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Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation examines the conditions of possibility, meanings and effects of the “tricks” and “cheats”, as illegitimate stratagems, devised and enacted by platform-based delivery workers in Bogotá (Colombia), against the platform companies they work for.

Paper Abstract:

Critical labour platform scholars have demonstrated that while platforms promise autonomy and independence, legally categorizing workers as self-employed, in practice, through algorithmic management, platform workers are increasingly controlled and subordinated. This contradiction ultimately exacerbates labour precarity producing insecure lives and livelihoods (Van Doorn, 2017; Rosenblat, 2018; Woodcock, 2020). However, l suggest that the forms of control deployed through algorithmic management are always partly failed for they cannot account for workers’ experiences and practices which exceed the digital realm. This inherent failure, coupled with conditions of heightened labour uncertainty, represents a fertile ground for the emergence of “illegitimate” practices through which workers strive to sustain and secure their livelihoods. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with mainly migrant, platform-based delivery workers in Bogotá, in this paper I consider the myriad of creative ways in which workers “tick” and “cheat” platforms. These stratagems span from the widespread practice of having multiple accounts based on fake identities, to the less common but more sophisticated frauds through which workers manage to “keep” the orders they are supposed to deliver, or even the money which clients pay for them. I discuss how these practices may constitute firstly, an almost necessary means allowing to navigate the precarious conditions imposed by platforms. Secondly, a way for workers to reclaim their promised, but negated, independence, and lastly, a form of covert, everyday resistance (Scott, 1986) which allows platform workers to highlight their agency and protest the perceived injustice of their working relations and conditions.