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Scoop.it!
Excerpted from Boyd Cohen: “The sharing economy is way beyond unicorns and death stars. There are millions of people around the world actively engaged in sharing activities whereby no money changes hands whatsoever (e.g. repair cafés, Peerby, tool libraries, Freecycle, Little Free Libraries, open source software, clothing swaps, timebanks, and more) or, at a minimum, … 
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Scoop.it!
The companies made one fatal error: You can’t truly remedy today’s economic problems by using the same business structures that created the economic problems. Because of their current ownership structure, Airbnb, Lyft, Über, and TaskRabbit could be bought out by ever larger and more centralized companies that won’t necessarily care about the well-being of people using the services, or about the overall abundance of jobs in our economy. There is only one way to ensure that a company will make decisions in the interests of the people it serves: Put those people in control of the company. So let me introduce the T corporation. Most business-savvy people know that there are S corporations (Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code) and C corporations (Subchapter C), but almost no one thinks about forming a T corporation (Subchapter T). But T corporations have been around for a long time, and they have a major benefit of not paying tax if 1) they are governed democratically by the shareholders (i.e., everyone gets one vote in the election of the board, regardless of share value) and 2) the earnings of the company are distributed to the shareholders on the basis of how much they patronize (i.e. do business with) the company.
jean lievens's insight:
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 28th, 2013 at 11:39 am and is filed under Ethical Economy, P2P Governance, P2P Public Policy, Peer Production, Sharing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Scoop.it!
The sharing economy offers enormous potential to create jobs. Sharing leverages a wide variety of resources and lowers barriers to starting small businesses. Cities can lower the cost of starting businesses by supporting innovations like shared workspaces, shared commercial kitchens, community-financed start-ups, community-owned commercial centers, and spaces for “pop-up” businesses. Cities can also lower permitting barriers for home-based micro-enterprises. Sharing is also at the heart of the employment model that is designed to keep wealth and jobs in the community: cooperatives. In the age of global economics, where even money spent locally can quickly slip from local communities, fostering cooperative enterprise creates local jobs that are rooted securely in the community. Just as important, cooperative jobs are likely to be good jobs that value dignity, creativity, democracy, and fair pay. These qualities are among the reasons co-ops are widely acknowledged as being more viable, more resilient, and healthier for their communities than conventional businesses.100 Supporting the growth of cooperatively owned enterprises may be one of the most important things that a city can do to support stable, fair paying, local job creation.
Scoop.it!
The legal problems of the sharing economy just got real. The latest lawsuits against "ride-sharing" companies Lyft and Über could be game changers. The plaintiffs are drivers who give rides to strangers for money, paying a portion of their earnings to the companies. The class action lawsuits argue that the drivers should be classified as employees of the companies. Regardless of the outcome, the lawsuits call attention to the potential harms arising from the non-sharing parts of the sharing economy. It’s a good opportunity to declare that the so-called “sharing economy” needs a new business model.
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