Collective action, labor struggle and protest go hand in hand, and it’s no secret that unionizing and organizing to fight for workers’ rights is a tedious task. But is there a way to simplify and boost the efficiency of the process?
On this week’s episode of the newly launched podcast The Agenda, Cointelegraph senior copy editor Jonathan DeYoung and head of markets Ray Salmond sit down with Larry Williams Jr., co-founder of TheLaborDAO, and Daniel Carias and Dustin Tong, co-founders of theCaféDAO, to discuss the state of workers’ rights in the United States and how blockchain can strengthen labor movements.
The trio also touched on whether a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) could successfully and equitably run a business.
Workers should be stakeholders and have access to equity
For Carias, the initial idea for theCaféDAO — whose goal is to create a physical coffee shop governed by a DAO — came about during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when most of his colleagues at the coffee shop he was working at had been laid off and he experienced new freedoms as part of a skeleton crew.
His boss let the workers take control of the coffee shop’s operations and run it as they pleased. “I was just so grateful,” he shared. “The people that were left, we were just so happy to work together that it was almost seamless.”
“That’s when I first conceptualized the idea of theCaféDAO. How can we run an organization, decentralized, where there isn’t a central leader? There isn’t a CEO-type person, right? […] Our customers were very happy. We were very happy. It was like the happiest time of my life, to be honest with you. And I just kept thinking, is there a way to do this out in the real world where I have a say, a vote?”
When asked about what finally catalyzed him to co-found theCaféDAO, Carias said:
“At least for me, it’s born from the frustration of not being able to control your destiny, essentially. I mean, we work these jobs like literally five or more days a week. We spend a large majority of our time at these places of work, but we don’t really have a say in the direction of the business. A DAO could potentially give workers a say in their destiny.”
And as for why he opted to go with the DAO model rather than a worker cooperative, he shared: “You have grocery cooperatives. You have farming cooperatives. Those already exist. But how can we use this blockchain technology to scale that up?”
Using blockchain to…
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