Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS)

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Browsing Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) by Author "Ali, Rosimina"

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    The Future of Worker(ers) in Mozambique in the Digital Era
    (2020-12) Ali, Rosimina; Muianga, Carlos
    As the digital platform economy and gig work have been accelerating, new expressions of work and tensions over working conditions, value creation and distribution, and over labour relations and regulation, are also emerging in Mozambique. Although digital work is still at an incipient stage in the country given the low access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the majorityof the population and their socioeconomic profile, ICT access has expanded over the past decade. The number of start-ups enabling digital work has risen in the past five years and more recently amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Research on social conditions of digital gig work in Mozambique’s economy remains largely unaddressed. Following a political economy approach, this paper explores how digitally mediated forms of work are (re)shaping, changing or exacerbating the existing nature of work and what questions it poses for the future of work(ers) in Mozambique. We argue that, in the current pattern of growth in Mozambique, labour markets have a fragmented nature where work is dominated by informal, irregular, unstable and insecure social conditions. The preliminary primary evidence from digital gig workers shows that the organisation of digitally mediated work seems to reproduce the existing disruptions within labour markets. This seems acute in a context where digital gig work is not yet legislated and trade unions are absent. The future of workers depends on the broad organisation of socioeconomic structures and relations which shape the nature of work, structurally linked to processes of accumulation on a global scale. A failure to broadly analyse work beyond the physically sphere, including the digitally mediated forms of work and its intersections with paid and unpaid forms of work, has implications for the design and effectiveness of public policies on labour.