Nevertheless, digitalisation blurs labour market dualisation between standard and precarious workers (Schwander, 2018). These trends also reshaped the hotel sector and personal transportation business regarding goods and people, mainly through Uber that became a prime example of the gig economy (Roque, 2023b). AirBnB, Tuk-Tuks and Uber services gained strength among the new digital precariat. These aspects differentiate the digital economy from the traditional economy, mainly due to the rapid transformation of value chains, where digital technologies merge with products and industrial services, creating hybrid products, that is, the “Internet of Things” and “Internet of Services”, elements of Industry 4.0 (Roque, 2023b). This also led to migration currents that became more pronounced since 2016 with the arrival of workers from Africa, Asia, but mostly from Brazil who sought to escape the economic and political crisis by seeking better and safer living conditions. Nevertheless, the dreamland they imagined they would find ends up being a world of competition, suffering, and informality (Roque et al., 2021; Poleto Oltramari et al., 2023).
In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the trend of platformisation and uberisation of work, promoting significant changes in the world of work, exposing pre-existing social vulnerabilities and inequalities (Huws et al., 2019) and unveiling a series of trends of exploitation and domination, through the ability to organise and control (Moraes et al., 2019). Precarity and vulnerability became aggravated, since several workers had no option but to become gig workers, especially immigrants and those who were unemployed. There was the predominance of bad or bullshit jobs (Graeber, 2018), with the raise in the proliferation of multiple atypical and precarious forms of work to the detriment of waged labour associated with modern industrial capitalism, based on effective contracts and social protection (Kalleberg, 2011). Gig workers experience high levels of atomisation and pervasive monitoring, nonstandard forms of employment, intensification of flexibility, being subject to the entrepreneurial ideology, driven by a variety of forces, including demographic shifts, labour market regulations, macroeconomic fluctuations, and technological changes (Abílio, 2017; Antunes, 2018; Doellgast et al., 2018; Gandini, 2018; Kalleberg, 2018; Keune & Pedaci, 2020; Slee, 2017; Tassimari & Maccarrone, 2020). This raised issues related to (un)decent employment standards and legal status of workers with the absence of a fixed contract and a salary, informal arrangements, uncertainty, intermittence, and lack of access to labour and human rights (Benavides & Silva-Peñaherrera, 2022; Kalleberg, 2009). That is especially the case for migrant workers in Portugal who are located especially in agriculture, service (call and contact centres) and logistic sectors, most of them being devoid of any labour and human rights, suffering slavery and xenophobic harassment.
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