Bio

R. Trebor Scholz is a researcher, author, and advocate for fair and sustainable digital labor practices. He is a professor and the founding director of The New School’s Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) in New York City, where he also operates a research institute with a fellowship program.

Scholz has worked to develop and promote a set of models for building worker-owned and democratically-controlled online platforms, known as “platform cooperatives.” He is the author of several books on the subject of platform labor, including Own This! How Platform Cooperatives Change the World, forthcoming with Verso in 2023, and Uber-Worked And Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy, which introduced the concept of platform cooperatives. 

In addition to his work at the PCC, Scholz has been a fellow at the Open Society Foundations, the Berggruen Institute, and Mondragon University, and is a Faculty Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He keynotes events around the world on topics related to economic justice, platform work, and the cooperative digital economy, and his ideas have been featured in major media outlets such as Le Monde, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and The New York Times.