Working on Digital Platforms in Brazil: Between Opportunity, Ideology and Job Insecurity

This presentation proposes to analyse the rise of platform cooperatives (Scholz, 2016) or the digital solidarity economy, as it has been called in Brazil recently (Rubim and Milanez, 2024). The digital information society has produced fundamental changes in the work and subjectivities of workers and citizens, being the ubiquity of digital platforms pointed out by Sadowski (2020) as a dominant form of rent-seeking in contemporary capitalism. The political scene in Brazil has been strongly influenced by extreme right-wing ideology in recent years, and we can see a trend towards the tendency to identify themselves as ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘right-wing’ among platform workers. This ideology also influences the ways of being and working of this precarious and underpaid professional category. According to Grohmann (2021, p.13), work on platforms is a "laboratory of class struggle": it can mean both the increase of exploitation, through the control and management of labour - such as Amazon, Rappi, Uber, 99 and other "giant" companies of platform capitalism, and the possibility of construction of alternatives by workers, when they are engaged in processes of self-managed association. Thus, to escape the precariousness of labour through the big investors’ platforms, some workers are trying cooperative models for their activities. Through ongoing participatory research in Brazil, we are analysing this scenario of transformations. The main empirical record is a cooperative of women and transgender people in São Paulo-SP, Señoritas Courier. Theoretically, our goal is to reflect on the present and future of work from critical epistemologies, considering the legacy of the sociology of work (Antunes, 2018), but also incorporating the perspective of decoloniality and decolonial pedagogies (Walsh, 2015), which propose forms of resistance to the movements of capital. In this sense, work and activism can be articulated, from the use of digital platforms.