By RICARDO ANTUNES*
Preface to the newly released book by Vanessa Patriota
I met labor attorney Vanessa Patriota a few years ago, during a Seminar on Platform Work, held in Fortaleza, of which she was one of the organizers. I was able to see, during her presentation, that clarity, lucidity and forcefulness were mixed in her reflection. Traits that are now repeated in this book, the result of his doctoral thesis defended at the Faculty of Law of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), in the line of research on labor law and critical social theory, rich and originally developed over decades, under the leadership of Professor Everaldo Lopes Gaspar de Andrade.
Autonomous or subordinate? This is the central dilemma of this book, which is duly detailed and unraveled. To carry out this endeavor, various types of work were researched on digital platforms, especially those carried out by drivers and delivery people, defined as offline crowdwork (but also contemplating a parallel with a wider range of other platforms characterized as online crowdwork), highlighting the effective predominance of real and legal subordination, contrary to the central proposition of large platforms that use all possible mechanisms and traps to present work as “autonomous”, in order to disregard the protective legislation of work in force in the countries where they operate.
We know that this destructive process in relation to work was only possible due to a complex and simultaneous combination of several causalities: (i) the outbreak of a structural crisis since 1973, which worsened from 2008/9, subsequently, with Covid- 19 and more recently with the serious international warmongering context; (ii) a systematic and uninterrupted process of permanent and global productive restructuring of capital and corporations.
(iii) A rigorous financial hegemony shaped in clear harmony with neoliberal ideas; (iv) the increase in unemployment on a global scale, although more pronounced in the Global South; (v) with the explosion of computerization and communication technologies, robotization, initially in the industrial sector and then in agribusiness and especially in privatized services, which became laboratories for the rapid expansion of algorithms, Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, etc.
The main consequence of this complex movement, in the labor universe, was the advent and exponential expansion of a differentiated mosaic of labor activities, the most recent example being the so-called “platformized” or “uberized” work. Using digital artifacts and the abundance of unemployed workforce, as well as the “flexibility” of labor legislation that generated outsourcing, the increase in informality and the “invention” of intermittent work, this is how large digital platforms were able to manage the current types of work whose central distinctive feature is the refusal to comply with the labor legislation that exists in different countries and which regulates the relations between capital and labor.
It is for no other reason that large platforms present themselves as “service providers”, “technology suppliers”, in order to obliterate the real condition of salary and subordination that configures the reality of the work carried out there, in addition to enabling them to the exclusion of the payment of taxes that regulate the business world.
This was the challenge that Vanessa Patriota set out to solve. In his own words: “This thesis focuses on the study of digital work platforms with the objective of: (a) identifying the aspect of legal subordination present offline crowdwork of drivers and delivery people.
(b) Analyze the characteristics of the online crowdwork, in order to verify whether the workers included in it can be covered by Labor Law and whether, to this end, it is necessary to reconfigure the concept of subordination in the employment relationship”. Through this path, your investigation demonstrates that large platforms, in their various work modalities, use all means and forms, with the “non-negotiable” objective of keeping employees always excluded from labor rights in Brazil.
To obtain her main analytical answers, the author pursued the following questions: can new modalities of organization and work process, developed from the expansion of informational and digital technologies, provide a “protective cloak” within the scope of Labor Law? Does the existing regulation in Brazil offer and include the necessary elements to recognize the subordination present in platformed work? Or, on the contrary, is it necessary to “expand the spectrum of labor protection” so that subordination can be supported by Labor Law?
To carry out this challenge, Vanessa Patriota, throughout nine solid chapters, covered a wide spectrum of empirical evidence and covered dense analytical paths, dialoguing widely, both with the bibliography present in legal labor studies and also carrying out a fertile dialogue with critics. political economy and also with the sociology of work, which gave even more strength and force to his study. Because of this movement, your book can be read and used both in the legal sphere, within the scope of labor law, and by those who seek to better understand the economic, social, political and ideological materiality that shapes the legal world that deals with the work.
A look at the comprehensive summary of (Badly) camouflaged subordination demonstrates the richness of the study carried out.
In the First Part, it analyzes the meanings of work and the role of law in capitalism, with its transformations in the productive sphere and within the scope of social classes in their clashes. An adequate analysis of legal subordination, para-subordination and autonomy is supported by a careful understanding of concepts such as human work, technology, labor relations, merchandise, contractual individualism, class and class consciousness, Taylorism, Fordism, welfare state, crisis, flexible accumulation, always seeking to relate the reality of Brazil with the international context, which allows him to demonstrate how labor fraud develops.
In the Second Part, the author faces the difficult and decisive debate about productive and unproductive work, as well as the importance of this reflection for a better understanding of the essential meanings of platformed work in current capitalism, which is heavily financialized and rapidly digitalized. It analyzes the main characteristics present in research that focused on work on people transport and delivery platforms. It makes a solid diagnosis of this reality, using the empirical material present in the evidence obtained in investigations by the Public Ministry of Labor, involving the platforms Rappi, iFood, Cabify, 99 and Uber, which allows it to indicate the traits that configure the classic subordination that permeates this type of work.
It also exposes the main devices used by platforms to deny the employment relationship, which are in sharp contradiction to the working conditions experienced by workers. In doing so, it demonstrates how platforms reiterate the subordinating character present in effectiveness and labor law, accentuating the contradictions that exist between the various legislations existing in different countries and the form taken by work on platforms, which have transnational breadth and scope, an aspect that which is decisive in facing the dilemma of regulation.
He concludes his study with the imperative need to address the central dilemma of labor law in Brazil (and in the world today), when thinking about work on platforms: it is about fighting for regulated and protected work or preserving and expanding the enormous setback and social devastation present in these activities? Which leads the author to reaffirm the importance of emancipatory struggles to give concreteness to labor regulation, as well as to face the key issue of social control of algorithms, used by large digital platforms, which are for secret, restricted and absolute use of the platforms , aiming both to intensify the exploitation of labor and its concealment.
And, to reject the mystification that the algorithmic world is a distinct expression of “a new reality” in the world of work, Vanessa Patriota adds a central argument, in a crystal clear way: even if “we can talk about algorithmic control and digital management or cybernetic, the intensity of orders and disciplinary practices typical of classical subordination are not removed. This conclusion is extremely important as the concept of classical subordination is still prevalently adopted in both national and foreign jurisprudence and doctrine”.
This emphasizes the importance of “stripping subordination of its current clothes, to reveal what it really presents: intense, constant and binding orders, which give rise to disciplinary punishments in case of non-compliance and which are issued directly by companies, but through programming algorithmic.”
By refuting, with strong empirical evidence and rich arguments, the fallacy of “entrepreneurship”, this book offers us a portrait of the reality in which a huge mass of workers work during long and intense working hours, finding themselves, however, completely unguarded and deprived of the rights present in the protective labor legislation in Brazil.
Its conclusions are precise: “The digital work platforms analyzed were created in a context in which work occupies all spaces of life […]; in which trade unions are extremely fragile, making their struggles difficult; in which nation-states are captured by large corporations, and they are the ones behind the platformization of services; in which the precariousness of work is extremely high and companies that own digital platforms will intensify it even further; finally, in a context in which neoliberal rationality makes us believe that there are no alternatives to the proletariat, other than accepting the precarious jobs that are offered to them out of benevolence”.
That is why Vanessa Patriota's book could not be published at a better and more crucial time, exactly when in the National Congress several nefarious bills are being processed which, once approved, will be taking a disastrous step towards the devastation of labor rights. in Brazil, conquered by the working class as a whole in many struggles, fought over countless decades.
*Ricardo Antunes is a full professor of sociology at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of Pandemic capitalism (boitempo).
Reference
Vanessa Patriota. (Badly) camouflaged subordination: capitalist domination at work on digital platforms. Belo Horizonte, educational RTM, 2024.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
