This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host Stina Heikkila.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript that has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Hello both. Thanks very much for your time today. We are really looking forward to have this conversation with you. As our listeners know, we are exploring more or less since February last year in this podcast, the future or we said the present, unfolding present of organizing at scale in our so much changing world. And of course, a part of these changes that we are seeing are very much related to the so-called future of work. And also everybody’s talking about that. And, of course, this was a topic that we had to explore. And we started to some extent to explore this topic recently and also last year with Stowe Boyd or Sangeet Choudary. But I thought that your work was really important for our listeners to catch up with in terms of our work is changing, what are the tendencies and trends that we can imagine for the future.

So, maybe as a start, I would like to ask you both to explore a bit more the usual suspects and also, how platforms and marketplaces and especially lately, there’s been a lot of talking about so-called deep work platforms and vertical platforms that address specific markets or specific aspects of work. How these platforms are essentially impacting the worker? And there’s been a lot of talking about, for example, the “creators economy”, the “passion economy”, how these platforms or marketplaces are empowering individuals to become this kind of superstars in their context of work. So what is your feeling in terms of the major trends? And what are you seeing emerging in terms of how platforms are reshaping work? Maybe we can start with Albert since we had this little exchange in preparation of the conversation today.

Albert Cañigueral:
Hello, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m a listener of the podcast so it’s very good also, to be part of it. I would say from a macro perspective, what we see is the fragmentation of the work and the career of workers. I think that beyond going deep in any specific sector, or type of platform, I think that what it used to be a continuum, we used to work in a single place for many years, and have a single identity. What we are doing now is we are having consecutive jobs. Most of the people in the podcast, here, we’ve had worked in different spaces, in different companies. And now with the platforms, it’s very easy to have several jobs at the same time or several income sources. And as you were saying, there’s a multiplicity of these platforms. And one that’s gaining more steam is the passion economy and the expert economy, probably with business, like the ones you are doing with the podcast, or what Laetitia is doing also. She has personal experience, I think. You can explain from your personal experience. But I would say that it’s important to understand from a societal perspective, if that we are moving from something that used to be very predictable, very continuous relationship, understood as work to something that is very fragmented. And you will need to have a lot of relationships with a lot of different people. And this is where platforms help to organize.

Laetitia Vitaud:
Thank you Albert for this summary. I feel like I have nothing to add. I believe that cloud forms and marketplaces in a way they crystallize our conversations about the future of work and the unbundling of work beyond the actual size of revenues they generate for people. What I mean is that we speak a lot about Uber, about Deliveroo or about Etsy and Malt and you know, all sorts of platforms. But the business reality is that it’s still fairly small in terms of the revenues they generate for people. For example, crafts people who use Etsy to sell handmade handbags or whatever it is that they make generate a ridiculous sum of money. And yet why do we speak about platforms so much, and why are we so obsessed with them? Because they crystallize all of the transformations that we go through.

The first obviously, is the digital transformation that has repercussions on the way we interact with other people, on the way we find work, whether it’s digital work or not. But they also crystallize our conversations about the changing nature of all of our institutions, namely, social protection. It used to be that with each job we had, we had health insurance that came with it. Salaried jobs came with a number of protections like retirement schemes. So, you had a pension, when you left your work. It came with all sorts of protections when you lost it. You have unemployment benefits, usually. And all of these things are being unbundled. And therefore platforms, also crystallize our conversations about the new precariousness of work, how we’re basically left on our own, even though we’re connected with everybody else on those platforms.

So, you mentioned a number of subjects, the fragmentation of work, the fact that there’s no one relationship between a company and a worker, but also the digital transition, and all that it means and the dynamics on the market, whether or not there is a winners-take-all dynamic on some sectors. So, all of these themes basically are themes that dominate the current period and are going through a number of transitions, and perhaps that’s why we talk about platforms so much beyond their actual size and relevance.

Simone Cicero:
Right. And it sounds like another very important, maybe aspect that we can clarify at the start of this conversation is also this polarization, no, in the market. So, we talk about, for example, when we talk about the creators economy, and the passion economy, and these superstar producers that are starting to create a direct relationship. So, for example, there’s a lot of talking about Substack these days, and all these writers that created their own audience, and they own these relationships in a D2C way. So, basically, this more empowering side of the market. And on the other side, gig workers, and all these more utility-related work that has been as well, of course, organized through platforms. So, I’m curious to see what are your feelings in terms of, for example, the different impacts that these trends are having on these two types of workers and also in relationship with the Social Security or all the elements that revolve around the worker himself or herself. So, how these impacts are shaping up for these two sides of the market — if you also see these two sides?

Albert Cañigueral:
I agree there is a polarization. The funny thing for me is that a lot of these things that we now realize, there is polarization in the job market, there always have been polarization in the job market. It’s interesting that — because if we have the conversation around the impact of platforms, then we start to see a lot or to talk about a lot of these things that were already there. For me, it’s super interesting that because of — with excuse of the platforms — we can address societal issues that used to be there. And we can see — and we can measure now them with platforms, so that’s the first point. Then I wrote a report on 2019 about a topic, which is a little bit obscure. It’s called “worker tech”. It’s coming from the United Kingdom. And it’s how platforms are developing solutions for re-bundling the needs for the platform workers: type of insurance, training, being able to be present in several platforms at the same time, training finding colleagues.

And there’s this trend of something called Worker Tech. So, it’s technology for the workers. And when you start mapping, how worker tech is playing for the deep workers, more like delivery drivers, or people who are walking dogs around and so on. And then you can do a type of map. It’s very personalized per this type of work. So, you’ll see it’s not the same for the Uber driver than for the delivery driver or rider or for someone walking a dog. So, it’s very made “ad hoc” to this person and to his or her activity. And the same happens then when in the expert economy on the passion economy or the freelancing economy. So, it’s interesting to see this kind of massive personalization that you can do with the platforms. We tend to have this idea of social security and services at a massive scale, the same for everybody. And these platforms are enabling these micro-servicing for different needs, that forms an interesting trend on that space.

Laetitia Vitaud:
Yeah, what’s interesting with worker tech exactly as you describe it is that even for low paid jobs, there are opportunities for empowerment. For example, finding a better work life balance, because if you can choose your shifts, your slots, you have more mastery over your time. And that means a lot for parents, for example, someone who has to work very early in the morning might find it extremely hard to take their children to school. But when you are empowered to choose your shifts, or exchange your shifts with a colleague, which is what some of the worker tech solutions are all about. For example, people who work in restaurants or Starbucks, or whatever, they can exchange shifts with someone else depending on the constraints of their own lives.

So, the idea that there is empowerment for the privileged few and unjust precariousness for the poor, is a bit of a caricature. In fact, I think, in spite of the polarization, which is very real, there is a form of continuum. And what Albert described as worker tech is part of a number of a new ecosystem, that that offers some form of empowerment to all kinds of workers. And so that’s the positive. That’s basically the positive that concerns everyone, potentially. The negative is that because this increased individualization, which, of course, comes with lots of advantages, it focuses just on the individual, and it leaves aside — or it leaves largely aside — subjects that are more collective objects, in particular, collective negotiation of revenues.

And I think that’s the next frontier. There are a number of, not platforms necessarily, but new unions or new movements that are all about bringing the collective back into these increasingly individualized conversations. So, how do we negotiate collectively? Do we have something in common even though we will not choose the same shifts, even though we don’t have the same constraints, or the same desires? Is there something we can do together to negotiate together because together will be stronger, and to obtain a bigger share of the pie, whatever the pie is? Be paid more, for example.

Simone Cicero:
And is there still a space for collectively organizing this very deep unbundling trends? So, what I’m explaining here is so so what we are seeing is the individuals are, of course, ever more empowered, as you said. And in general, the efficiency trends that we are seeing are pushing towards an evolution from, I would say, integrated organizations more into network organizations where you have nodes that interact, and thanks to these extremely pervasive technologies. So, the question is, is there still a space for organizing collectively, I would say we can say unionizing. But we can also say, creating teams and new types of — new patterns of organizations. So, what is this a space for organizing collectively in a trend that pushes towards increasing unbundling and increasingly towards networks instead?

Laetitia Vitaud:
That is really the question of the century, what’s left of the century. That’s probably THE question for the future of work as far as I’m concerned, whether there is a space for collective organizing in an increasingly individualized world where every work or job is unbundled. But I think what we’re seeing in some spaces, for example, in domestic services, there’s this new union in the US, that focuses on domestic workers, who basically were the invisible workers of the past century and are becoming more and more visible.

And the pandemic has made them even more visible as everyone’s stuck at home — or every remote worker is stuck at home — and suddenly, the domestic sphere is kind of the next frontier that everyone’s looking at. So domestic workers — people who are basically cleaning women. It’s a lot of women so I use the word women — also among the platform workers who organized deliveries, there’s this independent workers of Great Britain Union that has, with new methods, made the plight of these workers suddenly a global or at least a national conversation in the UK.

So, those conversations are being held at the moment. I don’t think there is a concrete results of a new collective institution that can prove that there is a space for collective organization. But at least those conversations are all on the table right now. And maybe one last example, in France, there is a conversation about the social protection of self-employed workers. And there’s a new union, for lack of another word, it’s not exactly a union called “independants.co” that is all about negotiating this time with the government to create unemployment benefits for those who are struck by the current crisis and the next one and the one after. And basically, it’s about — It’s a national conversation about how we can rethink our institutions of social protection, and what it means to be — what security — what economic security means, in the 21st century.

Albert Cañigueral:
Yeah, for me this emergence of different groups of independent workers or autonomous workers is at what level these organizations are happening. Because there is a risk in the same way that we have a fragmentation of workers. There is a risk of fragmentation of this collective negotiation. And if you are too small, you will not have enough power to have negotiation power in the discussion. That was something that was pointed out by a traditional trade union member to me in a conversation, they were saying, the domestic workers, it’s a very specific niche. It’s large, super large. Or, for example, in Spain, we have the Kelis which are the people who are cleaning the auto rooms which are not employed anymore. They are external workers.

And they have unionized in the Kelis, it’s one group. And then you have the riders who are with the Deliveroo and with Global and with Uber Eats. It’s so niche that it is difficult to have this systemic approach. It’s very specific. So, there is a question there, what is the right size to organize to different niches that we might have? And I think it’s several. The answer is not just one. It’s at several levels. We need to organize something that is very niche specific for the people who are working in delivery platforms. And there will be other conversations like the one Laetitia was saying about the social protection as a whole for independants.co in France. So, it’s important to have all these levels.

And it’s not interesting to see, for example, I know the ones in Spain, inside the riders, the people who are doing delivery services, there are three or four or even five different groups of workers because they have different perspectives. There is also a fragmentation inside. So, in the same way that traditional trade unions tend to be quite unified, we see the emergence of all these groups. Some of them want to be employed by the platform, some of them are fighting against the platform and against the government not to be employed because they prefer to be freelancers. Some of them are led by mostly people who are national from Spain, others are led by immigrants. So, people who are more dependent or less dependent on the platform, they will not — it’s not a group of people who are all the same. They are different people with different needs. And in that respect, there is an emergence of different groups, that’s one thing.

And on the original question from Simone of the organization, I would say that, yes, we need in this fragmentation, it’s not just there is a space for collectivization, there is a must for collectivization. And the union effort or just one of the aspects. People also joined forces to learn together, to share tools, to share a space, to share a brand — like we do in Ouishare — to access the market in an organized way. So, we share the reputation. So, something I’ve learned during this research is that we are still too much focused on the individual and individualistic narrative. And for me, it’s pretty clear that the future of work will be the main character, or the main entity will be this small collective of four or 5, 10, 15 people.

Laetitia Vitaud:
Yeah, that’s very interesting. Also, it’s true that the narrative is purely an individualistic narrative. And that’s a bit of a problem because it creates blind spots. And one blind spot is that we fail to see the importance of the household as an economic entity. And that’s been made very visible by the pandemic in multiple ways. When households are composed of one individual, that’s a lot of loneliness and sadness and pain for people who are in lockdown and deprived of any form of human touch. But for households composed of traditional nuclear families with an opposite sex couple, and you know, a mother or father and children, what’s been made visible by this pandemic is how much there is no individual when there is a household as an economic entity. Because mothers who had to stop working because they had their children at home, and had no other choice but to take on all the domestic chores. And that was so massive in the US, it’s a million women who left work throughout 2020, because of these domestic chores, that they couldn’t externalize anymore.

And so nuclear families as this sort of as the entity that creates all these inequalities, in particular, gender inequalities, that’s something that must be seen, that should be seen because there is no individual when there is a household. And maybe but — because Albert mentioned the subject of other form of communities and other forms, forms of households also — that, in fact, we should bear in mind that this traditional nuclear household has become now a minority of all households. And yet, it still shapes our vision of what a household should be. And we think it’s the norm, you know, this father, mother, children, that that’s the norm. It’s no longer the case. It’s actually less than 50% of all households that are composed of such groups of individuals. And so there are new forms, of course, same sex couples, of course, single people, but also groups of friends living together, co-living entities, and lots of different solutions, and sometimes intergenerational communities living and working together. And they provide solutions that are lacking. And this lack, this terrible lack that we’ve seen, during the pandemic, can be solved by some of these new forms of living together and working together.

Stina Heikkila:
I’d like to maybe attach to that discussion about sort of the traditional household and nuclear family as well, and also talk about another more traditional space, which is our institutions and government. So, it would be interesting to hear what you guys think about what is happening to the relationship maybe between both people — so, who might be on the one hand, sort of craving more freedom, and on the other needing some sort of protection and collective action — how are we redefining the relationship between citizens and the state in this space and the role of institutions in regulating platforms? I mean, but also more broadly connected to the future of work that we have been discussing.

Albert Cañigueral:
I would say there is mostly a disconnect at this stage. Because you see a lot of emerging groups, emerging activities, emerging alternatives, people trying to do what they can with the technology that they have at hand, solving their own needs. And at least in Spain, and this is the government I know best at the moment, it’s more like, I would say a “Retropia”, like going back to the old forms of work, because this old form of work has a traditional good protection. So, we want this good protection for everybody, but we don’t know how to deliver in any other form. We only can think in a traditional contract instead of thinking on worker tech or other solutions to deliver. And the institution or the entity of negotiations is still the individual not these other levels that could be a household or could be a group of friends or could be like a guilt approach.

So, from my own experience in Spain, most of the things are still out of the radar of the government. And you need to- It’s also understandable because there is so much investment in the institutional structures, in the narratives, in the law in a given direction, that actually turning into another direction or including alternatives, it’s very hard. It creates a lot of frictions. It’s the same now going back to the family’s concept. When we start having same sex couples, it was a disruption for a lot of institutions. And it took a while to accommodate in terms of narrative, in terms of rights and duties; all these alternatives. So, we are in this interim also.

Laetitia Vitaud:
Yeah. And I think there are different cultural answers to these questions. You mentioned Spain. What’s true about Spain is probably largely true about France as well, even though there are some differences, obviously. But it’s largely the same. There’s this sort of innovation dilemma, that there’s no incentive for anyone to encourage alternative forms when the old traditional model of the salaried work and all its protections fits society so well that let’s take everything back to that old mold and what we’re familiar with. So, it’s largely the same. And that’s why traditional unions find it — traditional labor unions find it so hard to address the subject of the self-employed because it doesn’t fit the model. Basically, they believe it’s a situation that must be a transition. And ultimately, these self-employed workers have to go back to traditional salaried work, otherwise, they don’t know what to do with them. And it’s a traditional, an innovation dilemma.

But in other countries like the UK, it’s a different cultural situation altogether. It’s like they take it for granted that precariousness for low paid workers is the new norm. And the objective is basically to have as many people in work as possible. And so you know, they had these Zero Hour contracts and all kinds of contracts, whether salaried or not that basically, the main objective is to have everyone working. And who cares if that work provides extremely low pay? So, yeah, there’s no one answer to that question. And as Albert said, I think we’re in a period of transition. We’re beginning to understand that it will not be possible to bring everything back to the old model because there are too many people who are out of it, who fall through the cracks of whatever institutions we already have.

Again, that’s what’s made visible by this new movement called independants.co in France, that there is in fact, a large group of self-employed people who choose to be self-employed. And for the first time in many, many years that’s been acknowledged by the government, by the French government. Same happened in the UK, it was acknowledged that there is a sufficiently large number of people to question the old model.

Albert Cañigueral:
And for me, it’s interesting also to observe as Laetitia mentioned, the culture of countries which are not on our usual radar, like Malaysia, or even India, or Kenya, or some countries in Latin America. Because they don’t, they do not have the traditional institution that we give for granted in our territories. So, they actually see an opportunity with all these platform work. And it’s very interesting to see how both governments and employers are taking the transition from analog work — analog marketplaces to digital marketplaces, and all the additional consequences. And I would say, for example, I like a lot what the Malaysian government is doing, giving new protections, training people to work on platforms, using the digital mechanisms to guarantee the access to certain social protections.

And the same, there is a very interesting report about the impact of the gig economy in West Africa by MasterCard, if you want to Google it. They talk about the gig economy as both the informal economy — they call it the analog gig economy because it’s pre-existing — and it’s how most of the workforce in countries in West Africa earn their living. And they see the transition to digital economy as a great opportunity to formalization and to have the opportunity to provide some of these social security services, for example.

Laetitia Vitaud:
So, it all depends on the original size of the informal economy. So, in some countries like India, the informal economy provides most of the jobs. Whereas in countries like Germany, the informal economy, has a much smaller size. And so the opportunity of making the informal economy somewhat more formal through digital is not the same depending on where you start.

Simone Cicero:
Right. I mean, this is certainly interesting. So, my question here will be to explore with you, as we witness in this conversation, we are having somehow the existing public institutions are losing relevance in this debate. Because the trend of unbundling has been pushing so hard that to some extent, the traditional work agreements or social compacts that we were used work with in the industrial age, and then the public institution’s age are no more so functional. And so I think what we are seeing is institutions that are failing to understand what is happening to work. And as a result, to some extent, we see worker rights being jeopardized. And I would say even the discussion around worker rights is not — doesn’t sound so top of the news anymore. So, essentially, it’s like we are taking it for granted that the new patterns of work do not include the institutional agreements that we used to have in the 20th century, essentially.

So, part of this transition, I think it’s a transition between — It’s because the old, I would say the old space where work was a two sided contract between a worker and a company, for example, or even between an institution and a citizen is being so much pulverized and unbundled that, as I said, we fail to fit the older categories, the old ideas into this commoditization of work, I would say. So, on the other side, what we see is that these emerging space, where thanks to technology, such as you know, the internet, but even increasingly things such as the blockchain or things like that, future of work, it seems like a more collective contract. So, to some extent, we see, for example, platforms where you can connect investors and designers and workers into increasingly some new possibilities.

So, my question here for you is, how do you see this space of creating new solutions based on collective agreements, no more just two-sided contracts? And is this a space where we can see, to some extent, a reinvention of the publics into a multiplicity of publics, not just the very old monolithic idea of the public? Or maybe a public that works at the level of the household of the community, the neighborhood, the local community, and so on; what do you think about that?

Laetitia Vitaud:
That’s an interesting question. Among these institutions that you mentioned, there are norms regarding safety. Throughout the 20th century, we created a series of norms and rules, and laws to protect workers to make them safe. And some were dependent on specific branches specific industries had their own rules. And let’s say for example, whether or not you’re exposed to chemical products, there’s certain limits to that exposure, and you need to have certain equipment to protect the worker. If you’re an employer to protect them against the bad effects of certain chemicals, and etc, etc. But that model, those protections were basically modeled after the factory floor and the male worker in that factory floor. So, for example, with this example of chemical products, we had all the norms and all these institutions for the exposure to chemical products on the factory floor by male workers. And so they had all their equipment; special masks, special clothing to protect them, etc. And no protection was imagined for the domestic worker, mostly women working using chemical products at home, or for the worker, you know, working in a nail salon exposed to other chemicals which were not measured, not controlled. There were no rules regarding the safety of that work and the gear, the protective gear you’re supposed to wear.

And today, the opportunity is to not just rethink safety in the digital age, but rethink safety for all those workers who were not included in those institutions in the first place, who were already there in the 20th century. Again, domestic workers, service workers in nail salons and whatever, although it’s mostly women. I mean, it’s not just a gender thing, but it’s mostly women versus men on average. And so I think that yeah, among this, among the opportunities of reinvention is this opportunity to rethink what safety means. What does working safely mean today? And in the 20th century, workers who were fragmented, are not included in those definitions. Today, now that everyone is fragmented, everyone is more or less on their own. We can ask the right questions. What does safety mean? Exposure to chemicals, what does it mean? What kind of protection should we all have when we work in certain environments with certain risks?

Simone Cicero:
If I can jump in before leaving the floor to Albert, I think I want to highlight this point that you raised. Because it seems like due to the deteriorating context, economic context, it’s like we are increasingly willing to accept agreements of work that do not provide these kind of worker protection system that we were used to in an economy of the 20th century, an economy that was growing that was not facing these existential threats that we are leaving or these profound disruptions. But it looks like now due to the profound disruptions we are leaving, we are increasingly willing to accept that the traditional context of work is providing opportunities that are more marginalized, and are predicated on, as you said, predicated on precariousness. So, the question that maybe I can raise for Albert as well, because you also had an experience of creating collectives.

So, the question is, is this new collective spaces that we are trying to build as individuals, being them digital unions on one hand, or being them new forms of organizations, I’m thinking about the, I don’t know, the livelihood pods or the small organizations that we build as entrepreneurs to co-enterprise together into new spaces; are those spaces, these collective spaces, the real unique spaces where this new, safe space, safe I would say, networks, safety networks can be built in the lack of alternatives that are coming from more traditional working agreements?

Albert Cañigueral:
Yeah. And coming back to the original question or linking both, I would say that you, you nailed it very well on asking if we have multiple publics or I would say, we might have agreement at several levels. So, some agreement or some level of security should be universal acknowledging this fragmentation. For example, assuming that everybody will have a fragmented work life, instead of having an unemployment insurance, we should have an income insurance, because we need income stability. We’ve seen during the pandemic, how governments in an emergency move, they try to have this helicopter money for the people who lost all their income or part of their income due to the lockdown situation. So, we should acknowledge that everybody and maybe in the future that will grow into universal basic income, I don’t know.

But as a universal principle for citizens of this and that and the other country, we might expect to have this level of protection in the same way that we have universal access to health services in Europe, in European countries, most of them. So, there is something that needs to be provided at this universal level and that needs to be revisited because it was built with certain assumptions. And now these assumptions seem not to be longer true or not for everybody. So, it’s important to do this revisit and redesign part of it if necessary. For example, the pension system that used to also to be funded with the contributions of the long-term workers, it was very stable contribution. Now, with this fragmented workforce, the contributions will not be stable anymore. So, we need to think more on that space. So, that’s one level. If we go one level down, we go to maybe a sectorial.

So, what happens when all the people working in the shops let’s say like facing the public in proximity services, and what common risks do they have all the people working in shops, for example? What kind of collective among all the shop workers we could have? And what level of protection training, simplify mobility, I don’t know, shift exchange, as Laetitia said before. So, what level of security and services we can have? This is at a sectoral level let’s say, at activity level. And then more what you were saying now Simone at this a smaller unit level, which could be like the size of a football team, if you wanted; 10, 11, 15, 20 people, four people. These are my colleague mates.

Maybe I’ll be working with them or along them. This is my working family, or working household, going back to what lady Laetitia mentioned before; what level of protection or what services can we have on that space? This is probably closer to a guild in the Medieval Ages, or something. So, yeah, I think it’s important to explore at different levels, what level of protection we can get, what is more efficient at what level.

Stina Heikkila:
It sounds like, in a way when you transfer to a new model. Also, if we take into account the current very turbulent environment, which is I mean, we’ve lived in 2020 very strongly with the pandemic, but it’s already before we have threats from climate emergency and so on. So, do you see that this shift can provide us with a more adaptive and a more flexible reconfiguration of society in a way that could respond to shocks in a new way?

Laetitia Vitaud:
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. You mentioned climate change. But another disaster was made visible this year during the pandemic and that’s the disaster of all elderly care homes. Throughout the Western world, more than half of all deaths occurred in elderly care homes. And these institutions were based on the assumption, as Albert said, that people of the same age should be put together and that care, like any other service, was best provided in a sort of top-down way, with economies of scale, in the model of scientific management, and the mass economy, right. So, you create economies of scale by putting everyone together and having a couple of nurses look after them. And the bigger the institution, the more economies of scale you have. And these have proved an absolute disaster. I mean, it’s not just the deaths, millions of deaths throughout the Western world. It’s also stories of neglect, and horror, that really, really make you cry. It’s as bad for the workers concerned, the nurses who were not protected who face unprecedented risks with no protection whatsoever.

So, today we have this opportunity with the digital transition that we’re going through to revisit some of these institutions. And the way we deliver care is one of them. It’s all the more relevant in the contexts where basically, in a lot of Western countries, one-fifth of the population is going to be over 80 pretty soon. It’s probably already the ratio in Japan. Median age in most European countries is above 45. More than half the population is older than 48 in Italy, more than 48 in Germany. So, pretty soon we’re seeing is that this is the central question in the future of work and yeah, the opportunity with digital is to go away from mass economy versions, mass economy solutions, and have something that’s much more flexible and much more attuned to adapting to circumstances and providing solutions that are better suited to the needs of the people.

Simone Cicero:
So, at this point, my question would be, if these possibilities of reintegration of care and reproductive work into how we actually account for value creation in society is going to need institutional intervention? So, do we still need for example policymaking to push us towards an idea of adding value in society that goes beyond just the traditional work agreements of the industrial age, let’s say? Or you see emerging, for example, new ways where we can organize in collectives, or creating, for example, new financial agreements or new agreements of how we manage our organizations to make it possible for us to create these new ways of managing our needs and potential to contribute in a way that is more realistic and gives us a way to create value not just by producing or consuming something. But also by providing our care services or nurturing services that are complementary to the traditional service economy, or work economies that we are used to in the 21st century. What do you think?

Laetitia Vitaud:
I love that there are so many beautiful answers in your questions. It’s interesting, you mentioned that. I mean, I wrote down the word reintegration, which I think is really key. So, in your question, I think what’s central is the idea of reproductive work being traditionally separated from productive work in the industrial paradigm. So, it’s this idea, okay, there’s a factory now on this productive work in it and at home is reproductive and one is paid, and the other one is unpaid. And what happened since then, is that a big chunk of this reproductive work became paid again, or entered the economy in GDP. But there is still sort of a conflict between paid and unpaid reproductive work. And when I say conflicts, basically, there’s a competition. Whether you iron your shirt yourself, that’s not part of the GDP. If you have it ironed by someone else, then it’s an economic activity, and it’s part of the GDP. And traditionally, governments and institutions we’re more focused on what’s paid than what’s unpaid. Because what’s paid has value and what’s unpaid has no value.

And when it comes to elderly care, again, I go back to that example, because it’s so telling, and it’s going so — it’s going to be more and more massive. There is both paid and unpaid reproductive work going on. And what’s interesting, or what’s important is that we need to have a more holistic approach. And platforms can help coordinate paid and unpaid, create this fluidity between the two. So, that voluntary work, for example, the voluntary work of young 70-year-olds, looking after old 90-year-olds can be made easier, can be supported, supported through encouraging different forms of housing, where people from different generations can live together through tax systems that create incentives, through yes, new platforms to help the voluntary worker work together with a paid worker, when it comes to looking after someone who’s at the end of their lives and needs a lot of help. So, it’s a number of things that can be used to have this more holistic approach. So, that reproductive work can reintegrate both paid and unpaid contributions.

Albert Cañigueral:
Here, I would also add the semantic aspect because we are discussing ideas and concepts. And here let me recover the definition of work that Esko Kilpi — a common friend with Simone — he was defining work as “work is solving other people’s problems”. So, that’s a very wide definition of work, which includes both obviously, reproductive and productive work. And I think it’s important that — or I try when I talk about the future of work to have this definition, in the back burner, because it helps to have this broader picture. And it’s important that yeah, it’s not only what we are being paid for, but also what is important, Simone mentioned for the community, for the society at different levels.

And we need to talk especially and I’m adding here, not so much platform, but automation, robotization, these kinds of elements that we’ll be able to automate part of the tasks of work that will probably leave a little bit less of space for human work, at least in some activities that we know nowadays. Others will emerge for sure. But probably more creative, more closer to the cultural, closer to the artisan. And we know that all these spaces are not so valued in our mindset at the moment. And we’ve seen also during the pandemic, how essential workers are poorly paid. While a lot of non-essential workers, we can live without their effort, their work, are very well protected and very well paid. I think we are at this stage that we need to, yeah, reevaluate what value we give to different activities in society.

Simone Cicero:
Right. So, from this conversation, like as a closing reflection, I would like to explore with you. In this conversation, I think we have discussed how things are shifting so strongly, to some extent. And so especially how existing categories, let’s say from the industrial age, don’t really fit anymore to the work landscape and are increasingly going to be unfit to describe what the future of work looks like. So, maybe if you can spend a couple of words in, you know, if you are really seeing this paradigm shift; if you are really seeing what comes after this nexus that we seem to be leaving? And if yes, what are the new path and the new ideas, the new platforms, the new things that manifest these shifts more than anything else from your point of view? What are the things that maybe are worth mentioning to say, you know, this is the future of work, it is happening already, starting to happen already?

Albert Cañigueral:
I’ll go back to the collectives because I think it’s a topic that we all will like. But I would say yeah, I’m trying to have a — to explore the other list, for example, in France, and, Laetitia, I’m sure you will know, you have this group of developers called Happy Developers, for example. Or the people who are in Bordeaux, what’s the name of the — Cosmic Collective, for example. They are in the advertising industry. In Spain, for example, there’s My Way Spain is people who used to work in the advertising industry, and they are fed up with the big brands and the big agencies. And they offer themselves as a bunch of freelancers to the industry in their own terms. So, I’m really interested on this level of 20, 30, 100 people organization or there is one in the UK. I’m pretty sure Laetitia also know Hoxby, H-O-X-B-Y collective. So, for me this — And sometimes they look like a platform, but they do not go for the automated matchmaking process. They are more like, okay, we are bundling together to access the market in an organized form. Which is something like the Gills did. So, I don’t know, for me, the evolution might be in this direction.

Laetitia Vitaud:
Yeah, interesting. And we mentioned earlier the question of training and transitions. And I think there is a lot happening in that sphere of the new collective institutions, for example, schools, training solutions, training — ed-tech solutions not for children, but for everyone of every age. And that field, I think it’s a revolution we’re going through. And we’re beginning to realize that you know, the old three-stage life with first training, then working, then retirement, that that’s really over. And that we’re entering a world of work where there are multiple stages and multiple transitions. And that if we have to go through these transitions on our own, it’s too hard. But if we have collectives, groups and schools, and movements that can help, then we can make them easier.

Simone Cicero:
Right. So, it seems like it’s really an open ended question. So, it’s really after this conversation, I feel even more that the future of work is something that we still need to understand properly. We frame it in an age of, to some extent, a little bit of institutional failure, with institutions that are clearly failing to capture this shift. And at the moment, not adding much value to this transition, which is the most striking aspect. I know in this conversation we are having around the future of work, there’s a lot of markets, there is a lot of technology. There’s a lot of entrepreneurship but there’s not much public, not much institution in the conversation yet. And I think this is a massive question mark in the digital world, how we’re going to rebuild our institutional agreements around work. And in a rapidly changing landscape. So, this is maybe my main point that I get back from this conversation. So, do you want to add anything more before we close? And for sure, I would like to ask you to just highlight where our listeners can catch up most efficiently with your latest research?

Albert Cañigueral:
Yeah, I think like most of us, I’m very active on Twitter. So, I would recommend to just keep an eye on Albert Cañig. This is where I’m active mostly on sharing what I’m learning. Just a quick, I would say, comment because now during Christmas I’ve been playing a little bit with virtual reality. It made me think about the future of education as Laetitia mentioned, and also the future of work in this space, in this digital space of the metaverse. So, not in the short term, I think but in the mid-long term, some people will be working in pure digital spaces. That’s something to keep an eye on in the mid-long term.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you. And you also have your book.

Albert Cañigueral:
I published a book late last year in Spanish, El Trabajo ya no es lo que era, work is no longer what it used to be. You can find it on my personal website, all the links, everything. It’s called AlbertCañigueral.com. And it’s available in several places.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you, thank you. Laetitia?

Laetitia Vitaud:
The same as Albert, I’m also on Twitter. My Twitter handle is at V-I-T-O-L-A-E, Vitolae. And I have a newsletter that is about the future of work with a feminist perspective. And it’s on Substack. So, one of those platforms that we mentioned, and that I am using as a personal vehicle for my future transitions in a career that’s more and more complex and multiple.

Simone Cicero:
So, again, thanks very much. And I’m really looking forward to talk again when maybe our ideas crystallize a bit more in the coming months, possibly, or years. Thanks very much again.

Laetitia Vitaud:
Thank you.

Albert Cañigueral:
Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
And to our listeners, catch up soon