Up & Go: the gig booking platform owned by workers

Low-level service workers--disproportionately women of color--face low and stagnant wages, unpredictable schedules, and little opportunity for professional or asset development. Gig workers face greater instability with consumer-focused booking apps which claim burdensome fees, amass an oversupply of competing workers to prioritize client convenience, and disproportionately contract with younger, more highly-educated workers.

Our solution is Up & Go, a ready-to-scale gig work platform owned by gig workers themselves. Consumers book high-quality home services on the web app; worker-owners control their schedules, wages, and business decisions and profits. Through tailored technical assistance and training, marginalized workers own the technology and marketing tools that connect them to customers, gain autonomy in their work conditions and wages, thrive in a network of workers who share and improve service standards, and successfully manage this cooperative enterprise. Workers increase wages and working conditions in the immediate term while building 21st-century skills and assets for long-term prosperity.

Low-wage service industries dominated by independent work are seeing tremendous growth in U.S. cities. In domestic work sectors like residential cleaning, workers rely on agencies, referral services, or self-promotion to cobble together income through gigs. These workers (mostly women) face unfair wages and conditions, struggling to negotiate terms across language barriers and without contracts. 

Service workers face even greater instability with consumer-centered booking apps, which claim hefty commissions, disproportionately contract with younger, highly-educated workers, and design algorithms and user interfaces that exacerbate hiring discrimination and pay inequality. Workers with limited tech literacy see lower earnings or may not access these apps at all. Even the most successful gig app workers must juggle multiple platforms, spend hours researching and navigating company policy, and have very little say in company policy or app design. (Niels Van Doorn, 2018; Data & Society, “Beyond Disruption,” 2019) 

Extractive labor practices contribute to tech companies’ unsustainable worker turnover and customer churn rates, artificially low prices, and legal and regulatory challenges.

Well-marketed scheduling and payment technologies can offer efficiencies for consumers and workers, but a new, sustainable business model is needed to provide quality work and asset development for marginalized workers and reliable service to customers.

Up & Go is designed to address the needs of and work in partnership with low-income service industry workers who are predominantly women of color. Since 2017, 80 workers have received jobs through Up & Go and contributed to governance and management decision-making. Among workers on Up & Go, 100% are immigrants and English Language Learners and 91% are women. 

None of the workers on Up & Go had previously accessed work through a digital gig platform. Their barriers to access to the digital gig economy include a lack of basic tech literacy and access to capital, assets, and information, in addition to everyday challenges of poverty, limited formal education, language barriers, and discrimination. 

Up & Go helps low-income workers access and gain control in the digital gig economy through inclusive practices in all aspects of our work, including recruitment and technical assistance in organizations with strong community roots, tech development using human-centered design principles, bilingual and worker-centered customer services, and culturally-responsive, tailored technical assistance services using popular education methodologies. Through Up & Go, workers pool resources and democratically decide all pricing, company policies, and strategy, which are reflected in and reinforced by the technology development process.

Up & Go, a tech startup owned by domestic workers, innovatively applies booking platform technology to create good jobs and asset development opportunities for vulnerable workers in traditionally low-wage sectors. Customers access the web-app at www.upandgo.coop to easily schedule and pay for high-quality cleaning services from a company with transparent work practices. Workers set their wages and schedules, define service offerings and terms, develop and approve company policies and strategy, and retain ownership of company assets. 

Up & Go is supported by Center for Family Life (CFL), a nationally-recognized leader in incubation of worker-owned enterprises (“cooperatives”) in low-income immigrant communities. Since 2006, CFL-supported cooperatives have generated over $13M and stabilized the families of over 500 workers. CFL has refined our trainings, toolkits, and technical assistance tailored for marginalized workers to manage and govern their own equitable enterprises. Up & Go scales this model for job and asset development by wedding cooperative governance with technology.

Up & Go is defined by:

-Job Creation and Quality: The average wage for workers using Up & Go is $25/hour, double what the typical worker previously earned. Workers establish shared minimum job quality standards and equitable job assignment policies, supported by terms of service and bilingual customer service staff. Ultimately, Up & Go aims to lift wage standards in growing service sectors.

-Asset Development, Stability, and Security: Unique among gig work platforms, Up & Go profits and ownership interest are shared entirely among worker-owners, not outside investors. Workers own all of Up & Go’s intellectual property, including the brand and codebase, ensuring that workers can benefit from the wealth generated by technology.

-Upskilling and Inclusivity: Workers meet monthly on platform operations and business governance, and receive ongoing training/TA to support their decision-making on growth strategy and tech development. Using human-centered design principles, the web-app is developed with workers to respond to their values, work conditions and expertise, and tech needs; workers receive education/training on app features. Currently, Up & Go worker-owners are all immigrants and people of color, and 95% are women.

Up & Go is a functioning and scalable wealth-building engine for workers who previously could only increase earnings by working longer hours into old age. By pulling back the curtain on and establishing worker-ownership of essential business and technology tools and knowledge, Up & Go ensures that gig workers share in the asset-building, educational, and professional development opportunities available in the tech sector.

Up & Go is innovative in that it equips workers in low-income communities with digital marketing and customer management tools to secure and manage gig work and compete with investor-backed tech startups. Before Up & Go, existing NYC worker-owned businesses used inefficient marketing strategies, such as flyering, spending up to $1,000 to obtain a single customer. Now, as one worker-owner put it, “we are still investing our time in marketing our businesses, but we are learning about and doing marketing at a higher level.” Up & Go’s technology development has been shaped by the early participation of workers, using human-centered design principles. Worker-owners collaborate with tech developers so that Up & Go reflects worker-approved service offerings and digital marketing and customer management strategies. This fosters innovation, such as introducing a price range model to allow both predictability and flexibility in pricing, and building trust through a transparent business model and company-wide customer reviews as opposed to individual worker profiles and rating systems that can be invasive and lead to discrimination. Looking forward, worker-owners are innovating their service model with subscription plans, allowing them to focus on repeat customers rather than investing resources in one-off jobs. We are developing new features to streamline and automate scheduling and other back office systems. The technology is designed in line with worker-approved, equitable job assignment policies and systems. Worker-owner participation and training ensures that these tools are accessible and useful.

Up & Go applies technology to foster entrepreneurship and business asset development, create quality jobs, and upskill vulnerable workers in service industries impacted by technological changes in the gig economy. 

Entrepreneurship, business growth, and asset development. 

Activity: Provide resources and technical assistance to develop and implement a web application and marketing campaigns for worker-owners to sell cleaning services. 

Outcomes: Up & Go’s sales grew 275% in 2018 from 2017, and doubled in 2019 from 2018. Workers learn and apply business growth strategy. Workers increase earnings and build assets by lowering their costs of customer acquisition and operations by pooling resources and building a valuable client list, brand, and codebase.

Job creation and improved job quality and wages. 

Activity: Workers receive TA to establish shared minimum pricing and service standards. Electronic booking and payment processing helps enforce contracts. Workers are supported in establishing work safety policies and addressing any safety issues, including terminating contracts as needed, without unfair penalty.

Outcomes: The average take-home wage on Up & Go is $25/hour (30+% higher than industry average; double average worker earnings before joining). In a 2019 CFL survey, 62% of worker-owners reported becoming more financially independent, and 50% were able to establish savings.

Upskilling. 

Activities: Worker-owners receive coaching/TA as they take on roles in business finances, marketing, governance and management, and training/onboarding fellow worker-owners. Workers co-design and receive training in Up & Go app features. 

Outcomes: Workers develop today’s leadership, public-speaking, and project and people management skills and business and tech knowledge.

Since beta launch in December 2016, more than 80 workers have received jobs through Up & Go. Currently, Up & Go is serving 35 participating worker-owners; eight representatives (worker-owners) meet 3-10 hours per month on Up & Go operations and governance. All workers receive business training and TA from CFL. In 2020, Up & Go will serve 50 worker-owners. Beyond Up & Go, CFL serves 200 worker-owners annually.

Up & Go membership will increase to 150 worker-owners in 5 years. Workers will benefit from: 

• Increased wages (average $25/hour), and at least one job per week (based on historical jobs data).

• Increased literacy in cooperative governance and decision-making, technology (including Up & Go tools as well as basic computer skills), business strategy and impact tracking, marketing strategy, customer service, cleaning hard-skills, and workers’ rights, OSHA, and safe non-toxic cleaning techniques. We routinely offer and evaluate these trainings. 

• Co-ownership of a recognized brand and valuable technology, with company valuation increasing by 50% within 5 years.

Over the next year, Up & Go aims to:

• Provide jobs to at least 50 worker-owners.

• Gain back office efficiencies and reduce costs through improved worker-facing tools to streamline scheduling. 

• Develop geographic expansion plan for 2-3 U.S. cities over 3-5 years

• Study options for use/sharing of IP to serve workers in other industries/geographies, while maintaining asset value

• Develop worker leadership in Up & Go management and governance bodies. Offer workers trainings/technical assistance in marketing strategy, customer service, and new tech.

Within three to five years, Up & Go will have grown to be a recognized brand in NYC, with a growing presence in 2-3 other U.S cities, through which hundreds of worker-owners secure stable work, build assets, collaborate to strengthen their sector, and gain additional professional and business skills. Up & Go will fulfill its mission to bring more quality jobs to more workers throughout NYC and nationally through its:

• Portable and adaptable product, supported by strong and scalable management and governance systems.

• Partnerships with cooperative incubators and other workers organizations.  

• Prioritization of interoperability and component-based development, and opportunities to license/share software;  

• Lean marketing, leveraging unique brand positioning for referral traction, bolstered by new app features.

In the coming year, Up & Go faces market, financial, and technical barriers.  Currently, many service industries, particularly in the gig economy, are exploitative, offering workers meager, unlivable wages. Up & Go promotes fair wages in an industry where prices are kept low by the exploitation of workers, and domestic workers’ labor is undervalued.  The resource-intensive work of maintaining and improving the sophisticated technology of Up & Go also presents a challenge.  

Over the next five years, Up & Go faces additional technical and administrative barriers.  As Up & Go grows and implements increasingly advanced technology, ensuring workers’ technical proficiency with the tools will be critical. Additionally, with the expansion of Up & Go over the next five years, our current Board of Directors, which provides marketing, business development, and technical expertise to Up & Go, will need to be supplemented to meet growing and more complex needs.

To promote fair wages, Up & Go will build on the workers’ success to date through partnerships with worker advocacy groups as well as smart messaging on the value for quality service and the satisfaction of paying fairly and supporting women-owned business. In addition, as we build scale through the expansion of Up & Go, we will have greater leverage to address wage expectations in the market.  We will also work with the Solve community to find partners to build a joint marketing approach to educate consumers and raise industry standards.

To maintain and adjust the technology behind Up & Go, we will work with the Solve community to connect us to the resources and technical expertise we need to get the platform to sustainability.

To ensure workers’ technical proficiency with Up & Go’s increasingly sophisticated tools, we will develop and deliver additional trainings and ensure that all tech development is driven by workers’ needs.

To address the need for additional expertise on Up & Go’s Board of Directors, we will be cultivating new members representing a wide range of professional domains through current partners, stakeholders, and other interested partners. We would appreciate the Solve community’s support in the ongoing development of the Board.

In the United States, Up & Go is providing an online booking platform for customers to book cleaning services in New York City from local worker-owned cleaning cooperatives. Up & Go markets its services online, through earned media, at events, and through other channels, targeting NYC markets. CFL provides technical assistance to the participating worker-owners in NYC.

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Up & Go is a project of the Center for Family Life (CFL), a nationally-recognized incubator of worker-owned enterprises (“cooperatives”) in low-income, immigrant communities. Our innovative business development enables low-income workers without capital to launch businesses and create living-wage jobs and opportunity in historically exploitative sectors. Workers establish and enforce contracts and pay themselves a fair wage, allowing them to invest in their businesses and neighborhoods.  Since 2006, CFL-supported cooperatives have generated over $13M and stabilized 500 workers in NYC.

Our solution team is composed of 12 individuals: three full-time staff, five board members (composed of three worker-owners and two external experts), three external experts from CoLab Cooperative, and one external expert from the Robin Hood Foundation.

Up & Go was launched to the public in 2017 by a group of 25 domestic workers in New York City, with support from CFL as technical assistance provider and coordinator, the Robin Hood Foundation and Barclays as seed funders, and CoLab Cooperative as product developer. The founding team of this collaborative effort has remained intact since its early development in 2016. At CFL: Julia Jean-Francois, CFL Co-Director, has led fundraising and partnership development efforts for Up & Go and brings 16 years of workforce and small business development experience to the project; Maru Bautista, Cooperative Program Director, has provided technical assistance to worker cooperatives for over 5 years at CFL, helps coordinate the successful local campaign to secure city government investment in worker cooperatives, and is a leader in the worker cooperative movement nationally; Sylvia Morse serves as Up & Go Product Manager/Project Coordinator, including leading user prototyping (leveraging methodology and training from Google X) and communications including press coverage in Fast Company, WIRED, and NPR and presentations at conferences from NYC to Brazil. CFL meets biweekly with the Robin Hood team, including Program Officer Nancy Park, who maintains a seat on the Up & Go Board of Directors, and Steven Lee, Managing Director of Income Security, both of whom bring years of experience in technology and startup development and have provided critical thought leadership since Up & Go’s infancy. The same team of software engineers and designers at CoLab have built Up & Go since 2016.

Up & Go is the result of close and innovative collaboration with: 

• Robin Hood and Barclays, which have provided grant resources; in-kind tech development and marketing support; guidance and oversight on impact tracking, vision and strategy.  

• CoLab, a worker-owned digital agency that has built the web app, provides CFL with training on design thinking and user prototyping, and advises on tech strategy. 

• The New York City Council has invested more than $12.2M cumulatively ($1.9M in CFL) in funding for cooperative development across New York City to date.

Up & Go harnesses the technology powering today’s digital “gig” economy and places it in the hands of traditionally-excluded low-income immigrant service workers. Up & Go is the first home services booking platform in the U.S. that is owned and controlled by workers, ensuring workers have fair work and share in the wealth generated by technology. On Up & Go (www.upandgo.coop), customers book quality, on-demand home cleaning services from local small businesses that are owned by the home cleaners themselves. The average wage for workers utilizing the platform is $25/hour, 30+% higher than the local industry average and more than double what the typical worker earned previously. Amidst hand-wringing over technology’s transformation of the future of work and legal battles over tech companies’ treatment of workers, we offer an action-oriented solution that both embraces technological development and advances worker power.  Worker-owners in low-income communities can now compete with tech companies that have upended service industries with advanced booking and payment systems.

Up & Go’s current revenue model includes:

• 5% earnings on all sales (determined by worker-owners); 

• Annual worker-owner membership fees; and 

• Grant funding 

Additional potential revenue streams to explore include licensing, mark-ups on cleaning products, and speaking engagements.

Projecting revenues only from the 5% referral fee, Up & Go would be self-sustaining after roughly 23,000 jobs. Up & Go has several advantages over competitor booking applications in achieving sustainability:

• As co-owners of Up & Go, workers are incentivized to sustain the company by keeping jobs on the platform, rather than using it for lead-generation. 

• Joint marketing and economies of scale. Before Up & Go, worker-owners organizing cooperative enterprises each had to bootstrap their own boutique businesses and marketing plans. Individually, they lacked the capital and capacity for digital marketing, but can now pool their resources to reach new markets. Additionally, workers may use joint purchasing of supplies and equipment to reduce costs.

• Social impact story and service quality gives Up & Go unique traction for growth through customer referrals and customer loyalty.  

• Worker-owners are incentivized to recruit new members, thus increasing revenues from member fees, because: 1) worker-owners benefit from the platform’s financial success and growth, and 2) training and governance structures imbue Up & Go and its worker-owners with social mission to expand the platform’s benefits to more workers. 

Up & Go is already the most sophisticated implementation of the “platform cooperative” concept, or democratic governance and worker-ownership of technology, providing a model that has garnered broad interest in replication.

Up & Go is CFL’s first tech venture. While we have significant expertise from CoLab Cooperative and the Robin Hood Foundation, we need to build partnerships and gain insights from others immersed in the tech field -- ensuring not only that we understand the latest trends in tech development and have connections to talent and resources, but also that we can help educate tech sector partners in our innovative model.

Solve’s approach of forging partnerships in order to challenge the current bias in technological development and advance workers rights is highly aligned with Up & Go’s mission and collaborative approach to work.

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Through Up & Go, participating worker-owners are building their tech literacy--and some are beginning to build tech fluency. However, additional support and expertise from experienced tech bootcamp and other training organizations, with experience working with adult learners, English Language Learners, and people with limited formal education, could help advance our approach and implementation.  These groups may be interested to learn from our experience developing coops and training members in business literacy, sales, goal setting, etc. We would love to further build our team’s tech knowledge and capacity while building the tech and workforce development sectors’ understanding of the power and potential of cooperative ownership and entrepreneurship. 

We have had initial conversations with engineering collectives and other social impact tech groups about the potential of licensing and building on Up & Go’s codebase in order to expand our impact. Meeting and partnering with more of these groups, with the worker-owners, will inform our growth and expansion strategy. 

To further refine our marketing strategy and bolster our marketing resources, we would like to connect with design and marketing agencies interested in doing pro bono work to partner with the worker-owners to develop campaigns, do trainings and provide TA on our email marketing and social media strategy, and explore other projects to improve our storytelling tailored to our target customer.