PLATFORM WORK: A DOUBLE EXPROPRIATION OF CAPITAL

Abstract

In this article, we want to discuss two key issues related to work on digital platforms: how it is possible to maintain despotic control of the work of delivery workers and app drivers through algorithms and at the same time get these workers to "lend" their work tools (car, motorcycle, cell phone, internet) to make profits for large companies. We call this phenomenon the double expropriation of capital. At first in our research, we started from a review of the bibliography of the phenomenon of uberization, based on the fourth industrial revolution or revolution 4.0, as well as the movements of this digital proletariat that try to break the despotic power of the app. In a second moment, we carried out field research with the application of 150 forms to analyze this double expropriation from the voice of workers, and also two interviews with union representatives and delivery workers, as well as interviews with some app workers. Our conclusion is that this double expropriation of app workers is part of an objective process gestated by the capitalist mode of production from its 2007/2009 crisis, and that, in order to get out of this crisis, it deepens the precariousness and exploitation of labor, with new unproductive restructurings, labor reforms and privatizations, expropriating jobs in the productive sectors and in the public service to create an army of "free" underemployed and/or unemployed  For the greed of large corporations and digital platform companies, which have in the despotic control of algorithms and the extreme intensification of the working day, a fusion of the Taylorist regime with Toyotism, something we call Tayotism.