Abstract
This paper studies how a group of delivery workers in Barcelona were able to organize a successful traditional and a social media strategy in order to claim for their rights as wage workers. They created a union, RidersxDerechos, and they also decided to create a worker’s cooperative, Mensakas, with their own application and algorithm. We will study how they were able to re-appropriate technology and to use digital communities to spread alternative discourses. We have used different methodologies: traditional content analysis in Media, debate analysis in Social Media, qualitative ethnography. We noticed that RidersxDerechos access to media was very successful (300 piece of news analysed) thanks to strikes and court trials, facilitating a change of perspective in the treatment of platform economy in Media. Media were following up the digital entrepreneurship rhetoric until then. Along with the traditional media strategy they developed a diversified communicative pathway in social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Goteo) that helped them to establish alliances with riders from other cities and countries. We focused on more than 25.000 tweets analysed. Finally, they proposed a new way to use technology by creating their own app and algorithms for their working cooperative, Mensakas. Crowdfunding were also used to fund it and to spread an alternative working storytelling from Silicon Valley’s.
Highlights
The transformation of the productive and communicative landscape in the past two decades synthesizes its phenomenology in digital technology and its new uses
This paper proposes a study of the narrative, economic, technological and communicative process performed by a group of delivery drivers who in July 2017 created RidersxDerechos in Barcelona, a trade union that defends their rights as workers and reports false self–employed status
The main objective of this research is to focus on the case study of RidersxDerechos and Mensakas as activist groups in order to study how they do to subvert the power of the logarithm of the delivery platforms (Glovo and Deliveroo), re–appropriating the technology and using
Summary
The transformation of the productive and communicative landscape in the past two decades synthesizes its phenomenology in digital technology and its new uses. We have never before had millions of people around the world working synchronized within the same platform (Scholz, 2017) This technological phenomenology of the end of wage labour and, occasionally, the end of professional information has led workers to modify their communicative strategies in contexts of conflict, deconstructing the idea of precarious workers becoming entrepreneurs and using new technologies for their own purposes. The riders’ trade union took the conflict a step further by reshaping the technological instrument in a fairer labour context: they created Mensakas, a rider’s cooperative, with their own application. They can confront the rhetoric about the obsolescence of labour legislation or the assumption that technology must sweep away labour rights. Founding a workers cooperative in the context of a deregulated digital economy is a kind of meaningful action in order to recover “the notion that labour is not a commodity, but rather it is part of the human being that, needs to be protected and differentiated from other trades and goods is an abstract principle – it has and must have practical implications” (De Stefano, 2017, p. 11)
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