Platform-Sponsored Grassroots Lobbying

* Report: Understanding the Airbnb “Movement”. How platform-sponsored grassroots lobbying is changing politics. By Luke Yates. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2021

URL = https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/45224?cHash=a4dfad974b8ae30f13d8407f1bbd86b6

Description

"This report is about citizen participation that is funded and coordinated by businesses. The case study is Airbnb, one of the biggest companies in the “platform economy”, which resources and mobilizes its landlords to lobby for its preferred forms of regulation. Since 2008, numbers of short-term rentals, many of which might otherwise house permanent residents, have expanded dramatically all over the world. Problems around housing shortages, tourism, taxation, and urban conviviality have led to social movement opposition and local attempts to regulate in San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and dozens of other cities worldwide.[1]

Since 2014, a key part of Airbnb’s political response has been the use of grassroots lobbying, a phenomenon where businesses influence societies by creating apparently independent social movements to act on their behalf. Airbnb presents carefully curated and intensively coordinated groups of landlords who have a single room or property as “people power”, an Airbnb “community” or “movement”. This offers the company legitimacy and additional political influence to protect a business model that is increasingly dominated by professional accommodation providers, not “home-sharers”.

Platform-sponsored grassroots lobbying is a public form of corporate lobbying, yet little is known about it and there is generally no regulation of the practices involved. It is becoming widely used across the new digital “platform” economy, including ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft, to delivery companies such as Doordash, to electric scooter companies GetAround, Lime, Scoot, Spin, Bird and Lyft Scooters. Grassroots lobbying is now a key tactic for disruptive new businesses facing regulation, but its current scale, how it works, and its social and political impacts have received little attention.

The claims posed here are based on the first in-depth investigation of platform-sponsored grassroots lobbying. [1] In this work, we analysed documents and interviews with twenty-one former Airbnb public policy staff who worked across fourteen countries in North America and Europe, including Germany, Austria, and the UK. The report focuses on the campaigning practices of the groups Airbnb creates and coordinates that it calls “host clubs” or “home sharing clubs”.

Home sharing clubs are associations of selected Airbnb landlords who are resourced, mobilized, and coordinated by Airbnb public policy teams to advocate for favourable regulation. These associations are made up of an unrepresentative segment of Airbnb landlords—mainly those that share their own homes or rent them short-term. They are created predominately and in disproportionate numbers in cities where the effects of Airbnb are leading to calls for stricter regulation. Like more traditional lobbying and PR practices, they target public officials and public opinion. They have been deployed in hundreds of towns and cities globally, through the hiring of hundreds of “community organizers” whose main role is to create host campaigns that are politically useful to the company. The Airbnb case is still the most intensive and sustained platform-sponsored grassroots lobbying strategy in the world to date."

(https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/45224?cHash=a4dfad974b8ae30f13d8407f1bbd86b6)

Contents

"This report provides evidence of how digital platforms are governed through the case study of Airbnb’s home sharing clubs. It is divided into six parts:

• First, an introduction to the debates and struggles that circulate around the sharing economy and short-term rentals, the context for Airbnb’s grassroots lobbying campaigns.

• Second, a description of the home sharing club model. This part highlights the purposes, aims, and main practices of host clubs.

• Third, an explanation of who participates in corporate campaigns and how participants are recruited.

• Fourth, a review of the various forms of support offered by the company to participants in Airbnb campaigns.

• Fifth, a discussion of the implications of platform-sponsored grassroots lobbying, drawing on interviewees’ anxieties highlighting reflections and critiques from former staff.

• Sixth, an exploration of the influence of Airbnb on the wider practices of platform-sponsored grassroots lobbying with Uber, Lyft, e-scooter companies and vaping giant Juul, and a consideration of the future of corporate grassroots lobbying.

These sections also correspond to some central claims that were made by Airbnb in their public-facing materials about their home sharing clubs:

1) that fighting against regulation is only one of their many purposes;

2) that clubs are “independent” of the corporation;

3) that clubs are made up of a diverse constituency of stakeholders of landlords, guests, small business owners, and local civil society leaders; and 4) that their impact is chiefly the empowerment of ordinary people and the education of society and law-makers.

The report finishes by drawing out some recommendations for how government, civil society, and business might deal with platform-sponsored grassroots lobbying and in particular the case of Airbnb."

(https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/45224?cHash=a4dfad974b8ae30f13d8407f1bbd86b6)

Author Bio

• Luke Yates is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester whose research focuses on collective action and socio-economic change. He is currently working on political struggles around the platform economy, corporate-funded civil society initiatives, and social movements’ conceptions of “everyday politics” and “strategies”.