Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) - (Working papers)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/38293

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Gig EconomySubject: search.filters.subject.Brazil

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    The impact of digital labour platforms on the conditions of food couriers in Rio de Janeiro.
    (Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2022-11-15) Souza Santos, Lucas
    The incorporation of new technologies into the world of work has been the subject of numerous studies, with the digitalisation and platformisation of work gaining increasing attention. The aim of this article is explore the profile and working conditions of food couriers in Rio de Janeiro, paying attention to their professional trajectories and individual and collective experiences. I conducted 500 surveys with food couriers in the second half of 2021, followed by 100 semi-structured interviews. Survey questions focused on basic demographic information (age, gender, education and so on), the labour process and conditions of work, work identities and aspirations. Through discussion of the quantitative results of the research, the experiences of food couriers and the debate in the literature on the subject, I argue that the structural precariousness of the category has gained a new impulse with the current low incomes and extensive working hours, as well as a diversification in the composition of the category. The paper identifies three groups of food couriers, based on their experiences and expectations, despite them often sharing similar working conditions. The first group includes those who worked as food couriers before the existence of delivery apps, who have more visibly attempted to resist the platformisation process, and have a certain “culture” of their own. The second group refers to those who are in courier services as a temporary job, as an alternative to unemployment, and who generally aspire to return to their former activities. The third group contemplates those whose first job is in platformised deliveries. This younger group seems to see an extremely precarious job as normal, although they intend to work in another profession in the future. Thus this article is interested in pointing out some continuities and ruptures in the activity of food couriers in Rio de Janeiro after the arrival of digital platforms.
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    Labour market transformations in the era of new technologies: an analysis by regions, gender and industries in Brazil.
    (Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2022-11-15) Tessarin, Milene Simone; Morceiro, Paulo Cesar
    The impact of new technologies on the workers is the subject of intense debate. However, a deep analysis of the global South qualifying their regions’ inequality is rarely addressed. We evaluated the Brazilian formal labour market, unpacking disparities according to regions, manufacturing sub-sectors, and gender. First, we created a compatibility table of the occupation list provided by Frey and Osborne (2017) and the Brazilian occupations list to identify the occupations with a higher and lower digitalisation risk. Second, we elaborated a granular view of such occupations using different dimensions (five regions, 23 industries, three technological groups and gender). Third, we analysed the employment change between 2011 and 2019 to promote a comprehensive view of the drop in employment in the past decade. Results showed that most jobs in the Brazilian manufacturing sector are in occupations at high risk of digitalisation but that there is substantial heterogeneity regionally, sub-sectorally, by gender and for all region-gender-sub-sector combinations. The proportion of women workers is smaller than the proportion of men in almost all sub-sectors, but they are concentrated in labour-intensive, low-tech sub-sectors more susceptible to digitalisation. The employment drop between 2011 and 2019 was most significant in occupations with higher digitalisation risk and even more pronounced among women in all regions. Public policies need to be adjusted to the various existing heterogeneities in the global South. It is necessary to explore the synergies between educational, regional, social and science-and-technology policies to balance the impact of new technologies on formal jobs.
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    Click farm platforms and informal work in Brazil
    (Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2022-11-15) Grohmann, Rafael; Govari, Caroline; Amaral, Adriana
    This paper analyses work on click farm platforms in Brazil and argues that work on these platforms updates and reproduce traditional informal work in the country. The methods involve digital ethnography on click farm platforms, WhatsApp and Facebook groups and YouTube channels, and worker interviews. The findings present relationships between informal work and work for click farm platforms in these dimensions: a) culture and language, especially from WhatsApp groups, functioning as an extension of click farms; b) vocabularies and practices around “resale” as a sign of informal work in the country; c) the role of YouTubers in spreading neoliberal discourses; and d) boundaries around the piracy market and illegality. The paper contributes to debates on the taskification of work through digital labour platforms and the widespread neoliberal discourse and identity. First, the click farm platform deepens the mechanisms of micro-work platforms by presenting new layers of “fauxtomation” and “ghost work”, in a platform labour circuit marked only by Brazilians – consumers and workers. Second, it reveals the articulation among discourses of neoliberalism, entrepreneurship, and informal work in the context of the global South.