Companies that bask in the glow of the sharing movement should represent the movement’s core values with their growing political clout, says Robert Kelley, who identifies three issues they should all be able to agree on.
One of the best panel discussions at the recent OuiShare Fest was Friday’s “Public Policy and the Sharing Economy,” which focused not only on which policy initiatives proponents of the sharing economy should support, but also the most effective ways to get them implemented.
The panelists seemed to agree that paving the way for more sharing behavior is good, and also that any sort of engagement with politics must be taken very carefully. Molly Turner, director of public policy at Airbnb, summarized (and I paraphrase here), “We should stay away from ideology and remain bipartisan.”
It was a statement I disagreed with immediately, because sharing is an ideology, and, perhaps unfortunately, some of the values associated with it are sometimes partisan.
From those with much support, much will be asked
Companies in the sharing movement enjoy a certain amount of goodwill from the public that most other companies don’t receive. Often, this goodwill is well deserved : these companies tend to engage in resource efficiency, promote more social interaction, and democratize industries once characterized by high barriers to entry. But the support shown by the broader sharing community is not automatic, and it comes with a set of expectations around not only areas like operations and governance, but also public policy positions.
A clear example of how not to go about advocating for policy is provided by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, which in the interest of promoting more immigration also ran ads for increased oil drilling and against health insurance reform. It’s hard to imagine any current sharing companies taking such a cynical tack, but in some instances, silence might be just as outrageous.
In a famous 1970 essay, the University of Chicago Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman famously wrote :
There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
But when business plays a central role in defining those “rules of the game,” then all stakeholders in a particular business are justified in asking that it use its power for social good.
Issues we should all agree on
Since people have made some excellent attempts to define the ideology of sharing, I won’t try to expand. In short, I would submit that sharing is a rejection of the “every man for himself” philosophy, and it is the recognition that our problems are better solved and our lives are better lived together.
Beyond this there is room for many interpretations, and that is where disagreements can arise. Still, based on the deepest of these core principles, there is certainly some common ground. So what are some policy areas where we could expect the entire sharing community to agree to support ?
1. Open government initiatives. OK, I doubt there are many readers who are actively opposed to open government, but the whole point of advocacy is to push policy in a certain direction. Applying the open source and P2P models that are so intertwined with the collaborative economy to governing should increase the quality of both our governments and our democracies.
2. Broader anti-discrimination laws. A quote that drove a lot of conversation at OuiShare Fest was the one attributed to a friend of ZipCar founder Robin Chase :
My dad had one job his whole life, I’ll have seven, and my kids will have seven jobs at the same time.
But what if they are discriminated against in some or all of their freelance jobs ? Generally (and here I’ll speak specifically for the US), anti-discrimination protections for employees are not extended to contract employees. For example, if your boss asks you out on a date and you say no, and then he gives you a demotion, you probably have a pretty strong case for sexual harassment. But if you are running errands for a service like TaskRabbit, and your client asks you out, he has little to worry about from the law if he simply refuses to hire you again.
I understand that solutions like e-reputation can serve to counter discrimination, and that the resilience provided by “seven jobs” should help to make people less vulnerable to this sort of behavior. But that doesn’t address the fact that much societal bias is systematic, or that a great many freelancers are quite dependent on just one client. As we, the people in the sharing movement, gain our footing in this new economy, we should make it harder for the less fortunate among us to get knocked down.
3. Universal health care. It’s sad that, in the US, universal health care is a partisan issue. But to return to Molly Turner’s earlier quote, the companies, organizations and individuals of the sharing economy should not shy away from speaking up just because it happens to be partisan.
Universal health care is perhaps the best example of the ethos of the collaborative economy : it is most efficient and most beneficial when we all come together and share insurance. Many early and enthusiastic users of services like Airbnb and Taskrabbit are looking to make or save a little bit of money because they’ve been marginalized from the mainstream economy — which means it’s quite likely they don’t have access to affordable health insurance. These companies are in a position to speak up for more than just the good of their businesses, but also for many of their users.
In general, it’s rare to see for-profit companies get the sort of support that, for example, Airbnb received from many in the media and general public in the wake of their recent legal setback in New York. And I don’t want to pick on Airbnb here, but if a company is going to play in the public policy arena, its supporters have a reasonable desire to see them fight for more than those policies which directly impact their own growth and profits.
And in the end, when so many of its users share a common set of values, advocating for better public policy should be a great business decision, too.
Credit picture : 
Arnoldo Riker ; Public Citizen
Cet article Should the sharing community take stands on partisan issues ? est apparu en premier sur OuiShare.
