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<\/p>\nThis article about organisation by data-driven platform workers in Edinburgh is written by Cailean Gallagher and was first posted by bella caledonia.<\/p>\n
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Ask folk in Scotland\u2019s capital if they can describe any of the Edinburgh\u2019s \u2018big moves\u2019 and they might mention the reopening of the St James Centre last year, the relocation of the Scottish Parliament back in 1999, or maybe even the shift of the city\u2019s wealthier denizens to the New Town in the 1800s.<\/p>\n
They probably won\u2019t mention the 9 \u2018big moves\u2019 that were published last month as part of the framework for the \u00a31 billion City Deal in Edinburgh and South East Scotland (ESES for short).<\/p>\n
The ESES City Deal is a 15 year plan involving the Scottish and UK governments as well as the region\u2019s universities, to \u2018accelerate growth, create new economic opportunities, and meaningful new jobs\u2019 [sic]. The first \u2018big move\u2019 on its grid is to make Edinburgh the \u2018Data Capital of Europe\u2019.<\/p>\n
A reader of the report might suspect that the architects of the City Deal have some delusions of grandeur. \u2018The ESES region was home to the Scottish Enlightenment\u2019, they declare, \u2018and now has a unique opportunity to build on the investment from the Data Driven Innovation programme.\u2019<\/p>\n
The Scottish Enlightenment, the flourishing of ideas and innovation in the eighteenth century that unleashed new methods in science, history, and economics, seems a rather hyperbolic parallel.<\/p>\n
But the comparison is made by historians too. In a 2019 book called\u00a0Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh\u2019s Civic Development, 1660-1750<\/em>, Murray Pittock represented Scotland\u2019s eighteenth century capital in modern terms of innovation, connectivity, and other \u2018routers of change\u2019.<\/p>\n Civic development was pioneered by city politicians and officials, lawyers, academics, doctors, planners, and other professionals, Pittock claims, whose \u2018association, hybridisation and fusion\u2019 created a \u2018cross-cutting generation of ideas that provide the infrastructure of the Enlightenment\u2019.<\/p>\n This assemblage of eighteenth-century anecdotes into an arduous analogy of a modern \u2018smart city\u2019 almost reads like a tribute to the boards and civic committees of the City Deal.<\/p>\n But whether we read the historian of the eighteenth century or the planners of the twenty-first, there is something missing from this melting pot. The workers of the city.<\/p>\n Professor Pittock\u2019s book has plenty of details about the regulation of muckmen and coachmen, the couriers and cleansing workers of their day, but hardly a mention of their own innovations and agency.<\/p>\n Yet the\u00a0Society of Cadies<\/a>, the forerunners of today\u2019s delivery drivers and riders, developed their own system of regulation and rates that gave them control over their routines in the burgeoning city.<\/p>\n Returning to today, the City Deal passage about Enlightenment continues: \u2018We must embrace the spirit of innovation found across our communities and businesses and direct this to solving a wider range of challenges\u2019.<\/p>\n But where communities and businesses are active agents, the only mention of workers is entirely passive \u2013 things are done for them and to them, not by them. And there is not a single mention of trade unions or workers\u2019 associations in the whole 50-page document.<\/p>\n Yet for workers in the city the experience of innovation and the impact of Data Driven Innovation has a massive effect on life. The algorithmic allocation of work and pay programmes the inequalities and economic opportunities that the City Deal declares as its mission to improve. And workers are also finding smart ways to solve the problems of platform exploitation.<\/p>\n Take a Deliveroo rider who works on a data-driven platform. Their rates of pay and working time are calculated with data that is first taken from the rider, then hidden from them. It is extremely difficult for these couriers to make contact with other riders to build up the collective knowledge and skills to challenge poor conditions in the gig economy. They too need infrastructure and innovations to improve their power at work, and their ability to turn gig work into a better economic opportunity.<\/p>\n The same goes in care, construction, tech work, and many other sectors where data-driven change is advancing fast and shifting more and more power to those in command of the data and technology.<\/p>\n Fortunately, workers are not waiting for the City Deal to make a \u2018big move\u2019 in their interest. The\u00a0Workers\u2019 Observatory<\/a>\u00a0is an initiative of gig workers to monitor the way that work is changing due to data. In Edinburgh and across the world, workers in the digital and platform economy are conducting their own inquiries into data-driven change, meeting data driven innovation with worker driven innovation.<\/p>\n This week, the Observatory is supporting an international event called\u00a0\u2018Digital Worker Inquiry\u2019<\/a>, that brings together workers, researcher, and union organisers to explore innovations and infrastructure being developed from the bottom up to empower workers to take matters into their own hands.<\/p>\n It will showcase projects from around the world: a Chilean initiative for workers to gather stories about changing experiences of data-driven work, a Georgian tool to calculate wage theft, and an Edinburgh-based app for delivery riders to monitor pay over time. These kinds of worker driven innovations are enabling couriers, care workers, rubbish collectors, coders, and construction workers to come to terms with the Data Driven agenda that is transforming work in every city on the globe.<\/p>\n Platform workers in Scotland\u2019s capital see every facet of the city but they are often unseen. They will probably not be surprised to be missing from the \u2018big moves\u2019 grid drawn up by the City Deal leaders and planners. But they are developing plans to make some big moves of their own.<\/p>\n 28th October 2021<\/p>\n This article was first posted at:- Platform Workers Plan Big Move<\/a><\/p>\n also see:-<\/p>\n