The gig is not a novelty.

The history of working class in Brazil is a history of a gig economy.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today my guest is Rafael Gromyn.

Raphael is a professor at Unicinos in Brazil, the coordinator of the Digital Labor Research Lab

and a principal investigator with the Fair Work Project in Brazil.

In this conversation, Rafael fills us in on the conditions and organizing of food delivery

workers, ride hail workers, and even Click Farm workers in Brazil. I feel like Rafael makes a good

point that when we talk about the gig economy, that frame of reference

doesn't really fit in the global south, in places like Brazil, where a lot of the working

class is used to the kind of insecure work that we, in the global north, associate with, you know,

app-based work and these platforms because we are used to, you know, the employment

contract being the way that most people experience work. But in a place like Brazil, where

Rafael is based, that's not the case. And that kind of employment contract has never been

as universal as it is in the global north. And so gig work has always been a thing.

And now it just takes a different kind of form when it's on these platforms and apps.

So I think this is a really fascinating conversation about what's been going on in Brazil,

about the organizing and strikes that have been happening.

And even about the ways that the

platforms have tried to kind of push back and try to change the narrative in their favor in the

face of the protests and strikes and even the work that fair work has been doing to create a

rating system for the platforms around minimum fair work standards. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada,

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