Not far from the Ritz hotel, beyond the cigar stores and shooting shops of Piccadilly, lies the secluded splendour of Lancaster House. A neoclassical mansion of honey‑coloured Bath stone, its cavernous rooms and gilded pillars are so lavish that when Queen Victoria visited, she reportedly told her hostess: “My dear, I have come from my house to your palace.”
It was in this British Versailles, on a crisp morning in March, that the winners of the new economy congregated to discuss what to do about the losers. The delegates, who were there for a conference on the “future of work” (tagline: “Prepare to be disrupted”), included Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, Microsoft’s “director of office envisioning”, and the founder of SenseCore, which produces “revolutionary human monitoring technology”. At one point, I heard a man introduce his company as “a quick-harvest ideas incubator based in Seattle”.
The jargon was cutting-edge, but much of the analysis was wearyingly familiar. Martha Lane Fox, the co-founder of lastminute.com, condemned Britain for “still not getting the internet”; Ed Vaizey, the Conservative minister, bumbled about the importance of creative thinking in a technical age; several softly spoken success stories relayed the importance of mindfulness for business leaders. Later, a man from McKinsey insisted that “while it isn’t politically correct to say so”, the one thing that the workforce needed to rediscover was discipline.
The central problem about the future of work confronting the supremely self-confident crowd is that it is not just the poor, but increasingly the middle classes as well, who can no longer count on any kind of certainty. Unemployment is falling, yet anxiety is growing, as freelance “opportunities” and part-time assignments replace steady employment. Seven years on, it is increasingly clear that the financial crisis has left lasting marks on the world of work. The recovery has begun, but the number of Britons working part-time when they would like to be full-time – still 1.3 million – has barely been dented.
What the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has called an “epidemic of insecurity” did not go unacknowledged at Lancaster House, but it was inevitably glossed in a language of adaptability. As the Economist summed up the emerging zero-hours labour market, the 700,000 people in the UK in jobs without guaranteed hours are “workers on tap”. It is a market where employers call the shots. Yet at the conference, there was little frank discussion about whether technology was making things better or worse; nobody spoke to the fears of people stuck with on-call shifts, hoping for work that might offer a regular paycheque.
But then – at the stroke of noon – up sprung an awkwardly extroverted Englishman who actually had something specific to say. Sandwiched between Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Steve Jobs, and two billionaires – who agreed in hushed tones that “inequality was a challenge” – Wingham Rowan was given just 10 minutes to make his pitch. With his black shirt and off-yellow tie, he looked a little like a sci-fi enthusiast who had wandered into the wrong conference hall, and the audience initially thinned out. But Rowan, who is 54, soon had the attention of those who remained. He brims with the zeal of a man who has not merely seen the future, but knows how to get there.
Rowan was here to demonstrate the invention to which he has dedicated the past 20 years of his life. He believes that it can transform the very nature of work – by doing for downtrodden shift workers what automation and financial arbitrage have done for the flash boys of Wall Street. His creation looks at first like a pretty straightforward website, where recruiting firms can advertise positions and would-be workers can log on to find jobs. The site is powered by gruesomely complex software at the backend, which ushers the two parties towards one another, as if – to quote a great Scot – guided by an invisible hand. Rowan talks excitedly about “securing the vision of Karl Marx through the means of Adam Smith”. After hearing him enthuse about his project, its name comes as a disappointment: the central database of available hours, or Cedah.
On stage, Rowan spoke briefly about why Cedah was needed, before cranking up a demonstration video. Rowan’s disembodied voice blared from loudspeakers, declaring “So we built it!”, while the real Rowan sat silently by. The demo began with a father logging on to a rather dated-looking website – glass-effect, embossed typefaces – to see who might be around to take his disabled son, Gary, swimming.
After a series of simple drop-down menus for “What?”, “Where?” and “When?”, we got to “Who?”, and a range of cheery and immediately available workers’ faces popped up. Alongside each of these little pictures, the person’s star rating, “role match” and wage expectations were listed. The father clicked his choice, and the booking was made.
Next, we saw a worker log on and skip her way through a similar set of menus, detailing how far she would travel for what pay, what hours suited her, and so on. Availability was blocked out on a spreadsheet diary, the completion of which prompted a list of live local job openings in personal care, dog walking and “household tasks” to pop up on the screen. If we are entering a world of “workers on tap”, then here we glimpsed Rowan’s vision of the sort of employee who might be happy to flow through the pipes – sunny-side-up jacks-of-all-trades embracing new earning opportunities.
At the end of the presentation, the BBC’s Emily Maitlis, who was compering, noted that the “spreadsheet looked a bit like an Airbnb of your life”, referring to the rent-your-spare-room website that has become a giant of the so-called sharing economy. The big idea behind this growing sector is to use IT to trade resources that previously sat idle. That might mean a spare room, or a little-used vehicle, but it could equally be a human being with time on their hands. Several of the Lancaster House delegates had also invested in Airbnb’s equivalents in the casual labour market – companies such as TaskRabbit, Amazon Mechanical Turk and Uber, the quasi taxi-firm that is gnawing at the security of every licensed cabbie.
At first glance, Rowan may seem like one more animal in the TaskRabbit warren: he certainly believes, as all the “sharer” evangelicals do, that the sun is setting on the day of the regular job, and that this is both inevitable and ultimately desirable. The difference with his project, however, is that it is founded on the belief that technology and economics are combining to make the transition more painful for workers – and that this needs fixing.
Chief among Rowan’s concerns is that many sharing-economy sites, such as TaskRabbit, take a considerable cut out of pay. Even more worryingly, other sites are able to circumvent workplace protections – minimum-wage rates, anti-discrimination laws, even the obligation to pay anything at all – by setting things up so that there is technically no employment relationship between the taskmaster and his hires.
In this new world, it seems, the obvious advantages for employers come at the cost of employees, who have little choice but to accept lousy and unreliable terms. The reality of new modes of working is often, Rowan said on stage, “hours on end of hanging around by your phone, to see whether or not a text about a shift will come through”.
Rowan is convinced that what is needed is a website that reconciles the interests of hired hands and casual employers. Cedah, he vows, can do exactly that. The website will operate not as a buccaneering enterprise, but instead as a staid “regulated utility”, which – he argues – can be better for everyone.
If casual work that might otherwise be done on a cash-in-hand basis went through an official system, that would obviously be better for the government, since it would enable more taxes to be collected. Because Cedah would be properly regulated, workers could be sure that all their rights would be respected. The system is also designed to allow workers to build up a portable reputation, the precondition for a real casual career. Finally, for workers and employers alike, there is an obvious advantage to a website that brings them together without charging an excessive fee.
This is not just the daydream of one lonely imagination: the system already exists. Developed in fits and starts over two decades, using private investment and slugs of public money – including £500,000 that was signed off by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2005 – the finished product is now sitting on a server farm by the banks of the River Ouse, in York. Rowan insists that it has been ready to go since 2006.
For Rowan’s great revolution in the way we work to begin, all that is needed is for the politicians who have already stumped up the money for the system to, as it were, switch it on. In practice, that means putting a critical mass of public-sector bookings through the system to turn it into a vibrant market – where wages can continually adjust, where workers can come to hunt out their openings, and where private employers will soon enough be impelled to do their recruiting.
Rowan knows, however, that there will be no green light before the general election on 7 May: the political fear of being charged with peddling “zero-hours contracts all round” will see to that. In a recent email to Rowan, a frontbench politician stated that this is “a topic we might come back to after the election” – once a campaign in which the “focus is more on the problems caused by casualisation, rather than on the opportunities flexibility offers” is safely out of the way.
That cold-then-warm email is typical of the treatment that Rowan has received over the years from ministers, thinktanks and big businesses, such as IBM and Tesco. Each has walked with him for a time, then wandered away. Irrespective of the waxing and waning of interest from anyone else, he has maintained a singular passion since 1994 – perfecting his online labour exchange. And his ambitions have only grown bigger.
Wingham Rowan was born in 1960 to a social worker and an art college lecturer, and raised in Wales and the West Country. His was a Guardian-reading family, although not, Rowan recalls, especially political. In contrast to the kinds of people he would later work with in thinktanks – whose CVs invariably went something like “school swot, Oxbridge first, research fellow at the Institute of This or That” – Rowan was not a model student. He stopped paying any attention in class at age 16, the moment one of the many unsolicited ideas he used to bombard newspapers with caught the eye of an editor at the Sunday Mirror. The pitch was for six features, one for each week of the summer holiday.
Although they ended up commissioning journalists to write the articles, the Sunday Mirror liked the concept enough to reward Rowan with what he recalls was “a staggering sum for 16-year-old in a Somerset village in 1977, of – I think – £100”. His earlier ambition to be ordained went out the window: he was now entirely convinced that he had a springboard to the top in the media. Rather than studying for his A-levels, he began a frenzy of letter-writing to newspaper editors and TV producers, all of whom were treated to photocopies of the Sunday Mirror cuttings. (“Lack of ambition has never been a problem,” Rowan says.)
The moment his A-levels were failed and out of the way, he landed a job as a runner at the London office of Yorkshire Television (YTV), where he assiduously offered to make tea for everybody in the hope of forging useful connections. It worked. During one tea run in 1980, Rowan – not yet 20 – persuaded YTV’s head of children’s programmes, Joy Whitby, that he would be an ideal face to present mini-reports on a new kids’ show called Ad Lib, “the latest unsuccessful rival to Blue Peter”.
Ad Lib only lasted one series, but Whitby kept faith in her young hire and, after another winning tea-time pitch, Rowan’s Report was born. It was “a sort of junior Whicker’s World”, which featured interviews with “the kid from the Heinz soup ads and the children’s waterski world champion”. There was even a segment with the 13-year-old proto-fogey, stock-market prodigy and future Tory MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg.
When the show crashed and burned after two series, Rowan’s nascent career as a presenter seemed finished – and he was only 23. Even worse, he was without work. It was 1983: 3 million people were unemployed and Rowan was scrambling round for whatever off-screen roles he could grab. After flirting with an ambition to change the world – spending his leisure time on activist jaunts in Gaza or apartheid-era South Africa (“If I wasn’t getting tear gassed when abroad, then I didn’t feel I was on holiday”) – Rowan continued his indefatigable self-promotion in the footloose television industry, which led to odd jobs like a behind-the-scenes spell with Richard and Judy and a stint on the short-lived gameshow Three’s a Crowd.
It took a dozen itinerant years for Rowan to find his way back in front of the cameras. In 1995, he hatched a new idea for a show: he had noticed that the internet, still a relatively new phenomenon, was “overwhelmingly about sex”. For once, the people he was pitching did not need much persuading. ITV signed up a 52-week run of Cyber Cafe, where Rowan presented post-pub audiences with randy tales of how groups of Californians were now using “chatrooms” and “message boards” to swap pervy notes on the best escalators for upskirt photography, or the right room number to ask for in a hotel if you wanted to be able to sneak a peek at the action in somebody else’s room.
But even before Cyber Cafe made its debut, Rowan had begun to see the internet’s potential for social good. In 1993, a friend took him into the computer room at Newcastle University, where he saw how students had begun to use the web and realised, he said, that “if networked computers were more than a fad they would have huge potential for economic change”. As he relayed quirky stories of internet sleaze to a bleary-eyed nation, the conviction only grew: humanity had to be able to do something better with all this interconnection.
But what? For someone who had dedicated his youth to desperately trying to find career openings, one potential application suggested itself. Devouring books on finance such as Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, Rowan was overwhelmed by the unbelievable efficiency with which technology was already allowing the assets of the rich to be traded. But it dawned on him that “the trade in the single most important asset for the other 99% of us – namely our time – was something that technology was as yet only touching at the margins”. Here, then, was the great social problem that the web could solve: matching idle hours with jobs that needed to be done.
Rowan reached out to Demos, a New Labour thinktank so trendy that one of the researchers was actually called Perri 6. While continuing his regular job, telling prurient anecdotes on late-night TV, he began writing pamphlets for Demos on what he then called “public benefit computer trading”. In 1999, he published a book, Net Benefit: The Ultimate Potential of Online Trade. His focus, at this stage, was not only markets in labour, but markets in all kinds of odds and ends, “the sort of assets that even people at the bottom of the pile will have”. He had realised, long before the advent of Airbnb, that almost anything could be rented online in this way. You might have, say, a games console that you only use in the evenings, or a mountain bike you only use at the weekend. This, to the Rowan of the 1990s, was a wasted opportunity. The web meant that they could be loaned out to make money.
Demos’s director at the time, Geoff Mulgan, who went on to become Tony Blair’s policy chief, maintains that Rowan’s work in the 1990s was groundbreaking. “If Britain had been like California,” Mulgan told me, “someone would have put the $300m behind the idea, e-commerce would have been a great British success, and he would have been mega-rich.” But Britain is not California, and even though Rowan goes on “vacations” rather than holidays and waits in “lines” not queues, he is unmistakably British. And no one I have spoken to imagines that money is what motivates him. If it were, he would not have narrowed his focus, as he soon did, from online markets in general to online labour for part-timers on the fringe.
Rowan was not content to be a mere theorist of online labour markets. He wanted to create one, too. And not just any online labour market, but one so all-encompassing that it would revolutionise work. His priority was the 13 million people who wanted jobs, but could not guarantee the rigid commitment needed for full-time employment – whether this was a result of family responsibilities, studies or varying health.
As the first great internet bubble puffed up, it was not necessary to have a meticulous business plan, merely an idea that sounded sufficiently “webby”. He struck up deals with the employment agency Adecco, the management consultancy PwC and the database managers Informix. Together, these companies invested around £250,000 in Rowan’s idea, and more in support services.
As the millennium dawned, Rowan’s Guaranteed Electronic Markets (GEM) Development Organisation was registered and given five desks at PwC’s offices in the City. He could finally walk away from presenting Cyber Cafe, having saved all the money he needed to bankroll a few years of development. His next task was to pin down the technological details. So Rowan found himself suddenly drawn into “constant iterations of functionality” – or in plain parlance, trial and error. Unfortunately, there was much more error than anything else.
Some of the investors, hoping for quick results, were still thinking in terms of “the old listings model of search, essentially an online directory inquiries – a list of potential employers to call”. That is trivial to do, and, in Rowan’s view, is pretty much all that some of the big sharing-economy sites provide, for huge rewards, in 2015. He was always bent on creating something much more ambitious: software that could dip in and out of disparate databases in real time to create a live and continuous market, which would reveal to both buyers and sellers of labour all their available options at any given instant.
This is terrifically hard to pull off. If retail websites are relatively simple to design, hiring things out is more complicated – there is always a question not only about what is available, but also when. Then again, renting out hotel rooms is much simpler than renting out people. “Even for dog walking”, Rowan explained, “you need someone trusted, in your neighbourhood, and available – let’s say – at precisely 4pm.” And even with the least fussy employer, the law might require criminal-record checks, hygiene licences, professional qualifications, minimum wages, maximum hours, and so on and so on.
The rise and rise of the sharing economy may now be sweeping many of these safeguards away, but Rowan was always determined to do things properly – ensuring his website was dynamic and that it treated employees fairly – which intensified the technical demands. With the limits of early-2000s processing power, this turned out to be too much for Rowan’s small operation. GEM’s money ran out, and in 2002, it went bust.
* * *
During what Rowan now calls his “wilderness years”, the future of work was not a hot political issue. In 2003, unemployment in Britain fell below 5% – the lowest rate since Rowan was a teenager. Pay was not rising much, but growing options for credit meant that wage stagnation commanded very little attention. At this point, other people might have started hunting out new bright ideas, but Rowan was undaunted. He embarked on three straight years hunched over his Dell desktop computer, drawing countless flowcharts on PowerPoint slides, which dealt with every conceivable combination of employee preference and employer whim. The word “prosaic” does not do justice to the day-to-day problems that Rowan had to deal with between 2002 and 2005. Even now, he bridles with frustration at his inability to convey to the layman the depth of the arcane difficulties involved.
At the start of this period, Rowan was working without any income – he lived off his savings for months on end – and, after a former GEM colleague who had continued working with him quit, the day-to-day graft became almost entirely solitary. But from around 2003, Rowan attracted the interest of Paul Barry‑Walsh, a philanthropist and micro-financier, who told me recently that he had been happy to extend “an open chequebook” to “a bright and passionate guy” who shared his faith in the power of technology to transform casual work. They became business partners, and before long Barry-Walsh had sunk about £700,000 into Rowan’s project.
Rowan energetically pursued government backing as well, but he has not always been persuasive. His zeal offends every sensibility of an institutionally sceptical civil service. One former senior government economist allowed that “perhaps we’ve been too dismissive of him”, before adding that “it’s hard not to be when someone comes in and does a presentation which doesn’t highlight ‘a few useful things we could try’, but instead promises revolution”. A cabinet office official told me Rowan was “way too evangelical – it makes you suspicious”. “I’m not sure it’s fair,” a former Treasury man said, “but I’ve put him on my ‘avoid’ list.”
These same officials, however, conceded that Rowan did have a point about the potential of technology to create flexible openings for workers on the margins. In the era before the financial crisis, when the economy was producing enough “proper jobs” for those who wanted them, his proposition was received warmly in virtually every quarter. Rowan’s optimistic emphasis on fusing markets with technology to raise lowly living standards swam with the prevailing social-policy current of the time.
In 2005, John Prescott’s office stumped up half a million pounds for Rowan to develop his online system through to completion. By 2006, Cedah was finally good to go, with a requirement that – in return for the investment – Rowan would grant councils free access to his system. He was delighted to do so, because the state’s active involvement is, as he sees it, indispensable to Cedah’s success.
To make his system hum, Rowan needs to ensure that the site always offers lots of varied openings. Councils are the obvious customer because, he said, “even a smallish local authority will need a huge number of extra hands at different points There will be volatile demands for care, obviously, school patrols in term time, which aren’t needed in the holiday, and form-fillers for the electoral register, at the relevant point in the cycle.”. However, the offer of free access to Cedah has not yet proved a sufficient lure for local councils. From Kirkless in Yorkshire to Newham in London, Rowan can name plenty that have shown interest, but none has made the great leap he hankers for.
Rowan did enjoy a big breakthrough when he landed Tesco as a Cedah customer: for a while it used a version of the system to advertise its overtime shifts. But in the end, Tesco elected to use a simpler platform tailor-made for trading supermarket shifts. Rowan said he still has good relations with the company, but his former business partner Barry-Walsh hinted the system may not have performed as promised. Britain’s biggest retailer, he said, “had been oversold”.
A social entrepreneur who intermittently attempts to operate as an entrepreneur proper, Rowan has always struggled to crystallise his big idea into a winning business proposition. He is, after all, trying to lure profit-hungry capital into a carefully regulated marketplace, when it might prefer a free-for-all. And in the zero-hours recovery, where sharing sites with fewer scruples are springing up to service employer demands for “workers on tap”, the commercial proposition becomes an even harder sell. This leaves Rowan increasingly dependent on the public sector, which means getting politicians to bite. He attributes the continuing failure of ministers and councillors to embrace his project to “the silos between different departments, and the political obsession with counting discrete jobs, even where the cost of that is denying some people the chance to work in a more ad hoc way”. I’m not so sure.
During the mid 2000s, Rowan’s project was viewed as a harmless enterprise at worst. There certainly did not seem to be any good reason to shun a technology that offered occasional work to people who would otherwise lack any employment. But after 2008, as the economy has struggled, companies such as Uber have thrived. We have now seen a version of the flexible-hours future that Rowan believes is inevitable – and it isn’t pretty. For Rowan the fate of workers forced to sell scraps of labour on increasingly miserable terms is all the more reason to do things properly – which means, of course, doing things his way. Between the start of the credit crunch in 2007 and the depths of the recession in 2009, he says he moved out of a technocratic mindset and towards a deeper appreciation that helping people sell their time more efficiently was “a compelling human need”.
But I suspect that many of the people that he so energetically courts would now view Cedah warily. For all the safeguards Rowan has built into his software – to respect regulations and make room for employer-funded training – many councillors will, I suspect, glance at his proposition, and then look at what is already going on in their local labour market, and ask themselves whether they really want to give things another push in the same direction. After all, UltraFlexi – the name of the shell company in which Rowan keeps his software – would not be a bad phrase to describe the current UK labour market.
Even if the workers of the ultra-flexi future are able to find more productive openings, with different bosses on different days, they will not be able to count on much loyalty. As inequality rises, it is increasingly plain that pay is not only about the quality of your work but simply getting what you can. Relationships help determine your wage, as do moral emotions – such as the shame a boss feels if he pays himself too much relative to a lowly colleague. The lack of a stable group of colleagues also limits the scope for collective bargaining, and à la carte hiring has implications for community ties more widely, too.
Rowan, of course, would counter that such problems will dissolve once his system is in full swing: workers would be able to say no to an inconvenient shift if they could count on regular earnings from a constant supply of different jobs. But atomisation is not the only nasty potential effect of a centralised database of hours; bullying is another.
In the last few years, the number of jobseekers facing cuts to their benefits for transgressing rigid rules has quadrupled. Under recent welfare reform legislation, the government has taken powers to extend “benefit conditionality” to low-paid people as well as the unemployed. In principle, this could mean that a benefit payment could be docked if someone already in work was judged to not be doing enough to earn more. For the moment, the new universal credit programme is in such chaos that these plans are on the back burner. But what if, in the future, the Department for Work and Pensions were to enjoy real-time access to an employment database, of the kind Rowan envisages, which contains a complete, minute-by-minute record of each person’s work history? One can imagine officials, as they scramble to claw back benefit payments, docking money because a worker had not picked up an hour of work that was advertised on the system.
Rowan argues instead that the technology should empower jobcentres to tailor work to people’s needs, by enabling parents, say, to block out the hours when they have to be with their children. Perhaps, but if benefit claimants hear the rumour that has reached Rowan’s ears – about the Conservative minister and welfare reform mastermind David Freud being keen on his system – that may strike them as the opposite of an endorsement.
The austerity years have not been without hard times for Rowan himself. His long relationship with Barry-Walsh, his financial backer for so many years, has soured. On Barry-Walsh’s account, he steadily grew exasperated with Rowan’s preoccupation “with government backing, getting legislation changed” at the expense of first building a solid business. He said Rowan “was always off fighting for the next bigger deal”, when he should have been “making sure that the last deal was a success”.
It was after discovering just how few “real paying customers”, be they councils or companies, that they actually had in 2011 – just eight, he says – that Barry-Walsh began to panic. By 2013 he had had enough. After selling a version of the software to the recruitment company Brookfield Rose, and settling up with Rowan, who got to cling on to the master copy of his creation, Barry-Walsh walked away.
These days, Rowan finds himself acting as a lone travelling salesman, still peddling his big idea. There are, he says, some promising leads in the US – including the Chicago Jobs Council and the deputy mayor of Los Angeles. His undimming faith that things will come good reflects his certainty that technology is calling time on the day of the regular job. A new wave of “smart” mechanisation is disrupting ever more jobs, and Rowan points out that off-the-shelf droids can now do “pretty well anything, so long as they can first watch a person doing it time and again”. The one thing the robots cannot do is turn their hand to different tasks each day, which makes irregular work the one “beachhead on which humanity can hope to fight back”.
As things stand, the ruthless logic of online trading is hardly helping the homo sapien resistance. While researching this piece, I came across a website, hirewriters.com, where anyone can commission a 600-word article – the standard length of the editorials I write in a day – for as little as $4.20 (£2.84). That certainly gave me pause for thought about the security of my own trade, but Rowan is adamant that there is no future in trying to hold out against the tide.
The pre-election arguments about banning zero-hour contracts are, Rowan insists, futile. Workplace scheduling systems are already too sophisticated: they can simply “rejig schedules” to “avoid the legal triggers at which an individual is deemed to have a job”. The only protection for workers that the tide of technology will not overwhelm is to create “equally sophisticated markets that put the person selling their time in control, and able to sell their time to as many employers as they want”.
Marx wrote of a future free of repetitive wage slavery, in which one could fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and turn cultural critic after dinner. He might have agreed with Rowan’s description of the traditional job as “a monotonous, skill-sapping, dependency-creating arrangement”, but that is a rare position in the Britain of 2015. Most judge the boredom-for-security swap at the heart of steady employment to be a trade well worth making. As the zero-hours recovery grinds on, it looks increasingly as if Rowan might be right about one thing: this is not a trade that we will be able to count on making for very much longer.
Tom Clark’s latest book is Hard Times: Inequality, Recession, Aftermath.
Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread.
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