The labour process and workers’ rights at Mercado Libre: hiding exploitation through regulation in the digital economy

Abstract

E-commerce platforms such as, most famously, Amazon use digitalised production systems in their warehouses. In this article we examine how such digitalised systems impact upon the labour process, the organisation of work and working condition in the warehouse of Mercado Libre in Argentina, the largest e-commerce platform there and in Latin America. In many respects, this case is aligned with the evidence emerging from similar studies on Amazon. The ubiquitous combination of algorithmic management with discretionary human management has limited the sphere of workers’ autonomy and spaces of resistance, increased control to virtually any productive or unproductive time spent by workers in the warehouse and imposed stressful working conditions on workers, often with negative implications for health and safety. These conditions of exploitation common to digitalised workplaces have, however, been strengthened by the company’s hiring strategy, based extensively on labour broking, on the high turnover of a young workforce, and the strategic use of the existing institutional regulatory framework and formal trade union representation to buffer management from workers’ complaints. In this sense it is not regulation as such that is the key to better working conditions in the digitalised labour process but rather how that regulatory framework is effectively used and contested by workers’ struggles on the ground to get concessions.