Darcy Du Toit – Social Law Project, University of Western Cape

I’m Darcy Du Toit, attached to the Social Law Project at the University of the Western Cape. I’m a labor lawyer by trade, interested in the platform economy and platform.coopersystem.com.breratives, arising from long involvement in areas of labor law related to worker organization and democratization of the workplace. More recently, I’ve become involved with domestic work research since 2009, and we’ve been engaged in that area since then. Platforms owned collectively by workers represent a significant opportunity, especially because South Africa has a substantial unemployment problem, and job creation is a universal concern. Everyone, from government to business, talks about it, but realistically, neither big companies nor small businesses are likely to create millions of jobs. The next default position is encouraging young people to start businesses, but often they are neither equipped for this nor do they wish to do so.

Given the success of various commercial platforms internationally, that model has quite a lot going for it. If such models could be owned collectively, they would create work opportunities for those who own them, provided they are run properly, which of course means a lot of research must precede this to develop the necessary skills—technical, management, and others. If and when such a co-op succeeds in a given area, it would set a precedent for others to follow, potentially gaining momentum. We are very much at the beginning of this journey in South Africa.

Although there have been many co-ops for a long time, traditionally, they have been dominated by large agricultural cooperatives, which remain the primary model. For instance, trade unions started small co-ops for unemployed members in the textile industry when factories moved to the Far East. Unemployed textile workers formed co-ops to manufacture garments, but these have largely been unsuccessful. Some continue to exist, but they haven’t been sustainable. Despite a cooperatives act that creates a legal framework and theoretically the support of no fewer than 26 government agencies from the Development Bank of Southern Africa downwards, in practice, there is little support. We are hoping, in a small way, having linked up with former Uber drivers who became deactivated and domestic workers who see a way forward in forming cooperatives to market their services and empower themselves. We are at the beginning, but our project is officially due to launch from May onwards, really kicking off at the beginning of 2020. We hope that in two or three years, in cooperation with our colleagues elsewhere, to develop the necessary tools, particularly a platform that can be used initially by domestic and care workers. We believe there is real scope for success here, and as we progress, it becomes more complicated, but also to develop a platform that Uber drivers could use to market their services. It has been done elsewhere; it can be done. So, that’s where we are at the moment