Conferencias magistrales > Ludmila Abílio

Ludmila Abílio, Universidade de Campinas, Brazil

The centralized and controlled dissemination of just-in-time work: Uberization as a global trend

Abstract: We define uberization as a new form of labor control, organization, and management (Abílio, 2017). Although it takes shape and becomes recognizable primarily within platform work, it can be understood as a trend that permeates and pressures whole labor markets, especially in the South. We present three main features of uberization. 1) The transformation of workers into just-in-time workers (De Stefano, 2016; Berg,2016; Abílio, 2017). This is a centralized process, promoted by the oligopolies of a few companies, successfully subordinating, and managing large crowds of informal, available, just-in-time workers in a highly rationalized way. Algorithmic management provides the sociotechnical means for this management of workers as pure labor force (Abílio, 2019). 2) Informalization processes (Abílio, 2020), as a powerful synthesis of work flexibilization. It involves the loss of stable, regulated, and recognizable limits to work exploitation; the withdrawal of labor rights and guarantees; and the informal and dispersed transfer of risks and costs to the multitude of workers. 3) Subordinated self-management (Abílio, 2019), as the transfer of part of the management of work to the worker himself, albeit in a highly obscure and subordinated manner. The loss of boundaries of labor time, the non-contractual subordination (Zuboff, 2019), the transfer of unpaid costs and tasks to the worker, involves a rationality in which workers become responsible for intensifying the productivity of their work.

Based on more than 15 years of empirical research with informal and formal low-wage workers in Brazil, we argue that these elements, however, are not new for peripheral workers. The fabric of the Brazilian world of work is woven by life trajectories in a permanent transit between informal and formal work and popular entrepreneurship; of workers who face, resist, and adapt every day to instability, uncertainty, unfairness, and obscure and flexible rules, especially Black workers. In this way, at the center of uberization lies new forms of subordination and the centralized expansion of structural elements that make up the world of work and everyday lives of workers in the South (Abílio, 2017 and 2020)

We present the results of 12 years of empirical research with motorcycle delivery workers, based on interviews guided by life trajectory studies (Revel, 1998), and surveys on labor conditions and health. These studies have allowed us to closely follow the transformations of this work, new forms of control, and new forms of resistance.

Bio: Ludmila Costhek Abílio holds a degree in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo, a Master's in Sociology, and a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Campinas, where she is currently an academic and senior researcher at the Centre of Labor Studies – University of Campinas (CESIT/UNICAMP). Over the last twenty years, she has been investigating informal work and its relation to capitalist accumulation in the Global South. Her main research areas focus are the uberization of work, new forms of management, organization, and control of labor, as well as the relationships between labor exploitation, financialization, and capitalist accumulation. This has made her one of the leading Brazilian references on the uberization of work.

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