Around the world today, people are celebrating May Day—the international day of the worker—with parades, picnics and other demonstrations of solidarity.

At Freelancers Union, we’re celebrating, too.

Today we’re launching a new platform, Dispatches, where we’ll explore the ideas that are shaping our new economy. It will be an ongoing conversation with the innovators and visionaries of the new workforce. (And by innovators and visionaries, I mean you.)

The independent worker movement is the Industrial Revolution of our time.

No doubt you’ve heard me say this before, and many of you are living it: Work is breaking down. People are abandoning the 40-hour work week in favor of something else.

More people are freelancing, living gig-to-gig, project to project, and the employee benefits of the past are nowhere in sight. The whole notion of work is up for grabs.

The independent worker movement is the Industrial Revolution of our time.

And just as in the Industrial Revolution, when labor unions and women’s rights advocates and civil rights groups forged surprising alliances to pass fair labor laws, we’re starting to see surprising alliances emerge to tackle today’s issues.

Dispatches will be a place to share ideas and learn as we try to build this new mutualist economy.Dispatches will be a place to share ideas and learn as we try to build this new mutualist economy.

Social-enterprise investors, urban farms and rural cooperatives are finding that they share some mutual goals and starting to explore possible collaborations to achieve them.

We want to encourage—indeed, facilitate—more of these connections.

I’d love for worker coops and agricultural coops to connect through the National Cooperative Business Association, and for labor unions, social-purpose business leaders and elected officials to see that in many cases, we’re all eager for the same policies.

We need a place where we can discuss ideas and experiment fearlessly. This is that place.

In Dispatches, I’ll be highlighting the people and organizations that I come across who are moving things forward.

What surprising connections are you seeing? Send us a dispatch.

Dispatches will be a place to share ideas and learn as we try to build this new mutualist economy.

It’s not just about new thinking or old thinking; it’s about free thinking.

I hope you’ll join me.