Danger Around the Corner: Digital Platform Workers, Health, and Precarious Labor

Abstract

The year 2022, two years after the COVID-19 pandemic was reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), brought a new scenario in the workplace. According to a survey conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), more than 1.5 million people were already working through apps and digital platforms at that time. This corresponded to 1.7% of the population employed in the private sector in Brazil, in a context marked by the absence of labor rights, endless working hours, exhaustion, and illness among these workers. Of this total, 6% are women, approximately 60,000 workers. According to W. F. Pessoa (2024), the daily lives of women who work for apps — particularly drivers — involve precariousness and violence. Although, in recent years, individual passenger transport platforms have encouraged the entry of female partner drivers with the aim of reducing incidents of harassment and violence (PEREIRA; ARRIBAS; CARDOSO, 2021) against customers, the preference for female workers is not reflected in their salaries. According to data from PNAD 2019, women's income represented, on average, 77.7% of men's income (R$1,985 compared to R$2,555), according to the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) of 2019. In addition, gender-based violence also finds space in the routines faced by female workers. These aggressions have a common component: the silence of civil society in the face of the serious humanitarian crisis affecting app-based workers and whose gender dimension is equally unknown. According to Carol Alves, coordinator of Coletivo Elas por Elas Providência — founded in 2020 to support workers in vulnerable situations due to the pandemic —, “the working conditions of informal women workers are marked by extreme precariousness and vulnerability without any type of social or labor protection,” denounces Carol.

Based on this scenario, this work seeks to analyze the human consequences generated by the growing expansion of work through digital platforms, configuring an environment of increasing precariousness, with serious effects on the health of these workers, since the mediatized work environment reflects and aggravates the multiple forms of violence suffered in various layers of the social sphere.

The research is the result of a partnership between ENSP/Fiocruz and UFF and seeks to discuss and transform the health conditions and rights of app workers, proposing alternatives that can generate concrete actions in this field. The activities involve the development of a campaign with debates and communication workshops, in addition to advertising communication actions and the production of reports, carried out by a team of advertising students and journalism researchers from the Laboratory for Research in Community Communication and Social Advertising (Laccops), coordinated by the professor of Communication at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Patrícia Saldanha.

In the deepening of the debate on digital platforms and health, the proposal for this work was born, which seeks to reflect on and propose ways to guarantee health and the fight for workers' rights, a theme that we intend to develop throughout this proposal.