In 2015, an urgent public dialogue was unfolding about the state of the US workforce and its prospects for the next decade as a result of changing labor dynamics, growth of on-demand workers, and erosion of middle class wages and access to benefits. To support those conversations and to set an agenda for 2017 and beyond, IFTF's Workable Futures Initiative, created a report: 10 Strategies for a Workable Future.
This report drew from 40 years of research on the future of work and technology and builds on IFTF’s latest ethnography, workshops, and forecasts. The 10 strategies were synthesized after a Workable Futures Initiative convened in October 2015 with over 70 well-known thought leaders, technologists, and social inventors.
IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis believed it was the time to shape how things will play out during the following decade:
“All the stakeholders are finally talking. But often their conversations are centered on ‘turf and power’ debates focused on the short term. There is an unprecedented opportunity now, while we are all in dialogue together, to collaborate to make a truly workable future.”
Relevant today more than ever, the 10 strategies in this report chart an agenda for platform designers and policymakers alike:
Combine the best of investor-owned and commons-based platform models
Solve for both transparency and privacy
Integrate marginalized workers in a sustainable economy
Ensure opportunities for workers to advance outside of traditional organizational hierarchies
Support worker-owned identities
Create ways for workers to bring their voices together
Reinvent benefits to follow workers everywhere
Integrate learning and work
- Prepare youth for “the hustle”
Champion a good work code
In 2016, IFTF expanded its Workable Futures Initiative through additional ethnographic research, studies of the labor economics of digital platforms, and a series of hackathons and convenings in an effort to prototype technological, social, and regulatory solutions using these 10 strategies. The result of the research can be found in the report, Voices of Workable Futures.