Production Model and Work Experiences in Digital Labour Platforms in Chile. Ruptures, Continuities and Ambivalences in an Emerging Precarious Work Scenario.

In Chile, geolocation-based digital platform companies, such as delivery and ride-hailing platforms, have strongly expanded in recent years. Factors such as the expansion of access to the internet and smartphones, the massive influx of immigrant workers, the pandemic, and its impact on the destruction of formal jobs and the digitalization of consumption, the low levels of wages and the mistreatment and abuse in formal employment, the expansion of entrepreneurship imaginaries, among others, make up a picture that has favored the growth of platform work. In Chile, around 55,000 people (0.6% of the employed) earn their income - as their main occupation - through location-based digital platforms. This paper - based on the review of secondary sources and the fieldwork of two research projects involving interviews with 16 key informants and 31 workers - presents a characterization of the development of digital geolocation platforms in Chile, describing their productive model and workforce profile, and discussing the impact of the two new labor laws that seek to regulate the sector. It also delves into the meanings of work and the work experiences that workers in the sector construct daily, which are heterogeneous and strongly marked by different tensions and ambivalences, and in which it is possible to identify both the value they place on their jobs (autonomy and flexibility of timetable) and the criticisms (unprotection and unilateral change of tariffs) they express of the platform companies. Based on the analysis of these structural and subjective dimensions, we discuss the configuration of precarious work that digital platforms have instituted in Chile and Latin America, in which elements of the informal work historically present in the region are updated. At the same time, new elements emerge linked to digital mediation and the strong expansion of symbolic imaginaries linked to entrepreneurship and individualization.