Digital platforms and applications are becoming more and more a part of our daily lives. For most and most of us this means treating them as users: ordering food out, waiting for a taxi, ordering products online, renting accommodation. What we don’t pay enough attention to is that people work on these platforms, that many people’s lives are determined by this very work reality. And this life is often difficult: long working hours, constant anxiety about whether the daily wage will be sufficient, pressure from constant evaluation by clients, problems encountered by clients.
As a result, as several surveys have shown, they often have to work so many hours that they cannot have a regular meal. In a peculiar irony, people who order food “from outside” through platforms, because they don’t have time to cook, are served by people who have to work so many hours that they also don’t have time to cook.
The platforms themselves were presented many times as a positive change in our lives. Not only because they are supposed to serve us and allow us to find better products and services easily and at better prices, but also because they are presented as fields that strengthen the producers of products and services, since they allow them a potentially larger market, while they are supposed to allow those who work in them to have more flexibility, combined with better pay, especially in relation to the supposedly poorly paid jobs in other areas of the services. Not to mention the way that, especially after the pandemic, the platforms were combined with the supposedly more convenient telecommuting.
The problems
However, the surveys carried out among platform workers, as well as the mobilizations that have taken place in several countries, show a reality different from the supposed “empowerment of workers”. Because they may usually offer somewhat better wages than other jobs, however the problems recorded are much more: increased precariousness, fatigue, stress. What makes matters even worse is the way that often this work has neither the standard form of wage labor, nor any forms of greater protection that wage labor still has even after successive waves of restrictions on workers’ rights. In fact, there are several indications that signs of dissatisfaction also exist in the most “privileged” part of platform workers, that is, software engineers.
Besides, often working on platforms seems to be close to an employer’s fantasy. It is the vision of a condition where the worker is constantly available for work, ideally 24/7, where he is paid only for the time he works and not for “dead” times, where his entire work practice is recorded in the form of digital data, including the reactions of those dealing with the employee (ignoring that very often in work processes the customer is not always right). A condition where he/she is not even treated as an employee with rights, but as a “sole entrepreneur” who is finally judged simply by how much he invested in himself (and whether he exploited it as much as he should).
The template
However, the issue is not only the situation in relation to the workers on the platforms themselves. Because very often we see a certain sector of the economy and a pattern of organization of production acting as a pattern, as the sectors that shape a labor and technological paradigm, as for example happened with the Taylor factory which may not have been “quantitatively” the dominant labor standard, yet it set the tone for how work was defined throughout the economy for a long time.
That’s the potential we see ahead: that the platform-driven model of work becomes work-driven as a whole, with even more pressure for flexibility and precariousness, for personalization, for even more disenfranchisement. And we must observe that these dynamics are deeper and probably cannot be addressed by the various legislative initiatives that may exist to enshrine some characteristics and rights of wage labor in these spaces. Because the problem is not only the – undoubtedly important – dimension of the formal employment relationship (which, after all, remains at stake), but all the essential aspects concerning both work and technology (which, after all, is anything but neutral). Consequently, the resistances that develop in these spaces are of particular importance, precisely because they have the potential to be the ultimately decisive transformative factor.
The enduring resistances
The introduction of forms of work on platforms held out the promise of fragmented and individualized work to such an extent that ‘conflicts’ were avoided. The experience of the important struggles developed in these spaces, internationally, shows that solidarity is also developed, and original forms of coordination are invented, and forms of action are tested, often taking advantage of new technologies, explaining why things are anything but given.
