Though the digital platform economy in some contexts has created new employment opportunities, work in the platform economy has been widely criticized for its often precarious and exploitative character. One central mechanism through which digital platforms construct and conceal exploitative employment relations are information asymmetries among platforms, workers, and consumers. These information asymmetries are created through, among other things, a lack of transparency on how platforms allocate work, calculate payments, and use customer reviews for incentive structures and other rating-based work outcomes. Against this backdrop, the Fairwork project conducts action research to tackle these information asymmetries. In this talk, I introduce the Fairwork project and provide critical insights into our engagement with platforms as an action research strategy. I explain how this action research strategy can be effectively deployed both in the gig economy, and across the supply chains of AI.

Around the world, workers are trying to build collectivities while dealing with platforms and artificial intelligence (AI). Whether in cooperatives, unions, associations, and other collectives, workers are learning to govern these technologies through bargaining and/or technology development. This talk will emphasize the importance of understanding the pedagogies of struggles in the digital labor landscape, as aspects of class struggles. No one is born an organizer, and no one is born knowing all the risks and possibilities of AI. How do workers collectively learn the meanings of platforms and AI? The presentation argues for the need to understand platform/AI governance from below, led by workers, and build on the Latin American tradition of educommunication for a better understanding of AI/platform literacy. The talk will show how Hollywood writers, the Homeless Worker Movement in Brazil, tech co-ops in Argentina and delivery workers in co-ops and unions in Brazil are learning to govern platforms and AI, as prototypes of organizing, amidst challenges, failures and experiments.

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.

Digital labor has become an enduring feature of the global economy and a defining aspect of our everyday lives. Over the past three decades, it has manifested in various forms—mediated by software-as-a-service, platforms, and mobile applications. While some groups of digital laborers, such as location-based gig workers and content moderators, have begun to forge international solidarity networks and mount large-scale campaigns for the recognition of their rights, the majority of digital occupations remain unrecognized and unprotected.
By dismantling the artificial divide between the conspicuous global consumption of digital products and the equally global yet inconspicuous production of those same products, we can better understand that digital labor involves not just tech workers, influencers, or Uber drivers, but entire communities of users and producers of technology. Drawing on Latin American perspectives and historical framings of labor, I explore how this growing phenomenon intersects with informality and coloniality, offering new ways to conceptualize it.
Various emerging policy frameworks are addressing the social embedding, environmental sustainability, and community governance of human labor in digital economies.  In an era of widespread artificial intelligence production, these frameworks highlight the central role of labor while also offering new opportunities for activism and policy integration.