Tilman Baumgärtel has delivered an outstanding text on the shared economy for the 27/2014 issue of ZEIT. In it, he writes that the raving about “a more sustainable, participatory economy” is opposed to the companies that want to enrich themselves from this more social share-what-you-have economy. On the one hand, according to Baumgärtel, companies such as Uber allegedly undermine labor standards and legal regulations. On the other hand, these companies are now the middlemen, by eliminating them they are supposedly cheaper. Whether Uber is really better for a taxi driver, since he no longer has to pay for the radio center, is questionable. Baumgärtel also sees the danger of a new precariat of day laborers who can only live on labor exchanges: “This creates a shadow economy that has little to do with the original goal of the sharing economy, which is to make unused resources productive through equal exchange between providers.” And since everyone is self-employed, so to speak, one can no longer organize oneself for better conditions.
Baumgärtel also sees the danger that only those who already have more will benefit from the shared economy. On AirBnB, for example, those who already have a cool apartment earn. My experiences here are actually a bit different, often enough I have experienced, for example, that couples sublet one of the two existing apartments from time to time or that students vacate a room. I’ve even experienced a Parisian staying with a buddy just because he needed the money from subletting his apartment. However, the author is right when he points out that even free portals like Couchsurfing.org are now making profits from the commitment of volunteers. And who still works voluntarily when you can earn money for every second? “In this way, the sharing economy turns the originally altruistic motives of sharing and exchanging into its sheer opposite.”