Reflections from the 3rd Platform Coops Research Call
What the histories of labour can teach us about worker coops today
When we talk about the future of work, we often focus on what seems new: digital platforms, algorithms, artificial intelligence and emerging models of worker ownership. But while the technologies may be new, the fundamental questions are not. Who controls work? Who owns the infrastructure? Who creates value, and who benefits from it?
At our 3rd Platform Coops Research Call, Camille Steele, Melike N. Kaplan, Anannya Bhowmik Paul and Ela Kagel explored these questions through the long history of labour: From enslavement and industrialisation to algorithmic management and community-owned AI. Their contributions highlighted a central insight: We cannot build a more democratic future of work without understanding the historical power relations that continue to shape it today.
The hidden histories behind the fashion industry
What lies behind the wealth of the global fashion industry? This question drives Camille Steele’s research into the historical connections between slavery, cotton production and contemporary fashion. Drawing on her own family history and the legacy of the Great Migration, she traces the industry’s wealth back to the exploitation of her ancestors were forced to work in the cotton fields of the so-called Black Belt in the South, a major centre of cotton production during the enslavement period. Through the concept of the veil, Camille Steele highlights how the people behind fashion production have historically remained invisible, while the products and profits became one of the world's dominating industries.
The concept of the veil offers a way to understand these shifting relationships between visibility and invisibility. The veil separates the centre from the margins, shaping what we see and what remains hidden. In an age saturated with images, it continually lifts and falls, altering our position in relation to histories of exploitation and contemporary systems of consumption. From enslaved labour to today’s global supply chains, Camille Steele reveals how the fashion industry continues to obscure the human labour and environmental costs behind consumption. In doing so, she invites us to look beyond fashion’s surface and confront the histories of exploitation and inequality that are closely tied to its economic success.
If the veil were to dissolve, the invisible structures sustaining the fashion industry would become visible: the labour, the exploitation and the environmental costs hidden behind its products. It would challenge the distance between consumers and producers, forcing us to confront the histories and inequalities woven into the clothes we wear. Yet, visibility alone may not be enough; the question remains whether seeing what has long been concealed can lead to a fundamental transformation of the systems that depend on it.
Work as collective action
Melike N. Kaplan challenges the dominant economic view of labour as a commodity: time and effort exchanged for wages, where pay compensates for the discomfort of working. Instead, she proposes that work should be a way of using our cooperative capacity to meet collective needs and express ourselves.
From this perspective, capitalism captures our capacity to cooperate and redirects it towards capital accumulation, while encouraging us to see work as a way to prove our worth. The result is a separation between economic activity, the needs of society and the living systems that sustain us.
Drawing on Karl Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift and Karl Polanyi’s account of the economy becoming disembedded from social life, Melike Kaplan traces this rupture to systems that treat land, labour and money as commodities to be extracted.
Repairing this rupture requires more than changing the ownership structures. Cooperatives can redistribute ownership and governance, but they may still operate like conventional companies if they lack the wider structures needed to create lasting change. Kaplan therefore calls for "regenerative cooperativism": rethinking not only what work is for, but also the infrastructure and ecosystems that make different forms of work possible.
This means building both the formal infrastructure of cooperation and the living ecosystems that sustain it, from education and peer networks to federations, advisory organisations and collective narratives.
The questions at the heart of this vision are simple but far-reaching: What work does the world need now? What would work look and feel like if it were organised around collective needs, rather than capital accumulation?
Platform work: New technologies, familiar power imbalances
Drawing on examples from gig work in India and Denmark, Anannya Bhowmik Paul explored how conventional platform business models benefit from precarious labour conditions and use algorithmic systems to maintain control over workers. Although platforms often present couriers and drivers as independent contractors or “partners,” their working realities tell a different story: workers have little say over pricing, limited opportunities to negotiate their rates, and may face sudden account deactivation without a meaningful hearing. Drawing on examples from Denmark and India, she showed how platforms such as Wolt and Zomato can change payment structures, shape access to work and even deactivate accounts with limited transparency.
Despite differences in their national contexts, both cases reveal a similar imbalance: platforms retain considerable control over working conditions, while workers have little influence over the systems that govern their livelihoods.
Algorithmic management does not eliminate managerial power. It can instead make that power less visible and harder to challenge.
Anannya Bhowmik Paul also explored how cooperative technologies can offer alternatives. The bicycle delivery management platform CoopCycle rejects features such as dynamic pricing and rating systems. It also requires human and peer review for deactivation and it enables local cooperatives to host their own software. The cooperative ridesharing and delivery platform Eva.coop rejects surge pricing, uses blockchain-based smart contracts for transparent revenue distribution, and allows riders to become voting members.
These examples demonstrate that technology can be designed around different values. Cooperative platforms can make decisions more transparent, distribute control and give workers a meaningful role in shaping the systems on which they depend.
Beyond ownership: Who governs the digital economy?
Ela Kagel brought these questions together by revisiting an enduring issue in the history of labour: who owns the means of production?
Where industrial workers depended on factories and machinery, digital workers depend on platforms, algorithms, data, networks and audiences. Ela Kagel presents four archetypes of workers in the digital platform economy: Gig workers (mostly represented by delivery riders), content moderators, online entrepreneurs and creators. They may have very different working conditions and they may experience various levels of visibility and precarity, but they are all dependent on infrastructure they do not control.
For Ela Kagel, platform cooperativism must go beyond protecting workers within existing systems. It must also ask who owns and governs the infrastructure itself. However, ownership alone is not enough. A cooperative can still concentrate decision-making among managers or technical experts. Many cooperatives around the world demonstrate that shared ownership does not necessarily guarantee meaningful member participation in the decisions that shape their work.
Genuine worker agency means being able to understand and challenge algorithms, influence pricing, decide how data is used and participate meaningfully in strategic decisions. It also means asking whose voices are heard, whose knowledge counts, who will be mainly affected by certain decisions and who remains excluded from governance.
These questions become particularly important with the development of AI. Community ownership is a starting point, but it must be accompanied by deeper questions: Who built these systems? Whose labour sustains them? Who bears their costs, and who decides what they are for?
New technologies do not automatically create new power relations. Without democratic governance, they can reproduce old hierarchies in new forms.
Building democratic alternatives together
Across the four contributions, a common argument emerges: transforming the future of work requires us to look beyond technological innovation and formal ownership structures.
The history of labour shows how economic systems have been shaped by exploitation, exclusion and unequal control over resources. Contemporary platform economies may operate through different infrastructures, but questions of power, agency and the distribution of value remain central.
The concept of platform cooperativism offers an opportunity to address these questions by developing forms of collective ownership and democratic governance. But this requires ongoing experimentation: finding ways to share information, make decisions together, build trust and ensure that participation is meaningful rather than merely formal.
It also means recognising that cooperatives can reproduce the hierarchies they seek to overcome. Democratic ownership must be accompanied by a commitment to widening participation and questioning how power operates within organisations.
The challenge ahead is not simply to create platforms owned by workers, but to make the infrastructures on which people depend genuinely governable by them. By connecting the long history of labour with the possibilities of cooperative technology, we can begin to imagine an economy organised around collective needs, shared power and democratic agency.
The technology may be new. The struggles underlying the technology are old. How can we draw on lessons from the past to rethink not only who owns technology, but also what work means in society and how we organise it together?
