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Platform workers occupy the headquarters of a delivery company because the company wanted to change their status to contractors. After a strike, the deputy secretary of a new union of digital platform workers is blocked from headquarters. Banking unions claim that online sale digital platform workers are nor part of the collective agreement. A young migrant “rider” is run over on the street on his way to deliver an order from Glovo. Freelance designers charge bitcoins for their projects. A woman was the breadwinner for her family from the income she received by renting her house through Airbnb, but for the past few months she has been competing with the corporate hosts within the same city. Amazon workers go on strike on Prime Day under the motto “We are workers, not robots!”

These real situations can be seen in remote cities such as Bogotá, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Mumbai, Minnesota, Santiago de Chile, Padua, New Delhi, London and/or Manila. However, North-South inequalities show the disparities between the supply and demand of labour in platforms. Even among countries of the global South, there are astounding differences in labour costs, making, for example, freelance services in Asia much more affordable than those in Argentina.

When we explore in detail the peculiarities acquired by the “platformisation of work,” we find different dimensions that have to be considered and located geographically when we evaluate the opportunities introduced by this economy. Narratives that praise “revolution 4.0,” the “collaborative economy,” the “internationalization of individual work” and e-business, face serious difficulties to guarantee labour and fiscal regulations as well as social protection for workers who find an income opportunity in that type of work. This article intends to summarize these challenges through a feminist lens of the global South, considering the stances of academics, activists, unions, international agencies and global networks that try to join efforts in the face of the irreversible and unmanageable advancement of technology.

Revealing a lack of social protection

When we talk about “platform economy” we connect with the concepts of gig-economy, on-demand economy, crowdsourcing, microworkers, collaborative economy, “uberization of employment” and access economy. However, the diversity of tasks and exchanges carried out through these platforms has created different types of work, work qualifications, building user-consumer and user-provider profiles, wages, time availability, evaluations of performance, etc. Thus, the first step is to focus on platform profiling and typologies.

According to the elements considered, this kind of job can be classified by the intensity of the productive element involved, either intensive capital or intensive work; they can also be classified by the type of service rendered, either virtual or face-to-face, and the type of qualifications workers must have (Madariaga et al., 2019.) A recent ILO study (2019) introduces a specification regarding the number of people involved, making the difference between, on the one hand, web-based platforms where long-term tasks are assigned to freelancers or a group of people is assigned microtasks or creative tasks based on tendering. On the other hand, platforms based on location and applications that operate through geolocalisation where most of the tasks are distributed among specific individuals, through the applications, such as transport (UBER), accommodation (Airbnb), delivery (Glovo, Deliveroo, etc.) and home services (Taskrabbit, Zolbers) and those assigned to a group of people tend to be less common, such as carrying out microtasks at local level.

The risks and challenges of the current “delabourisation” work trends in digital platforms have been warned of by different sectors. The ILO (2019) has even indicated the challenges of guaranteeing decent work while digital platform companies insist that they are “new” forms of work, as opposed to traditional work, precisely to avoid labour regulations. Considering this contrast, we will present a series of challenges to labour rights, social security and social protection of those who consider the platform economy as an opportunity to generate income or to obtain additional income, work from home or combine schedules in a “flexible workday”:

• The impact on work relationships: The role of the platform company is distorted and only appears as an intermediary in the exchange of goods and services, not as an employer. In these platforms, the terms participants, members, independent contractors, or autonomous or self-employed workers are mentioned. However, the main argument of workers to claim payment of tax contributions is insisting on the fact that there is a sustained work relationship and they report a false “autonomy.” In countries of the North, we have seen the growing judicialisation of cases, work inspections and ongoing regularisation processes through tax collection. However, the situation in countries of the South is extremely different, due to the regulatory capacity of the State and a context of growing unemployment, precariousness, unregistered work and informal work. Researches from the South (Del Bono, 2018) indicate that the creation of an ad-hoc status (in-between an employee and a contractor) can lead to the legalisation of delaborisation, such as the labour reform proposal that the Argentinian government tried to promote. In any case, these situations refer to the discrepancies between a global regulatory framework and the power of transnational digital companies.
• The portable scorecard[1] as a work track-record: Workers’ protection also lies on the capacity to prove records throughout their work history. With the purpose of promoting digital transparency, the ownership and portability of workers’ data should be guaranteed, enabling the availability of information about their work performance (CETyD et al., 2019, Scaserra, 2019.)
• Challenges in union association, collective negotiation and social dialogue when the “the algorithm is the boss”: In the case of platform workers who provide face-to-face and geolocation services, the exercise of freedom of association has been threatened when they gather to make claims about daily work issues (e.g, demanding work breaks or accident insurance) or to demand their tax and retirement deductions. For those carrying out microtasks or selling products through platforms, in many cases there is no personal contact or supervisor in the company to talk with. In other cases, unionisation itself is hindered by work styles such as home office and remote work, which is even worse if we refer to demands for the right to disconnect (Scasserra, 2019.) This point is key, considering that this kind of labour force is available 24/7, 365 days a year. If schedule flexibility used to be one of the positive variables, currently those platforms are the ones that penalise if orders are rejected or if online inquiries are not replied to.
• Combination of paid work with domestic work and unpaid care work: ILO (2019) states that the two most recurrent reasons to join platforms are “to complement the wages received through other jobs” and “preference for working from home.” But in the case of women, it states that they can only work from home considering the global burden of unpaid care work. The so-called “labour and digital inclusion” worsens the conditions in which women work, with endless workdays where they combine paid and unpaid work, the latter deepened by the erosion of State obligations (Gurumurthy et al. 2018); with no sick leave, maternity leave, or paid vacations and with no certainty in terms of their retirement future. Unlike those coming from the informal market who obtain access to “microwork”, we must consider the promotion of new professional “freelance” women whose work track records show that they interrupt their professional careers to “engage” in remote work from home and to take care of their children.
• Rurality and social protection: The arrival of transnational digital platforms such as Amazon in the food retail sector entails some new risks for the sector. Real gender gap problems are reinforced in terms of techno-social skills and socioeconomic challenges that family farming, small businesses and cooperatives led by women face, particularly in the rural sector of the global South (Gurumurthy et al. 2018).
• Migration and rights: The social protection mechanisms to be designed should consider the migrant population working in platforms, most of them with no legal residence, no access to basic services and without the possibility of receiving pension and retirement benefits in the future.
• Reinforcing the international sexual-racial division of work: Gendering has also shaped the labour force of platforms, with strongly masculinised sectors such as transport and delivery, and others designed to provide services and care work for dependent people, which are highly feminised[2]. Thus, the sexual-racial division of work is reinforced for women who join platforms of domestic work, pet care, or passenger transportation.

At the same time, in countries of the South, it is highly possible to find workers who depend exclusively on the income generated through digital platforms and are not protected at all (no health insurance, retirement or pension plans.) Only a very small percentage of workers from countries of the South had retirement deductions or pensions, 21% in Africa and 32% in Asia and Pacific (ILO, 2019).

• The need to incorporate mechanisms to facilitate coverage of workers with multiple employers: Considering the international sexual-racial division of work and the disparities in the ability to “compete” in the market (Gurumurthy et al. 2018), another challenge is to guarantee social protection to workers with employers across different countries.

Revisiting challenges, a lingering question gears towards the path of resistance. In the face of setbacks in terms of social protection and labour rights, the tools for collective organization and fight might become obsolete. Along this path, calls for strikes and APP “blackouts” have been organized at global level; legal disputes are taken to labour courts; delivery cooperatives and new unions have emerged, and coordination has started to develop with outsourced workers and subcontractors.

Digital platform businesses, in the same way as land-grabbing, environmental degradation, intellectual property and finance, are part of the model of extractivist capitalism (Sassen, 2017.) Thus, the strategies to organize and fight must contemplate how these businesses operate in the junction of local, regional and global levels and who are the potential policy-makers in contexts where there is corporate capture of States.

Works cited:

Del Bono, Andrea (2018) “El trabajo en las plataformas digitales: los riesgos de la uberización del empleo en tiempos de crisis”[Work in Digital Platforms: The Risks of Employment Uberization in Times of Crisis], Nodal.

(Eurodad et al, 2019). (2019) Agenda urgente para una sociedad de trabajo [Urgent Agenda for a Work Society], IDAES-UNSAM/FES-Buenos Aires.

Gurumurthy, Anita Nandini Chami and Cecilia Alemany Billorou (2018) Igualdad de género en la economía digital [Gender equality in a Digital Economy], ITF/DAWN.

Madariaga, J., Buenadicha, C., Molina, E. and Ernst, C. (2019) Economía de plataformas y empleo ¿Cómo es trabajar para una app en Argentina? [Platform Economy and Employment What is Like to Work for an App in Argentina?], CIPPEC-BID – OIT, Buenos Aires.

ILO (2019) Las plataformas digitales y el futuro del trabajo. Cómo fomentar el trabajo decente en el mundo digital [Digital Platforms and the Future of Work. How to Promote Decent Work in a Digital World], Geneva.

Sassen, Saskia (2017) “El mundo unificado por la regla dorada de la expropiación capitalista” [The World Unified by the Golden Rule of Capitalist Expropriation], Sin Permiso. Source URL (Accessed in September 2,2019): http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/el-mundo-unificado-por-la-regla-dorada-dela-expropiacion-capitalista

Scasserra, Sofía (2019) “Debates en torno al futuro del trabajo” [Debates around the Future of Work], RT-UNAJ, Florencio Varela.

[1]  Through a portable scorecard it would be possible to collect all the information that the company needs about the work performance of each worker (CETyD et al., 2019; Sacassera, 2019).

[2] The works cited collect data on a binary basis. There are no studies from government agencies or organizations that collect data showing the presence of LGBT+ people. The same happens with people with disabilities.