Flexibilization and precarization of working conditions and labor relations in the perspective of app-based drivers.
| Autor | Junior, Jeova Torres Silva |
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Introduction
Sharing economy is the economic phenomenon that stands on a new business model, consisting of shared access to goods or services through free or paid transactions, by means of physical or digital networks (Gansky, 2010; Cantera & Vaquero, 2012; Schor, 2014; Christensen, Raynor, & McDonald, 2015; Hamari, Sjoklint, & Ukkonen, 2015; Slee, 2015; Carelli, 2017; Acquier, Daudigeos, & Pinkse, 2017; Petrini, Freitas, & Silveira, 2017; Gerhard, Silva Junior, & Camara, 2019). In the sharing economy, small enterprises and startups emerged as applications and digital platforms that have become large corporations, and from them raised a "new" mass of workers influenced by a set of ideas on flexibility in working conditions and relations, and an opportunity to increase their sources of income (Rifkin, 2011).
The sector of shared private transportation is the leader among those with the highest number of sharing economy initiatives, with 24% of total businesses (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2015). In 2020, Uber, one of the world's corporations in this sector, already had a market value of US$78bn (Cheng, 2020). Farrell and Greig (2016) show that, between 2012 and 2015, about 10.3 million people oined these platforms as workforce, only in the USA. In 2020, workers/service providers of the sharing economy in China were expected to exceed 100 million (Nan, 2017). In the European Union, according to Groen and Maselli (2016), the sum of part-time, temporary and freelancer workers aged 25 years or less increased by 49.8 %, between 2006 and 2014. In the UK, Conaty, Bird, and Ross (2016) mentioned that the number of independent workers had expanded to 4.6 million, or 15% of the total workforce. When added together, freelancers in the USA and the European Union reached 162 million people (McKinsey Global Institute, 2016).
In Latin America, phenomena related to the sharing economy have also gained prominence. According to the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (2016), Brazil leads the region, with 32% of all sharing economy initiatives. Such data show a global movement of workers from the traditional and formal obs to work opportunities more flexible and informal, or even precarious. Whether by satisfaction or need, this transition has changed labor relations and deserves investigation for better understanding. Although the sharing economy model has gained the growing adhesion of workers and users in different parts of the world, the challenges regarding its growth are becoming more and more noticeable and urgent.
There are critical analyses, for example, about this economic model not including noncommercial initiatives (Schor, 2014); it would consist of a wide range of digital platforms for pseudo-sharing, given their practices and social quality of their sharing (Belk, 2014), and that it still contains an anti-regulation movement in itself (Slee, 2015). In addition, in other studies, the mentioned flexibilization of working in the sharing economy can be considered more as a weakening of labor relations (Schor & Attwood-Charles, 2017; Polkowska, 2019; Capaverde, Medeiros, Antonello, & Rodrigues, 2021), and, paradoxically, even expanded - in some aspects - the control over the workers (Antunes & Filgueiras, 2020). According to Franco and Ferraz (2019), there is a close connection between fragility and control, as a result of the indifference of platforms toward their workers/service providers, since they have limited power of choice, accepting any ride or delivery for achieving, at the end of the day, the financial resources that ensure their survival.
Labor aspects, compatible regulation of relations, benefits and better working conditions are among the claims in the criticism of the forms of work in the sharing economy. The conditions and the way work is practiced led to a new term - uberization. At first, the term relates to the ride-hailing Uber platform, given the way this company associates service providers (drivers) and the relationship it has with them. However, the term has expanded its meaning. The "uberization" of work is defined as a new way to exercise a paid activity, reshaping labor relations (Abilio, 2020), transaction costs (Nurvala, 2015), service provision (Corona-Trevino, 2017) and economic responsibilities (Fleming, 2017).
Lima and Bridi (2019) observe that platforms interconnected with uberization operate by a principle that suggests to service providers that they are their own bosses or "self-entrepreneurs." To these authors, this perspective of entrepreneurship involves the precarization of work relations. Regarding the consequences of uberization on employment, Abilio (2020) observes that one of the main changes is how the relationship between the platform and the "uberized worker" is established, since this worker has no employment bond and no labor guarantees. Here is precisely an issue that led us to design the research. We sought to answer, in this paper, the starting question of the research: how labor relations resulting from new practices and activities in the sharing economy business model are configured, according to workers' speech? To get an answer for this question, we sought to hear from workers in the main sector of the sharing economy, the app-based private transportation.
Although not always supported by empirical research, some articles, especially in sociology of labor, have stated that these activities are leading to job precarization and weakening the historical gains of the labor movement. However, these studies did not present what sharing economy workers, as is the case of app-based drivers, thought and perceived directly, regarding their working conditions and relations. Those that we found (Fleming, 2017; Vosgerau & Comar, 2019), before starting our research, were not based on drivers' place of speech. And, among the papers published afterward, most of them focus on drivers that work for the Uber platform (Andrie, Da Silva, & Nascimento, 2019; Moraes, Oliveira, & Accorsi, 2019a, b; Amorim & Moda, 2020; Junge & Tavares, 2020; Lameira & Ribeiro, 2020). Uber is the main platform in this sector, but we observed that several drivers joined other apps, looking for a higher percentage of earnings in their rides. Other recent studies base their analyses on data collected through a single instrument - the questionnaire (Moraes et al., 2019a, b), or interviews (Andrie et al., 2019; Junge & Tavares, 2020; Lameira & Ribeiro, 2020; Vieira, Paiva, Alcantara, & Rezende, 2020; Capaverde et al., 2021). Our research, on the other hand, sought to validate the information achieved through questionnaires and interviews with drivers.
Hence, our study contributes because it has an empirical basis; it does not address only Uber drivers; and it relies on an analysis bias that articulates qualitative and quantitative bases of collection. Thus, we did not simply seek to confirm what the literature on labor law, political economy and sociology of work state on work precarization in this activity. Our research sought to use the literature as a conceptual foundation, but not to be bound by it, and only use the investigated case as an illustration. In an abductive perspective of knowledge building (Haig, 2005; Koviacs & Spens, 2005), the results and conclusions we reached had the central perspective of what app-based drivers think and say.
Therefore, our purpose was to understand what app-based drivers think of working conditions and labor relations. Regarding the procedures adopted for data collection, there was an initial stage of bibliographic and documentary search, and then an empirical stage of research with app-based drivers in seven cities in the Northeast Region of Brazil: Fortaleza and Juazeiro do Norte, in Ceari; Natal and Mossoro, in Rio Grande do Norte; Joao Pessoa, in Paraiba; Recife, in Pernambuco; and Salvador, in Bahia. However, in this article, we only use data from Juazeiro do Norte, where we completed the survey. In the other cities, the COVID-19 pandemic hampered the progression of field research. We expect to finish it by the end of 2021.
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Theoretical background
The scenario in the first two decades of the 21st century shows that new deep changes are underway in the capitalist system. Owyang, Tran and Silva (2013) observe that, since the beginning of the 2000s, another mode of regulation of the economy has emerged, centered on sharing transactions of goods and services, especially from people to people, and not just from companies to customers. This, in turn, is redefining the relationships between sellers and buyers, consumers and producers, expanding transaction models and affecting relationships, businesses and organizations (Bocker & Meelen, 2017; Frenken & Schor, 2017). These practices are inserted in the mode of economic regulation known as sharing economy.
Gerhard et al. (2019) show that this model of economic regulation disclosed by the sharing economy stands on a perspective of wealth creation from shared transactions of goods or services, located on digital platforms and applications or physical places. They redefine the traditional principles of access and ownership (private, public or common), as well as labor, consumption and production relations. A large part of the success of this model based on sharing, renting, lending, reselling, exchanging and donating is due to the generation that is, simultaneously, its main providing, demanding and working public. They are Generation Y, more commonly introduced as Millennials - the generation born between 1981 and 1996 (Dimock, 2019). Regarding the classification of generations, Parker and Igielnik (2020) show that they are subdivided into individuals born between 1946 and 1964, called Baby Boomers; people born between 1965 and 1980, named generation X; generation Y; and generation Z, comprising individuals born after 1996.
Each generation has a different way of behaving and analyzing the world. Faced with...
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