Resumen

ELBERT, Rodolfo  y  NEGRI, Sofía. Tweeting against capital: new forms of digital protest by delivery platform workers in Argentina during the COVID-19 pandemic. Estud. trab. [online]. 2022, n.64, pp.1-29. ISSN 0327-5744.

The global appearance of the digital platform economy generated important debates in the sociology of work on the relationship between technological change, work process and worker protest. In particular, there is a discussion about the impact of new digital technologies on the dynamics of worker organizing in these sectors of the economy. Are these exclusive tools for increasing the rate of exploitation by digital oligopolies towards an atomized workforce? Or can workers appropriate digital tools with the aim of promoting collective organization? In this article we intend to make a contribution to this debate by analyzing the dynamics of job insecurity and the collective organization of workers employed in digital delivery platforms in Argentina during the initial period of the spread of the COVID-19 virus in Argentina (from March 20 to July 1, 2020). In a context of greater job insecurity for delivery people due to their job continuity in a situation of health risk, we are interested in analyzing what types of collective action strategies they deployed to organize for their labor rights and, in particular, what place digital platforms had in these organizational strategies. The article uses a multi-method approach, which combines in-depth interviews and document analysis, with a quantitative component that analyzes a database of 56.100 tweets from 23.161 users related to strikes or protests on delivery platforms in Latin America that were published between March and July 2020. The results indicate that in the context of greater precariousness and strong restrictions on traditional forms of protest (face-to-face assemblies, mobilizations, etc.), couriers increasingly organized themselves through digital platforms to express their collective demands. This evidence supports the idea that, in certain contexts, there may be a worker appropriation of digital technologies to combat the dynamics of exploitation to which these technologies themselves contribute by increasing the control mechanisms of the work process.

Palabras clave : Labor Movement; Digital platforms; Digital protests.

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