Robert Reich is not a big fan of the sharing economy.

The euphemism is the “share” economy. A more accurate term would be the “share-the-scraps” economy.

New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they’re needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.

Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability.

The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.

His solution is unionization and collective bargaining. I am not against those things – in the short term, how you divide up earnings between owners and workers is a zero-sum question. In the longer term though, you want to grow those earnings at the same time you are dividing them up in some fair way. Unionization might resist the underlying economic and technological forces for a time, but it can’t change them. Remember the “ownership society”? If we aren’t going to give workers real equal bargaining power compared to their corporate employers, a possible alternative is broader ownership of those corporations. We could use inheritance and gift taxes to give every baby an IRA with $10,000 in stock the day they are born, just to throw out a random idea. That would grow, and then later in life, people could choose to either invest that money in education and skills for the jobs that do exist, or they could just choose to work fewer hours than earlier generations did.