Grade My Boss

Businesses are able to exploit employees because there are few mechanisms to hold them accountable. Laws exist to protect workers, but they are not broadly known, understood, or enforced. By flipping the script and allowing employees to anonymously grade their bosses in online reviews featuring constructively critical frameworks for addressing workplace injustice, we  draw the attention of potential employees and customers to harmful practices, the importance of workplace safety and the need for fair compensation. 

This solution becomes even more effective at global scale, becoming a crowdsourced alternative level of assessment akin to Yelp but towards inclusive hiring practices and good jobs. 

COVID-19 has made workplace exploitation more clear, as lower-paid positions like delivery driver and grocery store clerk became the front-lines of the pandemic without fair compensation or protective equipment, showcasing the need for making labor injustice visible. Grade My Boss is a long-term, sustainable tool towards this goal.

The key problem within the Challenge that we are trying to solve is “support workers to advocate for and access living wages, social safety nets, and financial security in order to prepare for, withstand, and recover from economic shocks.” 

Labor exploitation persists in a condition of invisibility. Legal workplace protections exist throughout North America but are not typically enforced. Given this lax environment, employers do not have sufficient motivation to pay their employees fair wages, spend money on safety precautions, or practice fair and inclusive hiring policies. As a result, these problems remain endemic in North America and around the world. 

However, given the opportunity between two different businesses supplying a similar product or service, most consumers will support a business with adequate safety measures, fair compensation and equitable staff treatment over one that fails in any of these areas. 

By making these issues public and searchable, we can center employee treatment to consumer decisions, applying pressure on businesses to change their practices over time while also notifying potential employees of the dangers of accepting positions at certain businesses and educating the public. 

Grade My Boss is a crowd-sourced review site that aggregates reviews of businesses as employers by employees. We provide a review form that asks employees to anonymously review their place of work based on key factors like safety, gender and race equity, benefits, compensation, and more. We then publish those results anonymously in an overall “Grade” that will turn up as a search result if anyone were to search those businesses.

In effect, we are turning the proven solution of crowd-sourced review sites like Yelp, Google Reviews and even Rate My Professor towards the problem of creating and encouraging fair workplace standards, challenging the power dynamic of the jobsite and making employers accountable to their employees. 

Grade My Boss is hosted on a website, and employs basic SEO techniques to make sure that employer reviews turn up in searches for that business. We are using proven technologies in a new way, creating an elegant solution to the persistent problem of employers having all the power in the work-relationship. We are giving workers a tool to hold all employers accountable.

Our target population for Grade My Boss are workers who hold little power at work and are unable to question workplace decisions and standards without risk of losing their jobs. By giving them an anonymous way of holding their bosses accountable, we are giving them a voice while protecting them from negative repercussions. 

We are explicitly listening to this target population by giving them tools for recording key issues, which means that we can adapt and scale Grade My Boss nearly endlessly. 

One review is unlikely to create an impact for our target population, but the more the tool is used the more we will be able to create an infrastructure of knowledge and accountability that will shift public perception not only of businesses and their employment practices, but also of the need for enforcement of labor laws and the prevalence of unfair working conditions.

We are explicitly providing workers a platform to advocate for living wages, social safety nets, and financial security. By giving them a tool to hold employers and businesses accountable in the public eye, we can use scale to amplify their voices and provide incentive to businesses to adhere to, and even surpass, legal requirements for workplace standards. Perhaps more importantly, this tool allows workers to speak out without fear of retribution from vindictive employers as is often the case.

GMB is an innovative application of existing technology and solutions. By taking the basic structure of crowdsourcing review sites like Yelp, Google Reviews and Rate My Prof and turning it towards the pernicious issue of unequal power between employer and employee, we use this typically consumer-focused strategy of assessment towards advocating for better workplace protections, compensation and socially just practices. By making “invisible” exploitations visible by attaching them to a business’s online presence, we use worker’s experience as a tool for applying social pressure.

What makes GMB different from other platforms such as Rate My Employer or the Glass Door? We are not in the business of helping employers recruit low wage workers. GMB is a tool for restaurant, retail and hospitality workers to tell their story and fight for better working conditions across the industry. Our survey is based on concrete working conditions and not on how satisfied the worker feels with their job. By taking a worker-first approach we create pathways for workers to flourish in safer and more equitable workplaces. 

GMB also has a human rights and labor standards dimension not seen in other platforms that are based on open reviews instead of standardized metrics for assessing labour practices.

Even if GMB returns a search result for an individual business several entries below more popular review sites, then it will make unfair workplace conditions a great deal more visible and influence consumer behaviour, therefore giving employers intrinsic motivation to reassess and develop their employee relations.

Grade My Boss is a website that features a submission form for accepting employee reviews of businesses anonymously, and it is also a publicly searchable database of aggregated reviews for those businesses. We also employ SEO techniques towards making sure that Grade My Boss is part of a consumer’s decision about whether or not to support a business; we want labor relations to be a part of public discourse, and this is our way of doing that. 

This technology is not new, but it is applied in a novel way towards an old solution. We are taking the proven strategy of giving consumers a chance to provide feedback to businesses and using it to give employees a chance to advocate, both individually and collectively, for better work conditions, better pay, and more equitable treatment. 

What’s more, by providing a structured way for employees to provide feedback, we are able to collect data on labor exploitations and workplace abuse that will make it easier to lobby and advocate for workers’ rights with statistical proof and a more accurate picture of what issues persist in work environments.

There is a great deal of market research that confirms that online reviews have an impact on consumer decisions about whether or not to buy from a business. Here are a few key takeaways from a 2014 study conducted by Google: 

• online reviews impact 67.7% of respondents' purchasing decisions. Over half of Google’s respondents (54.7%) admitted that online reviews are fairly, very, or absolutely an important part of their decision-making process.

• businesses risk losing as many as 22% of customers when just one negative article is found by users considering buying their product. If three negative articles pop up in a search query, the potential for lost customers increases to 59.2%. If four or more negative articles about a company or product appear in Google search results, those businesses are likely to lose 70% of potential customers.

Also, outside of certain key sites, customers aren’t likely to note WHERE they saw a negative review, only that they did. This means that negative reviews on Grade My Boss can have a powerful effect on businesses’ bottom line, providing a powerful incentive to seek better employee reviews. By making employee relations a part of a business’s online presence, we make them part of public discourse and make the invisible visible. 

Source: https://moz.com/blog/new-data-...

Our theory of change is based on several key premises:

• Labor exploitation persists in part because it can remain invisible.

• Commodities do not reflect the conditions that made them, so consumers are able to ignore injustices in the production process. Making these abuses visible, as part of the commodity (whether it be a service or a product) forces ethical considerations into the consumer decision and contributes to progress. Online reviews are one way of making these conditions visible. 

• Our informal interviews with workers in the retail sector suggest that most workplace violations are not reported at all because employees either think they will not make a difference, or they fear retribution from bosses. 

• Workers require anonymity and safety in order to come forward with workplace complaints. This conclusion is reflected in a 2017 study by the UK’s Focus on Labour Exploitation organization, which identifies “several barriers to addressing abuse and exploitation in the UK labour market. These include: lack of access to reporting mechanisms, lack of awareness of rights and unwillingness to report abuse due to fear of repercussions.92 While advice gateways exist for information on work-related issues, several of these are not accessible or suitable for migrant workers in precarious situations. The success of advice and reporting mechanisms, including hotlines and workers’ rights apps, will depend on these being trusted by workers. (https://labourexploitation.org...

• Change requires becoming a persistent part of social discourse; by offering consumers more information about businesses with good employment records and bad employment records, we can influence them over time. 

• The effectiveness of Grade My Boss will improve at scale, as we are able to improve SEO, provide comprehensive reviews of individual sectors, and become a credible source for online reviews. 

In sum, we have designed Grade My Boss to be anonymous, credible, public, and persistent in order to meet the needs of workers and influence public perception of labor exploitation.

Our solution currently serves the population of Greater Victoria in British Columbia (BC), Canada. During the pilot project we received over 1000 submissions to GMB and worked directly with upwards of 500 vulnerable workers. We focused on our home city in order to launch and test this proof of concept, but are ready to scale it via similar strategies on other major cities. 

We are currently re-tooling GMB to expand into Vancouver, BC and across the Province of BC by the Fall of 2020, with movements towards other Canadian cities by the beginning of 2021. 

We expect to meaningfully impact the lives of tens of thousands of workers over the course of the next two years, with the aim of capturing a snap-shot of the struggles of over 500,000 workers in five years’ time, once we extend the GMB solution to reach a North American audience.

Our goal for year one is to partner with labor-oriented organizations in these cities to scale the effectiveness of Grade My Boss. 

Our long-term goal is to partner with labor-oriented not-for-profits in cities throughout North America, including key cities throughout Canada such as Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, and Regina, as well as some pilot US cities such as Seattle and Portland.  in order to promote and scale Grade My Boss. We have already established a pilot Grade My Boss program; the key step will be performing outreach to raise its visibility and use in those cities. 

Over the next two years, we will continue this scaling expansion while revising and adapting both the site and our SEO strategy for maximum impact, publicizing and promoting both the site and its statistics in public news sources and trade journals.  

Our goal for the end of five years is that Grade My Boss will be established enough that workers throughout North America can discover the program independently, without outreach or community partnerships. This achievement will allow Grade My Boss to maximize its effects, and allow us to shift outreach to new markets and sectors such as Europe and South America.

The most significant barrier the Grade My Boss solution currently faces is market penetration. We are currently offering GMB within a specific geographic scope to prototype, test, and revise. We have achieved success in this limited framework, but for Grade My Boss to reach its full potential it needs much further reach, targeting other major cities and surrounding areas.

The other barrier will be cost: expanding use requires expanding hosting fees, and at some point we will need business class hosting. However, we don’t predict this to be a pressing need for the next year. Our most pressing need is outreach and expanded support. 

Our long-term barrier will be technology: Grade My Boss currently exists, but in order for it to reach its full potential we need it to be a comprehensive database that will be a search result for anyone looking up individual businesses. We have a functional framework, but to develop to this next level we will need help, which is in part why we are looking to Solve for support.

We will reach out to labor organizations in key cities throughout North America in order, delivering Grade My Boss as a tool that they can promote to their key demographics towards labor equity. In doing so, we feel we can replicate the success we have found in our pilot city, ultimately scaling Grade My Boss upwards with the same tools we have already tested. 

We will need to listen to these organizations and revise Grade My Boss based on their feedback, but RAN has a history of partnership and we are confident in our ability to form a network with these organizations through a process of outreach. 

An expanded network will also help us raise funds for the continual development and scaling of Grade My Boss, thereby contributing to overcoming our other major barrier. We predict that the process of scaling this program will proceed organically, developing more opportunities as needed.

The Retail Action Network currently has six full-time staff and a committed team of three “impacted worker” sub-contractors. RAN prides itself on creating employment opportunities for workers who have lost their jobs as a result of speaking out against workplace maltreatment. GMB aims to ensure that workers do not face reprisal when they share their stories with the public. Depending on funding opportunities, we may be able to expand this team to include workers whose employment were impacted by COVID-19 (such as grocery workers).

Grade My Boss has been in development for 4 years, and functional for the past three. We have worked out the major delivery issues with this pilot program already, and are ready to begin scaling in earnest. 

Our team is composed of workers with lived experience confronting the structural barriers we are working to undo, who are intimately aware  of the kinds of precarity that afflict retail, food and service workers everyday. 

RAN’s biggest skill in further developing Grade My Boss is our ability to find community partners to collaborate with; we will use this ability to connect with organizations throughout North American that will promote and support Grade My Boss by directing their members and participants towards the site as a tool for social justice. 

We are committed to network building and to visibilizing worker injustice, and as a team we are extremely proud of the work we have already done on Grade My Boss and excited to explore its future. We are committed, adaptable, and open to innovative solutions using existing technology.

RAN has made solid steps towards building worker-power in BC. We have done this by taking a unique and collaborative approach to organizing based upon principles of mutual aid, anti-authoritarianism, and de-centralization. This approach has been made effective through collaboration with Island Solidarity (IS), which is the hub for a growing range of community organizations that use IS to share resources, skills, and volunteer power to advance their radical goals. RAN works closely with a number of organizations in Victoria, and, increasingly, across BC. The organizations that we actively collaborate with through IS are:

• Employment Standards Coalition (ESC)

• Together Against Poverty Society (TAPS)

• Community Action Bus (CAB)

• Victoria Event Centre (VEC)

• Vancouver Island Human Rights Coalition (VIHRC)

• SocialCoast (SC)

These organizations all fulfill different functions in a dynamic ecology of collaboration and resource sharing. For instance, SC and RAN regularly organize, promote, and host events at the VEC (from Harm Reduction workshops to workers-rights information sessions), and the CAB often functions as a mode of transportation, particularly for members of the general public who face mobility barriers, to events hosted by these organizations. The VEC’s cafe space, opening this year, will provide another space to host meetings, workshops, and other daytime events in partnership with RAN and SC, and these events will support the VEC in turn. Through these collaborations, each organization supports the other and increases our overall capacity, as a community of activists and impacted workers, to bring people together to advance our anti-authoritarian aims.

We are a not-for-profit that is dedicated to supporting lower-income workers living through precarity, discrimination and exploitation. Our projects are funded through a combination of grants, in-kind support from our partners, as well as membership and donation fees. We are also connected to a dynamic network of ally organizations through “Island Solidarity” This network includes a vibrant cultural centre in the heart of downtown Victoria. Through this centre we run regular community events and solicit donations from supporters. RAN also conducts crowdsourced fundraising to large and small donors. By scaling Grade My Boss, we will also pursue national and international funding opportunities and work in partnerships with other labor organizations throughout Canada and the US. 

We provide support through direct actions and creative approaches to key problems that highlight workplace exploitations, provide educational workshops to workers that inform them of their rights in the workplace and how to organize for them, and in some cases facilitate access to legal counsel for employees with legal grievances. We are currently fundraising for a worker solidarity fund to help offset the costs of rent/food for workers whose employment has been jeopardized.

The Retail Action Network is a grassroots organization that depends on grants from funding bodies and also donations from members. We regularly seek large and small donations from members and the public through crowdsourced campaigns, and we are seeking funding from a variety of granting bodies across Canada (The United Way, Vancouver Foundation, UFCW, and Van-City). 

We also plan on harnessing the collective power behind small recurrent donations from our supporters. This is an accessible way for anyone, regardless of their income, to participate in RAN’s success. We will continue to utilize this fundraising strategy, championed by Bernie Sanders, since it is the most effective way to scale people-powered efforts for grass-roots change.

The Retail Action Network has planted the seed of Grade My Boss, but we need help to make it grow. While a relatively simple solution, we need technological expertise and funding in order for Grade My Boss reach its full potential, providing clear, visible information on workplaces to consumers so that they can make more informed, and more just decisions. 

We are applying to Solve because we feel we have an innovative solution to a persistent problem that effectively leverages existing technology towards new possibilities, and need help so that we can deepen the impact of Grade My Boss, scaling it to a much broader network of precarious workers in different geographical regions and ultimately to becoming an established and effective tool. The more workers we are able to recruit into using this tool, the more we are able to support them by providing consistent pressure to companies to improve their reviews by adapting to the safety and needs of their employees. Partnership with MIT and Solve will help Grade My Boss reach this level of operation, letting us support workers in their journey towards a just COVID-19 recovery.

RAN is a grassroots organization with a proven track record of partnership and mutual aid with other labor organizations, and we believe that we have hit on an elegant solution for visibilizing workplace injustice. We will create partnerships with other worker organizations throughout Canada and the US in order to promote and scale Grade My Boss to make it a more effective tool. 

We are also seeking technological partners who can help us support, develop and scale Grade My Boss. Support from MIT would be invaluable in helping us to fully implement the SEO technology needed to make Grade My Boss an effective tool and part of public discourse.

The Retail Action Network is already in touch with a number of labor organizations throughout Canada, and do not need MIT’s help in securing these relationships. However, we would be excited to gain access to MIT’s extraordinary software development teams to implement key SEO strategies to help Grade My Boss make workplace injustices visible to the general public. 

We would be very interested to partner with Solve teams such as Solver Code Nation, which received a grant to help under-resourced schools prepare youth for careers in tech; Grade My Boss has the potential to be a strong portfolio piece for such youth, and our project would benefit from helping students develop their project development skills. 

We would also be interested in partnering with Poket, who are profiling Nigerian businesses, and Supercívicos, who are using crowdsourced collaboration to fight civic problems; if they have solutions that would help scale Grade My Boss, we would be interested in helping them incorporate a model of worker justice into their projects.

As an organization that is lead by women and that centers the needs and struggles of female workers, our solution is especially oriented towards the goals of the Innovation for Women Prize.

Among the most pressing issues facing the retail and hospitality sectors is their susceptibility to sexual harassment and violence. High levels of interaction with clients, instability of working hours, low wages, and gender disparity between workers and management all contribute to high numbers of sexual harassment and assault cases. In Canada, women are four times more likely to experience these violations than men.

While the reasons for mistreatment in the retail and hospitality industries are multifaceted, we believe that empowering workers through education is one of the most effective ways of improving the situation. The ability to understand what does and does not constitute a violation of one’s rights, and what means are available for retribution or support in instances of violation, constitute vital steps in the process of building safer and more just work spaces. Grade My Boss is also an organizing tool which allows our team to connect workers, predominantly women, with educational tools so that they can speak truth to power without fear of reprisal.

Women are disproportionately impacted by structural barriers in the work place. Our work at RAN intends to dismantle the vicious structures that present these barriers so that the future of work leaves no one
behind.