Samuel Gompers: "So long as there is one man who seeks employment and cannot obtain it, the hours of labor are too long."

The section is dedicated to the intersection between peer to peer dynamics, , the new work culture and hacker ethics, the (im)material labor of knowledge workers, and their intersection with the traditional labour movement and concerns. It's also specifically dedicated to alliances between p2p movements and workers movements.

Introduction

• Please read: Theses on Digital Labor in an Emerging P2P Economy

• Peter Waterman: Linking Labour and the Commons Internationally‎: Re-Interpreting Equality in Terms of the Principle of the Commons

• Recommended books on the contemporary condition of 'work', by Dougald Hine at http://dougald.co.uk/workbooks.htm

• Key article by Hilary Wainwright: Co-Creative Labor, Productive Democracy and the Partner State; a very important text to reset government policies for the p2p age. The 3 parts cover: 1 A value revolution in labor; 2 Re-constituting industrial strategies based on co-creative labor; 3 The Co-Creative Economy needs a Partner State

• Tom Walker: Labour Power as a Common-Pool Resource

Worthy of attention and support

• The P2P Foundation supports the convergence of self-organized labor and multi-stakeholder cooperatives and solidarity economy entities on the one hand, with open models that sustain livelihoods and co-create commons. This is convergence of models is called Open Cooperativism and can take special forms like Platform Cooperativism or Data Cooperatives. This calls for mutual support and relations between productive communities based on open contributions (i.e. Commmons-Based Peer Production, and post-corporate ethical entrepreneurial coalitions (see http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Post-Corporate).

• The P2P Foundation supports the emergence of Commonfare practices of social solidarity for networked workers who co-created commons and shared resources (see our special section http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Solidarity), as well as their integration with a strengthened welfare system. In particular we support the creation of 'labor mutuals', i.e. freelance coops which already exist in the French-speaking world (Coopaname in France ; SMart in Belgium, Bigre, etc ..; see the project of AltGen in the UK).

See also:

• Tom Walker's work on Social Accounting [1] ; i.e. on considering Employment as a Common Pool Resource in order to institute a Labor Commons

• Manifesto for a Common Ground for Independent Workers calls for a new labor statute that combines autonomy and security

[2]

Citations

“In the age of hand-crafting, the dominant forms of organization were the all-powerful churches, kingdoms, and hand-craftsmen guilds. Just as the age of machine-crafting led the emergence of today’s organizations, ending the dominance of guilds, kingdoms, and churches, so too will the age of mind-crafting give rise to new, more chaordic concepts of organization that will end the dominance of today’s organizational structures.”

- Dee Hock [3]

Key Resources

• Free and Open Software Applications that are safe and useful for unionists, labour and social justice activists: [4]

Key Articles

• Hilary Wainwright: From Labour as Commodity to Labour as a Common

• The Exploitation of Digital Labor. By Trebor Scholz. A call for the emergence of Platform Cooperativism

• Working Online. Special issue of Work Organisation Labour & Globalisation. [5]: analyses how the development of online work has meshed with broader trends in organisational restructuring to erode traditional employment norms, time structures and models of behaviour at work, placing new stresses on offline daily life."

How-To

1. How to Find a Job Using Social Media [6]
2. The Shareable Job Search Search [7]
3. How to Create Your Own Green Job [8]
4. How to Make A Franchise Shareable [9]

Key Books

Labor under Cognitive Capitalism

• Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a Globalised, Informatised, Capitalism. By Waterman Peter [10]

1. Dyer-Withford, Nick. and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
2. Neff, Gina. Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
3. Scholz. Trebor, Ed. Digital Labor: The Internet as Factory and Playground. New York: Routledge, 2013
4. Peters, Michael A. and Ergin Bulut, Eds. Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2011.

General Political Economy of Labor

1. Labour Aristocracy: Mass Base of Social-Democracy (H.W. Edwards) [11]: "Makes the crucial argument for the origins and nature of social-democracy as arising out of imperialist rent."

Key Podcasts

• Peter Waterman on Communication Internationalism for Labor and Unions

Key Statistics

• A report from Orange called The way to work states that, of 28.5 million UK workers, 3.64 million (13%) are self employed, 7 million (24%) are part-time workers, 7% are freelance workers, and 11% are in businesses with no employees. Otherwise stated: 55% of the UK workforce does not have a job in the traditional sense of the word."

(http://www.doorsofperception.com/notopic/life-as-a-spot/)

• Ann Pettifor: "The ILO predicts that by 2019, more than 212 million people will be out of work, up

from the current tragedy of 201 million. (World Employment and Social Outlook – Trends 2015 (WESO).) [12]