massachusetts class-action lawsuit asserts that Uber exploits its
drivers, misclassifying them as independent contractors to avoid paying them as
employees with the same benefits.
Examples from elsewhere in the world shows
such fractious relationships with regulators need not be the norm. In February
2014, Amsterdam became the first city to pass so-called “Airbnb friendly” legislation. A law allowing short-term
rentals by permanent San Francisco residents was finalized in
October 2014, but requires them to collect city hotel taxes and imposes other
restrictions. In London, 1970s regulations limiting short-term stays were scrapped, making it easier for Airbnb and others to
operate in the city. The British government has even launched an initiative to
make the U.K. the “global centre for [the] sharing economy.” Similarly, while
some traditional
operators have fought sharing start-ups, others have chosen to get in on
the game themselves: In 2013 Avis paid half a billion dollars for
the car-sharing service Zipcar, and Hertz has started a similar service.
Below are a range of additional academic
articles that seek to define, understand and analyze the sharing economy, those
who participate and its economic impact
sumber:http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/business/airbnb-lyft-uber-bike-share-sharing-economy-research-roundup
sumber:http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/business/airbnb-lyft-uber-bike-share-sharing-economy-research-roundup
