Trabalho por Plataformas Digitais [Platform Labour]

Delivery workers, drivers, data workers, content creators, domestic workers—these and many other kinds of work are increasingly being conducted through digital platforms. Platforms are reshaping long-established industries while creating new forms of work, often through powerful mechanisms of dependency and control. The platformization of work—the growing use of digital platforms to organize and conduct work activities—is spreading across the economy, affecting workers with very different profiles and in very different contexts. This process involves new forms of data extraction and automation whose consequences for workers are far from promising. This book, in Portuguese, offers a critical introduction to this phenomenon. It explains its key concepts, examines who works through digital platforms, and explores the histories and economic logics behind platform labour. Despite the rhetoric of technological novelty, much of what platforms do is not entirely new; in many cases, they reproduce and intensify inequalities that already exist. But what can be done about it? What paths might lead towards a more dignified and democratic digital economy? Drawing on leading scholarship as well as practical examples, Rafael Grohmann and Julice Salvagni discuss possibilities ranging from regulation and worker organizing to the creation of alternatives to dominant platform models, including platform cooperativism and worker-owned platforms.