Freedom as Autonomy: platform workers’ struggles and the future of work in Argentina
Sofia Negri asks how we can build a future of work that transforms the salaried relationship to reconcile autonomy with social protection.
Photo by Heike Trautmann on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/@h_trautma
In April 2022, the hashtag #RappideMilei went viral on Twitter Argentina. This hashtag represented delivery platform workers as supporters of the country’s far-right libertarian party. The hashtag started after the owner of a public opinion consultancy firm described the worker at one of the delivery platforms operating in Argentina (Rappi) as the typical voter of Javier Milei, the far-right libertarian politician, now President of the country. For Milei and his libertarian ideology, delivery platform workers were an example of freedom, meritocracy and resistance against the State and its outdated laws, which constrained individuals’ ability to provide for themselves.
Delivery platform workers show high levels of mobilisation that carries anti-establishment elements within it. Specifically, delivery platform workers' struggles have rejected and surpassed traditional labour organisations and demands. Through my research, I have learned that the particular spatio-temporal characteristics of platforms and the ‘collaborator’ hiring model mean that workers experience a complex combination of freedom and oppression which cannot be politically contained under the current paradigm of the salaried relationship. By this, I mean that the form of subordination between employee and employer that is represented by the traditional salaried relationship is historically and organically associated with a strict fixed schedule in a fixed location, which does not completely correspond to the form of subordination existent in platform work. Platforms’ spatio-temporal organisation of work make it highly flexible, meaning it occurs across digital-urban spaces, moves through cities and does not follow a strict schedule, even if it does show certain regularities.
“Platform workers experience a complex combination of freedom and oppression which cannot be politically contained under the current paradigm of the salaried relationship.”
Platform workers’ political detachment from the salaried relationship is often portrayed as a product of neoliberal subjectivities. These workers, it is assumed, have bought into the discourse of entrepreneurship and learnt to champion an individualist ideology. It is supposed that it is this neoliberal ideology (even understood in Marxist terms as false consciousness) - rather than the current conditions experienced in the very few formal salaried jobs that exist in Argentina - that is responsible for the fact that platform workers have not fully supported proposals seeking to regulate platform work and turn it into a traditional salaried relationship. My research challenges these framings. Focusing on the job’s spatial characteristics and workers’ political subjectivities, I demonstrate that platforms’ ‘collaborator’ hiring practices stand out for their flexible spatio-temporal arrangements which produce experiences of both freedom and oppression, affirmation and negation within the job. Moments of affirmation are experienced by workers when they are able to reject an order or cancel a shift, or simply turn the app off because they need a break, they have a more important commitment or they decide to prioritise a moment of leisure. On the other hand, moments of negation are represented by the level of uncertainty, insecurity and obscurity in the way the platform functions that leads workers to work harder, faster and longer without knowing exactly how much they are going to earn or if and how the app is going to recognise their effort.
These mixed experiences express a contradiction that could well be used and mobilised politically, but that has so far been repressed by the normative binary framing of the salaried paradigm which constrains workers’ demands and desires. This paradigm establishes that for workers to access social security, the characteristics of the work need follow a form of subordination where the worker has no decision power over when or how much to work and the length of the workday and work week are strictly pre-established by the employer. This paradigm, however, is at odds with workers’ own experiences within the platform sector, where schedule flexibility allows them some room for autonomy, even if this is constrained by companies’ algorithmic management practices. Therefore, resolving tensions within the platform workers' movement in Argentina and beyond requires embracing workers’ desire for autonomy and challenging the form of subordination embedded in the salaried employment paradigm. This would not only advance labour struggles but also become an alternative political project to Milei’s libertarian far right government in Argentina, one that recovers freedom as a left-wing core principle.
To defeat this individualist, far right articulation of freedom, however, we need to discuss freedom from a leftist perspective, where it has always been latent. Under Peronism, Argentinian workers did not fight for the introduction of the legal eight-hour workday because everyone would have the same workload (and hence be equal), but because it allowed them more time outside the workplace and greater certainty about their daily lives. Leftist politics must recover its imaginative capacity, its disruptive will, its detachment from norms. One of the key spaces where this is urgently needed is in labour policy.
Goodbye salaried relationship paradigm
In my research, I highlight delivery platform workers’ conflicting experiences of flexibility, and their demand for autonomy. Workers’ testimonies show positive and negative aspects surrounding the level of autonomy that they have while working on the Rappi and PedidosYa apps (the two delivery platform companies operating in Argentina). Workers appreciate some level of freedom but complain when that freedom is restricted by the platforms. They also identify different levels of flexibility according to different modalities of work within the app, pointing to how platforms’ infrastructures involve a diverse set of arrangements with different levels of temporal flexibility. Workers say things like ‘it doesn’t end up being so free’, as well as ‘you still have freedom’ when talking about how the platform constrains flexibility and autonomy without completing erasing it. It is this wide variety of ways of using the app that does not align with what labour laws based on the standard employment relationship paradigm were looking to regulate when they were sanctioned. This variability opposes the fixed character of ‘a permanent job’, as one platform worker put it. And it is this that platform companies have used as an argument to avoid being regulated under national labour laws anchored in the salaried paradigm.
Autonomy in platform work depends on two criteria: 1) the organisation of labour time and 2) the degree of formal control that capital, in this case through the app, exerts over workers. While platforms do not formally mandate workers to work, control is exercised through companies’ direction over the labour process and systems of reward and sanction. Workers’ decisions to accept or reject work are shaped by economic need and fear of penalties, which range from lowering their rank on the app (meaning they are assigned less orders), to permanently blocking their accounts. Hence labour time, though flexible, is still structured by these policies and material constraints. Still, the ability to reject shifts or cancel orders represents a small but meaningful ability to enact the refusal of work, disrupting the capital–labour relation and asserting autonomy. These acts offer workers a sense of control over their lives and their working time, breaking alienation and carrying both ideological and political weight. Moreover, autonomy is also experienced in the absence of a human boss ‘looking over your shoulder’ and subjecting you to violent and unpleasant treatment (as experienced by many platform workers in their previous, salaried jobs).
“Platform workers’ ideological detachment from the salaried relationship is rooted not in the abstract internalisation of neoliberal discourses, but on the comparison between platform work and their prior material experiences in the labour market.”
Hence, platform workers’ ideological detachment from the salaried relationship is rooted not in the abstract internalisation of neoliberal discourses, but on the comparison between platform work and their prior material experiences in the labour market. I don't dispute that the characteristics of platform work do indeed demonstrate a relationship of subordination, whereby an employer imposes working conditions and unilaterally decides how much to pay for the job. What I critique is that in the eagerness to criticise the corporate narrative and demonstrate how the "be your own boss" discourse is a ruse to dodge the costs of social security, workers’ desires are also lost sight of.
Long live autonomy
Latin American scholarship has analysed the ways in which workers’ struggles sometimes constitute an excess that cannot be contained by traditional labour institutions. The excess in this case is workers’ demand for autonomy in terms of being able to decide when and how much to engage in value producing activities, without being denied access to social security and other labour rights. This interpretation allows us to frame platform workers’ desire for schedule flexibility as transgressive (a prefiguration to think something new), instead of an acritical incorporation by workers of the neoliberal discourse disseminated by platform companies. It is precisely through the mobilisation of workers’ desires for autonomy that the struggle can become truly transformative.
“It is precisely through the mobilisation of workers’ desires for autonomy that the struggle can become truly transformative.”
To incorporate the idea of autonomy into a political project, however, it is necessary to analyse it critically. On the one hand, the goal is to emphasise workers' self-determination and develop a political practice that stems from the centralisation of their desires rather than from a focus on their suffering. On the other hand, questioning the conditions under which this desire arises allows us to understand the context in which it sits - that of the fragmentation of the labour market - and thus also criticise how companies use the idea of autonomy to generate consensus among workers. Failure to critically examine these structural conditions can lead to libertarian political projects, in which autonomy is operationalized as an individual value linked to ideas of meritocracy. This – as seen in Milei’s project in Argentina – serves to obscure structural inequalities.
The political task, therefore, is to synthesise the anti-establishment values workers develop and to mobilise these sentiments in a radical struggle for freedom. New forms of work are already here, and workers have been clear in telling us why they choose them and what they appreciate about them. Only 21% of workers in Argentina are salaried employees with pension contributions. The political challenge, then, isn’t going back in time, but imagining a future and figuring out how we can make existing jobs good jobs, by redefining what we mean by ‘good’. Perhaps platform workers’ search for autonomy can be the starting point for building a new labour paradigm, one which challenges the subordination relationship that underlies the salaried paradigm. As an alternative, how can we develop a model that is not centred on ideas of entrepreneurship and individual values but on workers’ independence? This would be a step forward in the construction of new leftist utopias and a move towards real autonomy of labour from capital.
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Sofia Negri holds a PhD in Geography from Queen Mary University of London, and a BSc in Sociology from Universidad de Buenos Aires. Parts of this article were originally published in Spanish in El Economista.