On December 4th, 2024, the Shift Project community gathered for the last monthly meeting of the fall 2024 semester to learn about David Weil’s research on platform companies’ business model and flexibility.
Guest Speaker: David Weil is Professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. In AY 2025, he is the Stone Visiting Scholar / Visiting Professor of Public Policy, Malcom Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Weil served as the Dean of the Heller School from 2017-2022. He served as the Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor under President Barack Obama from 2014 to January 2017. He also co-founded with Archon Fung and Mary Graham the Transparency Policy Project at the Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Weil is an internationally recognized expert in employment and labor market policy along with regulation, transparency policy, and the impacts of industry restructuring on wages, employment and work outcomes. He has advised government agencies at the state and federal levels and international organizations.
Presentation: David presented his research, titled “Platform Business Models and Flexibility.” Discussions of the “future of work” often focus on platform companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash. These companies often justify their classification of workers as independent contractors as critical to their ability to provide workers the “flexibility” they desire. David will present an analysis of these platform’s business models to argue that flexibility is a core feature of profitability and the business model that would not be appreciably altered even if the companies were required to treat drivers as their employees. This perspective casts the “flexibility” in a very different context.
