2. Academic Wits University Research Outputs (All submissions)
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Item 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, LucasThe 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.Item With and against Platformisation: Men in care professions and the gendered dynamics of the future of work(ers).(Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2022-11-15) Komarraju, Sai AmulyaWhile several studies examine platformisation and the future of work from a gendered perspective, much of the media coverage and academic scholarship on the platform economy is divided in terms of their focus – (migrant) men involved in the supposedly “masculine” and visible work of construction, driving, and delivery, and the invisible care work performed by women workers and the challenges involved in both. Undoubtedly, the over-representation of women in different kinds of care work prompts such research. However, in India, both men and women from marginalised castes and classes have historically performed care work, such as domestic work and salon work. Based on patchwork ethnography and interviews with male workers in two feminised care professions (cleaning and salon work), this working paper first makes a case for feminisation of platform work beyond the mere presence of women, and then proceeds to explore the material contexts within which male workers enter (platformised and not-platformised) feminised care work, their views on platformisation, their resistance to and co-optation of platform work, and, related to these, the strategies they use to affirm their masculinity.Item Unexceptional neoliberalism: enterprise and informality in the gig economy of India(Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2022-11-15) Nair, Gayatri; Divyadarshi, JenniferThis paper examines the conditions of work in the platform economy across India, which has witnessed a significant expansion in the number of gig workers joining platform enterprises. The precarity underscoring work in the gig economy is now widely acknowledged, but what does this entail for workers in India and the global South who have typically been a part of the informal economy? The paper explores whether the absence of labour regulation and social security in gig work marks it as an extension of informal work. Based on interviews with gig workers and rooted in their experiences of work that remains unregulated, we consider whether gig work is an instance of “unexceptional neoliberalism” as it extends informality to new sectors. The paper unpacks the impact of the neoliberal state’s agenda of promoting enterprise on gig workers who are now subject to algorithmic controls of platforms, alongside “traditional” constraints of caste, class and gender, even as they are considered by the State and digital platforms to be autonomous entrepreneurial subjects.Item The labour process and workers’ rights at Mercado Libre: Hiding regulation in the digital economy.(Southern Centre For Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2022-11-15) Atzeni, Mauritzio; Kenny, BridgetIn this working paper we consider the case of Mercado Libre in Argentina, the largest e-commerce platform there and in Latin America. E-commerce is, most basically, the sale or purchase of goods or services over the internet (Goga and Paelo, 2019: 2). E-commerce platforms such as, most famously, Amazon use digitalised control systems in warehousing and distribution services. We examine how such digitalised labour processes impact upon the quality and protection of labour in warehousing, and how regulation and trade unions’ practices combine to represent workers in these new sectors of the economy. Based on the Argentinian experience, we found that workers’ jobs were fragmented, with high use of labour broking. The workforce was overwhelmingly young and temporary. It was the combination of algorithmic management with discretionary human management which imposed stressful working conditions on workers required to negotiate daily conditions, often with negative implications for health and safety. Yet the image of the firm and its reliance on young workers mediated experiences of working there for many. In addition, high turnover relieved some grievances through workers exiting. Still, the Argentinian case also suggests the key potential role of trade unions in the sector to protect workers, given the regulatory context of labour rights and sectoral representation. However, we suggest, this was not an automatic condition of institutionalised regulatory frameworks. Indeed, the recognised union served to buffer management from workers’ complaints while the more militant transport workers’ union fought to organise warehouse workers more meaningfully. We conceive this study of labour process dynamics and collective issues in Argentina as a way of generating ‘lessons’ for worker organising and trade union mobilisation in South Africa and more broadly in the global South, which we discuss in the conclusion. We also conceive of this research as the first leg of a broader comparative research agenda on labour relations in Argentina and South Africa to be jointly developed in the future.Item 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 CesarThe 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.