The Present (Future) of Work: Beyond Platforms — with Albert Cañigueral and Laëtitia Vitaud

Laetitta Vitaud is a teacher-turned-entrepreneur and, like Albert, a key reference — both writer and speaker — about the future of work and consumption. She has her own newsletter about the future of work with a feminist perspective, Laetitia@work, is editor-in-chief of the HR media of Welcome to the Jungle and leads a media called Nouveau Départ with her partner and husband Nicolas Colin, who we previously had on the podcast. Laetitia is working with clients on how organizations, management, work space, and social protection are impacted by the unbundling of jobs and the empowerment of freelancers.

In our conversations, we cover a lot of ground, where we focus on the apparent “innovation dilemma” that results from the gap in how the concept of work is evolving and the systems in place to protect a new age of independent workers with fragmented “careers”.

We explore how worker tech and different scales of collective arrangements help platform workers gain agency and rebundle traditional worker benefits.

To find out more about their work:

• Albert’s Website: https://www.albertcanigueral.com/
• Laëtitia’s Website: https://laetitiavitaud.com/
• Albert’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlbertCanig
• Laëtitia’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Vitolae
• Laëtitia’s Newsletter: https://laetitiaatwork.substack.com/
• Albert Cañigueral (newly released book), El trabajo ya no es lo que era: Nuevas formas de trabajar, otras maneras de vivir, 2020 https://www.amazon.co.uk/El-trabajo-que-era-trabajar-ebook/dp/B08DT67CG8/

Other references and mentions:

• Albert Cañigueral, The Digital Labour Market Under Debate, 2018: https://cotec.es/media/COTEC_PIA_Ouishare_WorkerTech_EN_ExecutiveSummary.pdf
• Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain: https://iwgb.org.uk/
• Independants.co in France: https://www.independants.co/
• Mastercard’s Digital Payments & Labs, Mastercard Labs for Financial Inclusion, and White Paper Media Consulting, The Gig Economy in East Africa, 2020: https://newsroom.mastercard.com/mea/files/2020/09/The-Gig-Economy-in-East-Africa-White-Paper.pdf
• Happy Dev: https://happy-dev.fr/en/
• Cosme Collectif: https://collectif-cosme.com/projets/
• MyWay Spain: https://mywayspain.es/
• Hoxby: https://hoxby.com/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 5 January 2021.

Key Insights from the episode

1. In the continued unbundling of jobs, platforms help to organise work and “careers” that are becoming increasingly fragmented in the (present) future of work. In this context, we can witness both a process of polarization — through the power law and winners-take-all dynamics — while on the other hand to only apply this lens can be a “charicature”, as pointed out by Laetitia who mentions that platform work can be empowering also for lower paid jobs. Albert points out that massive personalisation of worker benefits tailored to different realities of platform jobs is an interesting trend, which he has written about in relation to “Worker Tech” — a stack of tools that help workers rebundle benefits and other features of “employment”.

•  Listen to the conversation on polarization and empowerment from min 10:20.

2. The collectivization trend among platform workers is far from “finished” and constitutes one of the hot spots in the future of work. In the conversation, we highlight how not only do platform workers have different needs in terms of for example protection and training, they also differ in what the want from the relationship with the plaform. As Albert pinpoints: “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”. What seems to offer common ground is the idea that we need to move away from thinking about the individual, to open our minds to new forms of entities: co-worker “families”, households, communites or other forms of so far “informal” structures.

•  Listen to the discussion on the evolution towards networked organisations and organizing collectively from min 16:45.

3. The need for a more holistic approach to understanding how we organise the future of work inks towards the reintegration of productive and reproductive work in the post-industrial economy. As Laetitia points out, “platforms can help coordinate paid and unpaid, create this fluidity between the two”. Albert also highlighs that we can apply the widest definition of work as “solving other people’s problems” (referring to Eski Kilpi’s definition) and start to re-evaluate the value we assign to different activities in society.

•  Listen to ideas around the reintegration of productive and reproductive work around min 49:45

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organizing by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.