Uberized but organized: a study case on "Treta" and "Breque dos Apps"
We present here the partial results of a Master's research in the field of Sociology of Work, particularly in the study of the organizations of uberized workers; The research is under the umbrella of the Research Line “Work, Migrations and Social Policies” of the Graduate Program in Human and Social Sciences (PCHS) of the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), as well as linked to the Research Group “Politics, Public Policies and Collective Action (3PAC/CNPQ)” also from UFABC. For this text, the uberization of work, a typical phenomenon of the 21st century, is understood as another step in the process of productive restructuring that dissolved mediations and agreements between capital and work that lasted for most of the 20th century. These mediations became known, on the production side, as Fordism and, in the field of national states, as the Welfare State models. In this sense, the uberization of work means a process of labor relations on the fringes of the protective padding of the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT) and, even more, on the fringes of the condition of salaried workers, because this condition is denied by the lexicon. conveyed by companies that are based on neoliberal values such as partnerships and self-companies. These subjective elements are also combined with a brutal deepening of the control of these workers based on information and communication technologies (ICT's). However, despite this scenario of individualization of work and millimetric control, the uberized manage to organize themselves collectively for a counter-offensive of work in different parts of the world and in Brazil. Therefore, the primary objective of this work is to understand the collective organization of one of the main categories of uberized work, the courier, in the light of two concepts: that of social movement unionism and that of historical experience. For this, the analysis focused on the Treta collective, one of the main groups with couriers in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. From a methodological point of view, a qualitative approach was used with four semi-structured interviews with “front line” couriers and direct observation of the preparation meetings and the national strike organized by Treta on September 11, 2021. In this way, this dissertation intends to take a step towards understanding the phenomenon of uberization of work from the perspective of alternatives created by the workers themselves. As a result, it pointed to a process, albeit contradictory, of building a collective class identity, based on the workers' experiences in their own work and in the mobilization processes, and linked to more horizontal forms of organization, with economic guidelines and focused on capital/labor conflict tactics.