Delivery platform workers in Argentina in the pandemic and post-pandemic. Preliminary analysis of a panel survey

HAIDAR JULIETA

Amsterdam

Workshop; Work in the post-Covid era. The end of platform labor as we know it?; 2022

Platform Labor research Project, University of Amsterdam

Platform work is a global phenomenon that has specificities according to the region in which it takes place. This contribution aims to analyse, in particular, the evolution of working conditions and the sociodemographic profile of delivery platforms’ workers in Argentina, a country in the global South that, like other countries in the region, is characterised by high levels of labour informality.The first exploratory survey carried out with delivery workers in 2018 in Buenos Aires city, indicated that they were mostly young and migrants from Venezuela. A second survey conducted in July 2020 to 401 delivery workers, during one of the peaks of the pandemic, showed that the sociodemographic profile of the workforce had changed: a substantial number of Argentine workers, of various ages, and a greater number of women were added to the Venezuelan population.The analyses showed that platforms constitute a labour refuge for vulnerable population: initially, migrant workers and, in a second moment, Argentines who, due to the Covid crisis, suffered a reduction in their income or lost their jobs, many of them also precarious. It was also evident that during the pandemic, the platforms took advantage of the oversupply of labour force to make the already precarious working conditions even more precarious.Based on a preliminary analysis of a panel survey conducted in August 2022 to the same population surveyed in 2020, we ask: in the post-pandemic period, have working conditions changed on the platforms? What are the labour trajectories of platform workers (those who joined platforms during the pandemic, are still there or where did they go)?