Written by Fairuz Mullagee, Candice James
As the world continues to be digitised, and more and more work is organised through online
platforms, domestic services have not been untouched. Various platforms offer such services on a
commercial (for-profit) basis. The Digital Platform Co-operative Project (DPCP), created by the Social
Law Project (SLP) in the Centre for Transformative Regulation of Work (CENTROW) at the University
of the Western Cape, sets out to establish an alternative model for delivering domestic and care
services by means of a worker-owned platform.
Empowering and upskilling domestic workers who have been (and continue to be) undervalued and
exploited is a central feature of the project. The original concept sought to develop a generic model
through which participants would collectively market their services and/or products under
decent and sustainable conditions, obtain affordable access to products/services which they
require, develop their professional and organisational skills and deepen their understanding
of their social context. DPCP is aimed at building a viable business model on this basis, capable of
delivering world class services while enabling workers to participate in its design through workshops
on digital literacy, principles of co-operativism and other relevant topics.
The context is a world that has seen deterioration of democracy at all levels of society, in which the
question of ownership comes up frequently. For example, an Amnesty
International report, Surveillance giants: How the business model of Google and Facebook threatens
human rights (2019), shows how the concentration of power obstructs accountability. Similarly,
Matt Shaw in an article ‘Billionaire capitalists are designing humanity’s future. Don’t let them’ (The
Guardian, 5 February 2021) calls for ‘more public-spirited, collective futures’. *As the DPCP team
continues to embark on the journey of building a viable business model that is aimed at empowering
and enabling domestic workers to adapt, in an age of non-stop digitisation, Who owns what in a
digital platform and which form of ownership will best achieve the DPCP’s research objective of
empowerment and upskilling?
‘Ownership’ is used here as referring to a right to exercise control over property, physical or
intellectual. There are different forms that ownership can take, each with its own advantages and
disadvantages. In the domestic and care work sector, given the nature of the work and the vast
inequalities that exist, collective ownership is an attractive option for a platform dedicated to
empowerment.
By ‘collective ownership’ is meant a form of ownership where all members of a group can exercise
powers of ownership over a thing for the potential benefit of all. Here it is necessary to distinguish
between ownership in the legal sense and psychological ownership (defined by Wikipedia as “the
feeling that something is yours”). It can form around various objects, including an individual’s job,
organisational practices and organisations themselves. The most powerful means by which an
individual acquires it over an object is by creating it – that is why domestic workers must be involved
in the design and establishment of the cooperative. But its importance is ongoing. In uncertain
environments, for instance, and where there are frequent changes in membership, feelings of
collective ownership in an organisation can provide individual workers with a sense of continuity and
connection to their work.
Linked to collective ownership, democratically control is strongly associated with cooperatives as
businesses not purely concerned with profit-making but also with meeting the needs of the
members and their communities, non-economic as well as economic. DPCP thus seeks to build a
business model that will meet the needs of domestic workers while satisfying the requirements of
customers or users of their services, with the platform acting as the market-place.
In practice, the big question is: who owns what? Having started with the concept of a worker-owned
platform, we are now testing it in practice and grappling with the idea that a sustainable model may
turn out to be something of a hybrid – that is, one which seeks to prevent exploitation and is able to
shift the power imbalance between the traditional roles of ‘employer’ and ‘employee’ by redefining
these in the organisational structure of the collective.
To sum up: the project has a dual objective, combining economic sustainability with empowerment
and development. While the platform will be owned and controlled by its members on a basis of
participatory democracy, it will draw on the precedent of existing platforms so as to learn from their
operational strengths and weaknesses with the aim of optimising the benefits for workers and
minimising the space for enrichment by a few.
Enabled by technology, we believe that collectively owned and operated platforms offer a route to
fairer, more inclusive outcomes that can generate tangible advantages for workers with little
prospect of formal employment and consumers alike, with long-term social and economic benefits.
To this end, we together with the worker-participants need to continue unpacking the fundamentals
of financing and ownership in the next steps in our exploration.
These, too, are questions which CENTROW is targeting for ongoing research.
About the author: Candice James is currently working as the administrator for CENTROW and ACTCJ.
She also works as a part-time researcher at CENTROW.
About the author: Fairuz Mullagee is the coordinator of the Social Law Project at the Faculty of Law
at UWC.
