Innovations for Good Work
Panel for the launch of the Royal Society of Art's Good Work Guild on Innovations for Good Work.
With Laetitia Vitaud, writer and speaker on the future of work; Thorben Albrecht, policy director, IG Metall; Nchimunya (Chipo) Hamukoma, research manager, Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator; Christel Laudrup Spliid, qualitative consultant, HK Lab; and Christina J. Colclough, The Why Not Lab
Innovations are emerging worldwide to address the challenges of a rapidly changing future of work. The pandemic is likely to accelerate the pace of technological change and automation globally.
To secure a future where good work is available to all, we will need new approaches to skills, training and lifelong learning, to economic security and to worker voice and power. To launch the RSA Good Work Guild, the panel of good work innovators shares the solutions they have pioneered to support and empower workers in the transition to the jobs of the future; the systemic challenges they have faced in taking new ideas to scale; and the opportunities for innovators, investors and institutional actors to come together to build and sustain system-wide good work innovation, and a global movement for change.
Breaking the Monopolisation of Truth & WeClock
Starting 35 minutes in, Christina J. Colclough used her moments to build out on the RSA's "Building a Field" for an ecosystem for worker innovators. She urged the RSA to include networks of trusted data analysts, legal expertise around good data stewardship, and data storytellers who understand the workers' struggle and the union cause.
Christina introduced WeClock, the privacy-preserving self-tracking app she co-designed with Jonnie Penn, Nathan Freitas and Carrie Winfrey for the Young Workers' Lab at UNI Global Union. She urges unions to use WeClock to access work-related data and break the monopolisation of "truth" that the corporates control.
Before moving on the moderator asked Christina for her views on how funders should change some of their fundamental behaviours to get behind worker power. Christina replied.
Firstly, foundations need to not just research workers as objects, but as subjects. Foundations must dare go into the workers' realities. Secondly, we need to build an innovation environment that embraces failure, connects organisations, reaches out to young workers and finds their narratives and languages. Failure must be embraced, we need to experiment. And thirdly, stop being so shy to the trade union movement. Many foundations will not finance the union movement directly. This has to stop. Foundations are buying a good conscience. They can't just do lip service to this.
Read more about the RSA's Good Work Guild here: https://www.thersa.org/future-of-work/good-work-guild
See their report here
good-work-innovations-in-europe-june-202
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And see their funky Good Work Directory on good work innovations across Europe here: https://www.thersa.org/future-of-work/global-innovations-good-work/directory