Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how platform delivery workers in Bogotá conceive of independence through the idea of "working without a boss." Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on how workers assert value and autonomy over time by examining how they navigate intersecting "timescapes."

Paper long abstract:

In March 2023, a draft labour reform in Colombia, supported by labour unions, proposed granting platform delivery workers employment status. The aim was to provide labour rights and social protections associated with "proper" employment, defined by subordinate status. However, many workers opposed the reform. Their objections were rooted in a strong sense of independence, encapsulated in the idea of "working without a boss."

Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with predominantly Venezuelan migrant platform delivery workers in Bogotá, my research takes this opposition as a starting point to explore what “working without a boss" means in their daily lives. In this presentation, I unpack workers' valuation of autonomy over time arguing that academic discussions of the gig economy often reduce these claims to a mere internalization of neoliberal values because of their exclusive focus on market-imposed time. Conversely, I show that delivery workers navigate multiple, intersecting "timescapes" (Bear, 2016), where market time constantly interacts with, and is negotiated against, other bodily and social rhythms. This perspective allows us to understand the expression of time agency as a constant possibility.

By taking my interlocutors' claims of independence seriously, I suggest that they represent a radical effort to reassert the primacy of life over work, challenging perspectives that view waged labour as universally desirable. Ultimately, I focus on precarity not only as a site of violence and exploitation but also as a space with the political potential to critique the normativity of capitalist wage-labour and consider what might lie beyond it.