Ludmila Abílio^[1]

Abstract

This chapter seeks to identify the key features of the uberization of work, here understood as a new mode of organization, management, and control of work that did not begin with digital platforms and is not limited to them. The author draws on David Harvey’s conception of organization through dispersion (1989), which for capital means the centralization of control and the monopolization of whole sectors of activity, and for labor the formation of a vast multitude of workers, living in precarious conditions and subject to new kinds of degradation of work.

Three key elements are identified: work on demand, a long-standing process of the informalization of labor, and what the author calls subordinated self-management (Abílio 2023). Workers become permanently available for work, yet have no guarantees regarding the length of the working day, the value of the working hour, or any of the other conditions that were earlier standardized. At the same time, responsibility for the management of part of the labor process is shifted onto workers themselves, though under subordination to changing and indecipherable rules.

For workers, uberization brings informality and unknowability; to the platforms it brings information and knowability. It thus introduces a gray zone that pervades the work relationship as a whole. For capital, it is the datafication of work, the mapping and surveillance of multiple aspects of labor enabling a highly rationalized and efficient management of the workforce (Zuboff 2019). The more informalized and indiscernible the rules of the game become, the more productive and effective the exploitation. In closing, the author looks at the experience of the peripheral workers of the South, and finds that this apparently new phenomenon in fact represents the rationalization and centralization of modes of work long associated with life in the urban periphery. 
   
Keywords: uberization; platform work; informality; periphery; just-in-time worker; gray zone; Global South.

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Introduction

In only a few years, the uberization and platformization of labor have given rise to a new field of research across the globe. A salient feature of this field is the involvement of a generation of young researchers deeply committed to understanding and to some degree reshaping their own time, who are bringing great vitality to the task. This book is testimony to the way our shared labors are developing this domain of critical knowledge production. The countries of the Global South, ostensibly peripheral, are playing a pivotal role in this.

Today, the phenomenon of uberization has become a political issue all over the world. It has introduced novel features into informal work and created entirely new fields of economic activity, and as it continues to expand rapidly across the world it has prompted struggles over its regulation. In the countries of the Global North, it has brought with it a rise in precarity and new modes of exploitation of labor. In the countries of the periphery, it has exacerbated already existing forms of the degradation of work. Essentially, uberization involves the prolongation of working time, the devaluation of labor power, and the transfer of risks and costs onto workers.

Uberization is not easy to define. It has often been treated as synonymous with platformization—a problematic idea, in our view, hindering rather than facilitating an understanding of its chief characteristics. Here, uberization is understood as “a new type of organization, management, and control of labor” (Abílio 2017). It can also be seen as a global tendency permeating the labor market as a whole. It neither begins with digital platforms nor is restricted to them, yet the companies that succeed in establishing new forms of monopoly via platform-based operations are undoubtedly both deepening the process and bringing about its geographical expansion, in operations that are simultaneously centralized and enormously dispersed. Central to uberization are the transformation of workers into on-demand labor power, the informalization of many of the determinants of the labor process, and the transfer of some of the management of work to workers and consumers themselves, albeit in the context of a wider subordination.

The greatest challenge faced by research and debate today is making sense of the interplay between what is changing, what survives, and what is reconfigured under this new form of the management and control of labor. This chapter will argue that uberization can be understood as an effective maneuver by capital that enables it to finally make use of labor power in its pure state, stripped of the protection, the dignity and humanity, won by workers’ historical struggles.

The chapter will thus offer an analysis of the main features of uberization in the light of the gray zone approach, demonstrating what the concept of the gray zone can contribute to understanding both the process of uberization itself and the relationship between capital and labor today.

1. The Centralization of Capital and the Rationalized Dispersion of Labor

We can see uberization as the coming together of a number of processes already under way for decades, all tending to the centralization of control of the entire labor process while shedding responsibility for it. The counterpart of this centralization of control is an extreme dispersion of the workforce, the conjunction recalling the organization through dispersion that David Harvey (1989) evokes in his discussion of flexible accumulation—a complex articulation of centralization and dispersion. The centralization here is the expression of monopoly: it has to be borne in mind that platforms are more than just digital infrastructures—they are the operational structures of companies that have monopolized their sectors. This is clearly the case with food delivery, ride-hailing and microtask apps, for example. This monopolization is accompanied by an accelerating transfer of costs and risks to the workers, most of them located in the Global South, together with the intensification of work and the extension of working hours, all imposed by means both brutal and refined.

This element of organization through dispersion first emerged in the 1970s and ’80s with the globalization of production chains. Corporations such as Nike and Apple outsourced nearly all their production and distribution while centralizing control over both. They transferred risks and costs, absolving themselves of responsibility for workers’ health and safety, shifting the burden and costs of labor management to networks of subcontractors. This outsourcing of functions involves the integration and expansion of precarity and of shocking conditions of work. Informality, near-slavery, sweatshops and microentrepreneurship are central to these dispersed chains of production. And, finally, as Beverly Silver (2003) has shown us, capital also seeks in this way to avoid engagement with organized labor. In other words, organization through dispersion also involves the very high mobility of capital.

My point, essentially, is that uberization represents a new phase in this process of organization through dispersion, systematizing the central control of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dispersed workers.

In that sense, uberization did not begin with the socio-technical innovations known as platforms, nor is it limited to them. An umbrella term, in a sense, it gives expression to a new synthesis of decades of neoliberal policy, financialization, and new arrangements of production operative on a global scale. Of course, platforms do play a catalytic role, especially in their development of the algorithmic management of labor. But the focus falls so much on platforms today because they allow us to grasp and to visualize the essential mechanisms of a dynamic proper to the whole world of work whose national/local expression varies with the specificities of the respective labor markets. To sum up: what we are looking at here is a radical shift in the way that both informal work and formal employment are organized and controlled, ensuring subordination to a center while dispensing with what used to be subordination’s corollaries.

2. The Just-in-Time Worker

Central to uberization is the transformation of workers into on-demand labor-power, or, put another way, the use of just-in-time labor (Abílio 2017, 2023; Berg 2016; De Stefano 2016). Just-in-time workers make themselves available for work but are treated as mere inputs, used only when necessary. Just-in-time labor thus marks a retrogression from the historical gains associated with employment, notably regarding working hours and payment for time spent at the employer’s disposal. These workers are no longer guaranteed the means to the daily reproduction of their labor power. Despite being available, they do not know how much they will earn each day. For them, living in a state of permanent insecurity and instability, the workday has to be as long as is necessary to ensure their survival. What we see, then, is a brutal extension of working hours. Our research among the motoboys, as motorcycle delivery riders are called in Brazil, revealed that more than 50% of the 200 surveyed worked more than 60 hours a week, while 25% worked more than 80 hours a week (Abílio and Santiago, 2024).

We need to be very clear about the significance of this deliberately engineered expansion of on-demand labor. A major controversy today is whether and how uberization is to be regulated. What is at issue, in fact, in different ways depending on national contexts, is the possibility of unregulated recourse to on-demand labor. Its legalization, then, will serve as the foundation for its extension to other sectors.

The history of the conflict between capital and labor shows that workers’ struggles have been consistently aimed at ensuring the recognition of workers’ humanity by employers and the state. That is to say that workers are not be treated as mere labor power. For how many hours is it humanly acceptable for someone to expend themselves in work? Hence the legal determination of working hours. What is the daily minimum this person needs to survive as a human being? Thus the determination of the minimum wage. How many days a week can they be obliged to work? How much rest do they need? Thus the legal guarantee of hours of rest, leisure and sleep. What are the minimum conditions of health and safety worthy of a human? Hence health and safety regulations and the employer’s responsibility for the employee’s bodily integrity. The answers to these questions are socially and so politically determined, endlessly contested and shaped by the shifting and conflictual power relationship between capital and labor.

When workers are employees, rather than available on demand, they receive a predetermined daily wage. If the pace of production has slowed or if there are unproductive periods of time, the daily wage remains the same. The working day includes a number of non-working breaks. One of the main goals of management is to make the worker as productive as possible during the time officially allotted to work, to make all working time productive. Uberization solves this dilemma, but its solution is not to make all working time productive but to transfer the problem to the worker, turning non-productive time into unpaid work time.

We are thus seeing workers’ labor power dissociated from their humanity. Companies can finally treat workers as nothing more than a labor force available to be used as required. All paid time is now productive time. What then becomes of workers’ humanity? Well, workers become solely responsible for managing their own survival, or, in other words, for their own social reproduction.

3. Processes of Informalization

The informalization of labor involves processes that have been under way for several decades. Informalization is not just the growth of informal employment. To begin with, let us look at the working day of an uberized worker: it is not defined in advance, and all time is potential work time. (When I was doing research in London in 2025, a Brazilian motoboy showed me on his app that he earned a thousand pounds a week. He was however working twenty hours a day, seven days a week). And it’s not just the working day. All the fixed, recognizable, agreed-upon and regulated factors governing the labor process have been lost. For the uberized worker, there is no employment contract—just registration and the activation of an account; as there is no hiring, there is no firing, only deactivation. It is unclear to workers why they should have been assigned a job or not, how their pay is calculated, and why it should fluctuate.

As Alex Rosenblat (2018) pointed out, the rules of work are constantly changing: they have no stable or pre-defined form. It is a characteristic of informalization that there are rules in place, but they are indecipherable. They are indecipherable because they are highly flexible, both modulatable and modulated. They can and do change all the time. In other words, there are no limits, no legal constraints, no advance definition of the rules governing work. The rules are changeable, changing so as to reduce labor costs, extend work time, intensify work, and transfer risks and costs to the worker.

Informalization also impacts professional identity, and talk of the “gig economy” only contributes to the loss of recognition that uberization entails. It obscures the fact that the occupations concerned are being degraded and made even more precarious. It obscures the fact that the work is not some side gig, but an activity that consumes the worker’s entire life over many years. It obscures the experience, knowledge, skills, and daily strategies that the worker possesses and continues to develop. Like their counterparts elsewhere, the motoboys of Brazil are generally professionals with many years of experience who are faced by a daily worsening of their working conditions. We found in our research that a quarter of them had been working as motoboys for more than ten years (Abílio and Santiago, 2024), yet they faced the loss of professional recognition. The fact that there is no formal hiring or selection process gives the impression that anyone can become a motoboy overnight, which is far from the truth on the streets. Just as it is far from the truth that their work is of a temporary or occasional character. What is happening, in fact, is that many professionals are seeing their work subjected to a new type of management and their labor to a new mode of exploitation, in this foreshadowing the fate of many others.

4. Informalization Becomes Information

It is important to point out that this loss of stability and definition affects only labor. For capital, the opposite is true, as everything becomes mappable and datafied. This is something Shoshana Zuboff (2019) pointed out in her discussion of surveillance capitalism, explaining how firms rely on new technologies that enable the deep mapping and control of the different elements of the work process, together with many other elements that go to make up our daily lives. For the worker, everything is nebulous. For companies, everything is datafied.

It is a sad thing to witness the worldwide scholarly effort to produce data on the working conditions of platform workers, to contemplate the methodological challenges we face in gaining information on wages, working hours, and the number of workers involved. That is because we are on the side of those who are consigned to nebulosity . . . We have to live with the irony that a few clicks by the companies concerned would save us a lot of work. The data is all there, but not for us.

Algorithmic management fits perfectly into the processes of informalization. Everything is datafied and used to manage the multitude of on-demand workers: lifestyles, daily strategies, the weather, consumer habits and worker behavior patterns are among the endless elements observed and recorded, and the datafication of life becomes a central element in the management of labor.

But again, we must be very careful not to attribute this nebulosity solely to platform-controlled work. In reality, platforms catalyze and disseminate such developments. But informalization per se has been in progress for decades and is a very important feature of the new forms of management and control that began to take clearer shape in the 1980s.

5. Uberization and the Generalization of the Features of Women’s Work

The most important features of ‘uberization’ represent no more than the organized and rationalized extension of those historically associated with women’s work. For we can, in fact, identify those features in the vast mass of socially invisible work that long preceded the advent of the digital platforms—something that may help give a broader perspective on current developments. Before I investigated the motoboys, my doctoral research between 2007 and 2011 looked at cosmetics resellers working for Natura, a Brazilian company that operates throughout Latin America and beyond. It recently acquired Avon International, giving it a global presence. When I began my research, there were 200,000 women working for Natura alone, and they would be joined each year by another 200,000 (Abílio 2011). Four years later, there were a million of them. Years later, when I saw the motoboys being uberized, the more I looked at them, the more I saw the resellers.

The cosmetics resellers are engaged in direct sales, a global phenomenon of gigantic proportions; because it mainly involves women’s labor, however, it does not have the political salience of platform work. The global direct sales salesforce today exceeds 160 million people. Cosmetics resellers are not recruited, no more than are platform workers, and like them they enter the workforce just by registering, with no selection process or any occupational requirements. To all appearances, they work when they want, in the way they want. Their work is hardly recognized as work, being presented as a vehicle for the promotion of personal relationships. In other words, it is work that is not socially recognized as work—something that all women know well, given the invisibility of reproductive work.

Many resellers engage in this activity so as to save money on their own purchases of the same products. That is, they take some of their pay in discount. This recalls something often heard from Uber drivers, which is that they are working in order to pay off the loan on their own car, the tool they must have to work, and that the more they work, the more the car deteriorates. It reminds one, too, of the microworkers who are paid in vouchers and so are obliged to spend their earnings consuming the products of the companies they work for. A real puzzle, this: sometimes it seems as if they are paying to work . . . The boundaries between consumption and work are thus informalized and the distinction between work and consumption becomes blurred. This brings us to the consumer work described by Dujarier (2008) and the “prosumption” of Ritzer and Jungerson (2010), and also to Howe’s important account of crowdsourcing (2008). These shed light on a variety of activities that are not treated as work by those who engage in them but in fact supply capital with unpaid labor.

In the face of informalization, cosmetics resellers generally struggle to calculate how much they spend on product, how much goes on their own consumption, and how much they earn from resales. This echoes the continual difficulties we have in working out the real incomes of delivery drivers, Uber drivers and the like. Their work is highly flexible, taking no fixed form. This makes it compatible and miscible with other activities, employment, for example, allowing the reseller to use their workplace and time at work to sell cosmetics as well. It can also overlap with reproductive labor and leisure. In other words, all time becomes potential work time. As in the case of the uberized workers, this lack of a fixed form allows the work to be adapted to various situations. It could be argued that the term “gig” represents an attempt to name the flexibility that makes it seem as if work is something transient and sporadic, but the opposite is true. The work is not sporadic but continuous; it is just that its highly accommodating character—its vaunted flexibility—allows it to colonize every sphere of life.

At the time of my research, Natura had no stores in Brazil and e-commerce was practically non-existent, all its distribution being by direct sales. On visiting the company’s factory, I came to understand how the business worked. Outside, a vast multitude of female workers; inside, a factory that functioned in just-in-time mode. The company held barely any stock, this in fact being dispersed in the drawers of millions of resellers, who had paid for it and then bore the risk of selling or not selling it. The just-in-time production meant that products were manufactured only when resellers placed orders. In my thesis, I argued that informality outside the company became information inside it. The dispersed activity of a million women outside is translated into information inside, guiding production. In the same way, the nebulosity of the multitude of uberized workers is datafied for platforms who make rationalized use of an on-demand labor force.

6. Subordinated Self-Management

Thinking about the cosmetics resellers, I found myself wondering what might be the motivations leading so many women to engage in socially invisible work, work without recognition or occupational identity. Apart from any need for money, there was, of course, the appeal of a certain autonomy. And this brings us to the last key category in the analysis of uberization: subordinated self-management (Abílio, 2023). Uberization represents the synthesis of a number of logics that emerged with Toyotism. It is clear that Fordist rationality assumed a body under outside control, like poor Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line. Management was understood as external, coercively imposed on the worker.

This type of domination is still omnipresent, but is now entangled with new rationalities and forms of control. These are based on the transfer of part of the work of management to the workers themselves, who exercise a subordinated management, subject to rules and risks that they have no say in at all. Following the pandemic, we have seen the spread of remote work, which instantiates this new mode of control. Rather than an office, a time clock, a physically present manager and the apparatus of control they represent, we see much of the management and its costs passed on to the workers themselves. Now they not only manage their own working time, but also bear a number of costs that are difficult to account for. The home space, its furniture, its utilities and the coffee consumed are now factors of production. With this, the boundaries of working and non-working time are blurred: cooking while holding a meeting; working late at night and at weekends; measuring work by goals achieved rather than by the hours of the clock. We manage ourselves to excellently exploitative effect, extending our working hours, intensifying our own work, and bear its risks and costs.

This brings us to the uberized crowd of subordinated self-managers. No one will tell the motoboy when and how long he will have to work each day. Nothing is pre-established: where to work, how, when, for how long. It is up to them to manage themselves under conditions they have no power to negotiate, and in accordance with rules that are neither clear nor explicitly agreed upon.

In a nutshell, what uberization teaches us is that the more the work process is informalized, the more efficient, less costly, and more intense will be the exploitation.

Conclusion: The Gray Zone – The Potentiation of Exploitation by Informalization

Throughout the analysis presented here, I have sought to show how the erosion of stable forms—defined, socially agreed upon and legally regulated—has become a powerful mechanism for intensifying the exploitation of labor. This is a complex matter, and one that looks very different depending on whether it is approached from the periphery or the center.

In the developed countries, the idea of the gray zone reflects some four decades of changes to what Robert Castel (2003) aptly termed the “wage society”. In these countries, it is indeed possible to take as one’s point of departure a social reality with relatively well-defined characteristics, anchored in the Fordist compromise (Bihr 1995; Aglietta 1979), that is now undergoing profound transformation (Supiot 2024).

In this sense, it is as if we were observing a well-established bright zone, consolidated over the course of the twentieth century, whose boundaries and characteristic elements have become blurred and increasingly difficult to pin down analytically. The consequences of this transformation extend far beyond the theoretical challenge it represents; they also present a political challenge, affecting class consciousness and class experience, the forms of collective organization and the political horizons of the working class (Kesselman 2017).

We could then have recourse to concepts forged in the countries of the Global North, such as Brazilianization (Beck 2000) or flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989). Developed decades ago, these concepts already identified processes that have since become more salient and more recognizable, even if they remain difficult to define or delimit precisely. They allude, in fact, to the diffusion of characteristics historically associated with informality—a condition long understood as typical of peripheral countries.

When the notion of the gray zone is deployed at the periphery, however, everything becomes even more complex. Brazil never truly became a wage society: to this day, more than half of economically active Brazilians work in the informal sector. The profound inequalities that marked the country’s birth have reproduced themselves over time; they have been updated, have taken on new forms, yet fundamentally remain the same. Most importantly, binary categories such as formal/informal ultimately fail to capture the actual structure of the labor market.

When we look at the occupational trajectories of the peripheral workers of the South, we learn that they navigate, throughout their lives, between formal employment and other work situations: informal employment, self-employment, family businesses, or other. We tend to think, however, of formal and informal work as discrete spheres that together make up the world of work. It is this duality that underpins the concept of the gray zone, that underlies the criterion for identifying such a zone, where the boundaries of spheres that were once clearly delineated have become blurred and permeable. But a closer look at these lives reveals a different reality. I interviewed a motorcycle courier who had combined this with metalworking for the past ten years (Abílio & Santiago, 2024). Another delivery worker had worked as a telecommunications technician and an electrician, and now combined platform delivery work with selling clothes. This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout the twentieth century and into the present day, the workers of the urban peripheries have not had fixed, linear occupational identities; instead, they move across different activities, combining formal and informal employments while also running their own small businesses alongside their other occupations. If they are to make a living, they must engage simultaneously in multiple income-generating activities. They are self-managers in a world where very little is guaranteed. In fact, our statistical instruments are not even capable of categorizing, never mind measuring, the everyday movement that weaves together workers’ lives and the labor market as a whole.

Nevertheless, these difficult-to-define elements are indeed undergoing transformation. I have argued here that one of the defining features of uberization is on-demand work. Yet such work is nothing new for the vast majority of Brazilian workers. Many forms of informal employment, self-employment, and other work-situations have long constituted on-demand work. What we are seeing now, however, is a new kind of rationalization and a new type of centralized control over on-demand labor, whereby a small number of companies are able to subsume and manage enormous crowds of workers while simultaneously controlling and distributing just-in-time work.

In the 2010s, the Brazilian sociologist Cibele Rizek (2012) used the notion of zones of indeterminacy in analyzing the transformation of everyday life on the urban peripheries, involving new relationships between housing, work, financialization, and global production chains. These novel configurations entailed the loss of stable forms of work, as had already been noted by another Brazilian sociologist, Francisco de Oliveira (2003). He argued that informalization could not be reduced simply to the expansion of informal employment. Starting from the realities of peripheral workers, he identified, in broad terms, the elements that structure the exploitation of labor and capitalist accumulation today. Analyzing the relationship between financialization, new technology, and emergent forms of the exploitation of labor, Oliveira identified processes that have since become widespread and more readily recognizable in contemporary labor relations. In his aptly titled article “Passagem na Neblina” (Passage Through the Fog, 2001), he noted the blurring of boundaries between consumption and work, working time’s colonization of the whole of life, and the transformation of workers into just-in-time workers.

With the notion of the gray zone we revisit this fog, which has proved to be anything but temporary. Perhaps, rather than thinking in terms of zones, we should instead think of an informalization that now permeates the entire world of work. In other words, even the zones themselves are no longer clearly delimitable. What we are witnessing is an erosion of stable forms that affects the labor process as a whole.

To conclude, uberization shows that this erosion of stable forms is extraordinarily productive. From the standpoint of labor, what we see is that the less stable the rules are, the more opaque they become, the more productive they are for capital. Informalization contributes to the extension of working time and enables forms of labor intensification that are difficult to measure yet highly effective. It also facilitates the transfer of risks and costs onto workers.

However, we mustn’t look only at the labor side of the process. It is absolutely essential to recognize that this informalization affects only the workers. The other side of the coin is datafication: the transformation of nearly every aspect of social life into data. For capital, this creates the possibility of managing an enormous range of everyday activities in an extremely controlled and rationalized manner, without even having to define clearly what are the rules of the game.

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