UC Irvine

People around the world increasingly make or supplement their livelihoods through digitally mediated work arrangements, epitomized in rideshare companies like Uber in the US and food delivery companies like Rappi in Latin America. Such work arrangements have been widely criticized for their exploitative practices by activists, academics, and journalists. Even so, many vulnerable populations, such as undocumented migrant workers, have no other options for work and have continued to survive as gig workers. Workers have begun to organize to resist the conditions of their work on gig platforms. This dissertation responds to the question, What does it take to make a global labor movement of digital platform workers? To answer this, I argue scholars should attend ethnographically to the daily activities of gig worker activists in context and propose a notion of errand as method. My dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Ecuador, the US, online, and other networked locations in Latin America. Through my accompaniment with the Ecuadorian gig worker union Frente de Trabajadores de Plataformas Digitales del Ecuador (FRENAPP), I find that for gig workers to unite, they must overcome the temporariness that shapes their experience of temporality and mobility. For gig workers to unite under the model of unionization, activists must take on the work of giving such a concept traction against the diverse interpretations that gig workers have of their conditions and what should be done about them, fighting an uphill battle in a context of anti-socialism and lack of accountability from the state. Finally, gig workers around the world unite to claim the global scale for their movement while still leaving room for diversity among the different organizations in coalition. This work allows for an understanding of labor organizing in the gigged workplace against backdrops of differential temporalities and mobilities, the work of making transnational connections and ideas meaningful, and the possibilities of scale making projects other than those advanced by global capital.