--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9783031912610" library_document_id: "ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32" source_sha256: "47c7c08da0933a56a20193e0938b4f864c4eee2c4d93e47abe99898e2ac4b485" pdf_physical_page_count: 270 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 170 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32?start=170&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32.md?start=170&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32.md?start=160&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32.md?start=180&limit=10" --- # Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=170 | PRINTED_PAGE=158 “In Venezuela I lived on a farm, but in Portugal I have always lived in a room in an apartment in the centre of Braga with an Argentinean and a Venezuelan in a T3”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] “I had a very comfortable life in Brazil. I have a degree in Environmental Management, but I also have several technical courses. My last job in Brazil was a commercial manager and it was a good salary. My wife also had a beauty salon. I had a car, I had a recently furnished 3-bedroom house, with 2 suites, with a garage for 3 cars. My daughters studied at a private school, it was a very good life”. [E13, Man, 43 years old, Brazil] Before coming to Portugal, most of these immigrants have a network of family or friends to whom they reach. “For us, the transition was that we left at a time when a lot of people also left Venezuela. My fear was arriving here and not having friends or colleagues to share with, but we arrived here and so many Venezuelans came that I felt at home and that thing made the transition here not so complicated (…) What was most difficult and took a long time was finding a job”. [E6, Man, 45 years old, Venezuela] The process regarding documentation and legalisation can be a very long and traumatic process, restraining immigrants from obtaining access to qualified employment and renting a house. Most workers found employment through the support of their networks or by themselves searching for job offers on the internet. This happened especially due to the fact that they were did not have access to social security number, VAT number, and a residence certificate. “This process took 40 months (…) and a friend of mine told me that there was a lawyer in Lisbon who could give me a solution (…) he told me that there is Article 88 (Residence permit to carry out subordinate professional activity) which says that when your tourist visa expires you have 90 days and you can extend it with SEF for another 30 days and make an expression of interest that would imply an employment contract. But before that you must have a taxpayer number, social security number, certificate of residence from the parish council, bank account, insurance. At the Bank it was not easy to open an account because I was an immigrant and having NIF, Social Security and a passport weren’t enough, I only had a tourist visa”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] 158 I. ROQUE ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=171 | PRINTED_PAGE=159 In fact, especially in rural areas, people can suffer from racism and xenophobia until they are approved by the neighbourhoods where they live. “It was a shocking experience in terms of xenophobia and non-acceptance. I couldn’t rent a house under any circumstances. It was a scary situation, because I barely spoke to people, they hung up on me. It was something that I was very scared about because my friend’s friend is someone who was born in the city, and his parents are well known in Torres Vedras. Only after his mother went for a walk with me around the city on a Sunday was I able to rent a space to live with my daughter”. [E11, Woman, 48 years old, Brazil] In the case for exchange students, such as PALOPS, who came to attend academic courses using border agreements, they had easy access to documentation. Nevertheless, the cultural adaptation process can be difficult. “When I finished the 12th year in Cape Verde, I think the objective was to study and as at the time the universities were still in their initial phase and there weren’t many courses yet (…) as Portugal and Cape Verde have many agreements with universities regarding Palop it is much easier. (…) The first months were more difficult to get used to, the new climate, new country, being alone. I think it took me about a year to get used to being alone. (…) The process of acquiring nationality was much simpler than requesting a renewal. In this sense, I think SEF is much more bureaucratic”. [E9, Woman, 33 years old, Cape Vert] Most of these workers consider themselves in the condition of being precarious and poor, having to work simultaneously for several jobs or employment activities to complement their low income (puriactivity). 6 VULNERABILITY AND RESISTANCE AMONG DIGITAL … 159 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=172 | PRINTED_PAGE=160 “Life has become very difficult. I consider that before I wasn’t, but now I consider myself precarious, but now I’m precarious because I have to do a lot of things have three professions: the union, full time at the call centre, and I am also a part-time Uber driver, which is another precarious job. I’m a driver, sometimes I work two or three hours, but I am very poorly paid too. I still have to help my family, my sister who is in the USA (…) I don’t consider myself a poor worker, but I don’t have everything I would like to achieve, I have to eat, maintain a good quality of life. It is difficult to plan the future with the current situation (…) we are facing a crisis similar to the 2008 crisis, who can think about having a child even if they have capital and stability, there are no conditions”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] “I consider myself a precarious worker in the sense of being poorly paid, of having more work than being recognized”. [E6, Man, 45 years old, Venezuela] Regarding their projection in the near future, some of them don’t see any other alternative in the labour market but to be a call and contact centre worker. “Last week I turned 60 and I want to continue working in the back office because there are no jobs in the job market”. [E14, Man, 60 years old, Colombia] “The ideal job for me is the call centre. The idea that the call centre is a temporary job will disappear because there are many people who have their families working in a call centre and make it a profession like working in a textile factory (…) I don’t see myself working in a cafe. I don’t see working in call centres as temporary, there are many families that depend on the call centre, it’s a job for life”. [E5, Woman, 55 years old, Venezuela] 6 Perceptions Towards Suffering In this scenario of (de)regulation and flexibilisation of work, the world of digital and platform work comprises a stage of suffering, provided not only by business management, by the metrics established by algorithmic management which, in a way, embodies the role of a virtual foreman, and temporary work agencies. These immigrants had been working either in outbound and outbound, back and front-office work, especially in customer support service, for more than two years. They do not constitute a transitional workforce, although they were subject to precarious working conditions involving temporary work agencies. In fact, call and contact centres are among the most common and easy entrance employment opportunities for immigrants, being most of them grateful, even if they might suffer exploitation. 160 I. ROQUE ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=173 | PRINTED_PAGE=161 “Most people see it as a place of passage in Brazil. In Portugal, it is seen as a means of survival”. [E11, Woman, 48 years old, Brazil] “There were colleagues that when they came in started talking bad about their work. You are in a place with air conditioning, with a computer, you earn more than the average Portuguese person and you are speaking in your natural language, which is a benefit. You are in another country, and you have to adapt to it”. [E5, Woman, 55 years old, Venezuela] In many cases, this is stigmatised work, manifested through situations of racial, sexual, migrant and gender harassment, in which the workforce finds itself in situations of enormous social vulnerability and which, for survival purposes, is subjected to precarious employment relationships. “When I started everything was fantastic, but when I reached the secondyear things started to get complicated. My metrics are always great, but I start to feel harassed. The supervisor told me that I was a piece of trash who had to go home, and even wanted to report me to the SEF. I remember that, at the time, the SEF came here to the centre, and that day was a Wednesday, and thankfully I had the day off, they took a deported Colombian and a woman from Equatorial Guinea who got arrested”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] “Many immigrants come here, from France, Spain, Africa, Equatorial Guinea, Columbia, Brazil and Argentina. It is a multicultural mix because behind this there is precariousness (…) There is a high turnover of people in every call centre service in Portugal. There are more immigrants and LGBT people who take refuge in this work, but they also suffer seriously anyway. There are also doctors, surgeons and lawyers, systems engineers who are in call centres as their main profession (…) Why do you think the government needs immigrants with expressions of interest? Because it is precarious work and that is what this type of business needs, whether due to naivety or ignorance where people just cry (…) They are not paid extra for speaking other languages and overtime”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] 6 VULNERABILITY AND RESISTANCE AMONG DIGITAL … 161 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=174 | PRINTED_PAGE=162 “There was an episode of a supervisor that was heard in the room a supervisor slapped a girl in the face and that was a very shocking scene, I was like, oh my God! There is a colleague of mine who is Italian and the supervisor was telling her to put on a leash because that’s what you are, and she didn’t know what the word leash meant and when she realised to what she was associated she started crying because it is a very strong word. There was a lot of sexual harassment from the supervisors who used their hands to massage. They bullied at work. I never complained to Authority for Working Conditions, as I had an expression of interest, I didn’t want any conflict”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] These continuous situations may lead to high levels of stress, burnout and emotional exhaustion, as well as psychological illnesses, such as anxiety, emotional dissonance, depression, consumption of anxiolytics, antidepressants, and, in more serious situations, sudden death and suicide (Dejours, 1994; Derry & Kinnie, 2004; Roque, 2010). “In 2018, a colleague of the English customer support line committed suicide. He hanged himself at home because there was a mistake, another of many, and he had only received 40 euros in salary and was full of debts. After several complaints the company did not help him. He got tired and committed suicide”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] “And, suddenly, I asked my colleague, what’s going on, Adelino? Let’s take you to a doctor. The supervisor said that I had to serve customers. But I helped him and I went to the bathroom. He was having a heart attack, and the company was unable to call an ambulance”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] “She started crying and knocking on the iron door. No one could help unless there was a disciplinary process, but the girl managed to get out of the window and she went to the iron door and threw herself. By each window there is an air conditioning platform and, and the windows have spikes to prevent pigeons from straying into the windows. The French colleague got hurt all over and they had to call the ambulance and the police. This call centre building was designed from scratch with this architecture due to the train line and the frequent suicides. Every week there were suicide attempts, accidents at work, crying”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] 162 I. ROQUE ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=175 | PRINTED_PAGE=163 “By law, you can work six days, one day off and then another six days. They would force us to work overtime every day or ask for Friday, but we accepted. I accepted and did it because I needed the money. The mental exhaustion was total, it was total, but they took advantage of our need to do this. It was only our service because others weren’t willing to do that. The Portuguese and the French lines did not work overtime”. [E5, Woman, 55 years old, Venezuela] Besides these, there are also situations of disrespect for the human condition and the physiological conditions associated with it. “Each call has 10 minutes of average handle time, if it was longer than that and if it was a sale, everything would be fine. We have 12 minutes of break in the morning and afternoon, and 1 hour for lunch counted by the second. Every month women have physiological constraints that they cannot control, it is impossible. I saw it happen to colleagues who stayed there and then got up and had dirty pants”. [E13, Man, 43 years old, Brazil] During the Covid-19 pandemic, most workers were immediately transitioned to the telework regime, while others had to find help in trade unions or had to strike. Instead of liberating, this entire experience constituted a new source of precariousness for workers who found themselves burdened with work costs, increased surveillance and, in some cases, with domestic and care work that became aggravated, especially for women. However, issues related to the transfer of costs from capital to labour still persist, as is the case with the payment of water, electricity, internet bills and the costs associated with work equipment (computer, chair, table), and in some cases the meal allowance was withdrawn. Situations of imposing Orwellian control and surveillance also worsened, through the attempt to install webcams in workers’ homes to possibly control their performance and biometric control applications. 6 VULNERABILITY AND RESISTANCE AMONG DIGITAL … 163 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=176 | PRINTED_PAGE=164 “There is a chat called OyeTalk where you have to apply or notify (...) I have a company phone where you have to connect via VPN. But they wanted to install an application on my phone, and I said no. (…) You know what they say to me, instead of paying me the difference in the cost of cold weather? We recommend having a blanket, secondly having a cup of hot tea and a cat by your side”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] Regarding trade unions, there is concern from some unions around immigrants, for there are delegates who speak foreign languages or are native. Nevertheless, people do not seem to be interested in trade unions or politics, mainly due to their irregular situation in the country. “In Venezuela unions are not well regarded because it is a mafia. Here it is a little different, but it also has a political content of profit logic. The union has to be dependent on all workers. They cannot think of the communist logic of that the owner of the company is the bad guy and the worker is the victim, they see that it is bad to make a profit from a business”. [E5, Woman, 55 years old, Venezuela] “I was already a union member, and my experience wasn’t that good (…) They went with me to speak to the company, but I didn’t have support from them. And we had to take legal action because my dismissal wasn’t fair and the union was always saying yes, let’s see, let’s do that and that and I ended up leaving the union. Doing things on the outside I had better results. The union must be something that is meant to bring benefits to the employee, to carry out strikes, but at the end of the day those who benefit are on the employer’s side. These union members were fired after a while time, and they could find a solution for them. So, I don’t really believe in the union”. [E6, Man, 45 years old, Venezuela] Most call centre workers feel that they do not and cannot build a career in call and contact centres in Portugal, because social mobility is not for everyone. “I don’t feel like I have a career. They don’t allow it because there is no meritocracy. You have to be a total devotee of the boss, you have to be part of the elite club, which is the pure mechanism of capitalist wear and tear that is 21st century slavery”. [E4, Man, 44 years old, Venezuela] 164 I. ROQUE ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=177 | PRINTED_PAGE=165 “It’s very difficult to build a call centre career in Portugal because I have seen colleagues who have risen to supervisory positions and are worse off than when they were answering lines, colleagues who can’t even have lunch anymore. They don’t leave call centres out of fear or convenience of finding something else. They are constantly disappointed with it. I don’t see it as career, but as a job that helps those who are immigrants and compared to it. Others, for example, such as cleaning and restoration, are lighter work, but it is work that takes a lot of energy from you, the emotional fatigue is enormous”. [E13, Man, 43 years old, Brazil] 7 Discussion Considering the research questions raised in this article, the analysis of these portraits allowed to demonstrate that immigrant occupational trajectories are built of constant instability and precariousness, fearing dismissal, for they live in the here and now (Antunes, 2011, 2020; Carmo et al., 2021; Doellgast et al., 2018; Kalleberg, 2018; Keune & Pedaci, 2020). Individuals perceive this type of work as a way of escaping unemployment and integrate the labour market, even though they realise the real dangers this could bring in the near future, especially due to the eventuality of not being able to access basic labour rights. Digital platform work is not a mere trend, but a process which has been growing, especially after the pandemic, employing the most economically vulnerable, typically immigrant, male and racialised workers (Zwick, 2018). In the twenty-first century, it is crucial to analyse the workingclass experience and its morphology and to understand the complexity of post-industrialised societies that are undergoing a process of digital transformation and a consequent dehumanisation of work with the subordination to the algorithm and the transfer of risks to workers, where workers become obsolete and disposable, being “outdated” and replaced by others that are less demanding and flexible, or even by machines (Abílio, 2017; Kalleberg, 2009). The working-class must be understood as exploring the intersections of class with gender, ethnic and sexual identities in the context of changes in patterns of immigration and the rise of new protest movements and forms of organising (Clarke & Hubble, 6 VULNERABILITY AND RESISTANCE AMONG DIGITAL … 165 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=178 | PRINTED_PAGE=166 2018). This highlights not only a new morphology of work, but also of the working-class in its structural precariousness. This reinforces the idea that the working-class is still, or has become even more, heterogeneous, differentiated, and fragmented (Antunes, 2018). It was also evident in this article that disregarding these workers renders them to a vulnerable condition. The present case study has revealed that most call and contact operators experience situations of flexible, low-paid, and intermittent working conditions, enduring a life of exploitation and oppression in work, and seasonal, shift and physically demanding and repetitive work, facing various health problems, including psychosomatic illnesses, and situations of racial, gender, moral, and racist harassment and xenophobia (Roque, 2020). Through the perceptions of the interviewed immigrants, it was possible to understand the profound problems that arise from the fact that precarious immigrants are marginalised, especially those with an irregular status, even though their labour power is central to many sectors of the labour market as seen during the pandemic (Benson, 2021; Guadagno, 2020; Tagliacozzo et al., 2020). Workers know that they are being exploited but have no other way than to accept the plunder (spoliation) (Marx and Engels, [1849] 2010, p. 242) of their subjectivity. In the absence of quality employment opportunities, this may be the only way to enter the labour market, especially for immigrant, flexible, temporary, racialised and atomised workers. When the pandemic stroke most were not considered as eligible for receiving any governmental support and they had to enter the informal and digital labour market. The gig economy can lead workers to benefit from job opportunities that they might not be able to access otherwise, on a flexible-schedule basis, allowing them to match work with the performance of other activities and to balance their income. This requires that workers with agility, creativity, open to short-term changes, assume risks on a continuous basis, lowering the level guaranteed by state legislation, and destructuring the employment category as central of the labour law, in the face of a flexible contract that does not even guarantee a minimum wage (Sennett, 2006). The main issue remains in the lack of recognition of the different services regarding digital platform work as professional categories, as in the case of call centres and couriers. Temporary work agencies are still a determining factor for the perpetuation of labour exploitation. An operator can work for several companies in a single day, have a precarious contract renewable daily, weekly, or monthly, or not have a contract at all, being caught in the web of informality, and be surveyed through a volatile machinery system governed by the metrics stipulated by the algorithm. 166 I. ROQUE ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=179 | PRINTED_PAGE=167 8 Conclusions Digitalisation blurred the labour market dualisation between standard and precarious workers (Schwander, 2018), whereas labour protection and employment regulation are not assumed by default (De Stefano, 2016). Their core claims of a regular contract and specific regulation need to be addressed. If they keep on being disregarded in the legislation discussion, companies will keep on circumventing the majority of labour laws passed in general, perpetuating situations of (bogus) self-employment and informality (Moore & Newsome, 2018). These workers need to be given visibility. All of these situations are reflected in the discrediting of unions, the lack of collective bargaining due to lack of representation in the sector, weak social dialogue, and little synergy between unions. Governments and unions need to approach these workers and recognise their labour specificities, not only drivers and couriers, ensuring that their rights to social dialogue and collective bargaining are enshrined in the European legislation. The findings of this article also aim to contribute to the emerging debate on precarious labour relations in the gig economy, and decent work regarding digital platform workers in a scenario of racial platform capitalism. References 6 VULNERABILITY AND RESISTANCE AMONG DIGITAL … 167 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32.md?start=180&limit=10)