The Digital Work Laboratories - Interviews - by Rafael Grohmann

Work mediated by platforms is present throughout society. Terms such as “platformization”, “uberization”, “data” and “algorithms” are definitive words in the grammar of contemporary capital. On the other hand, workers' struggles also gained new contours, in devices such as platform cooperativism, digital unionism and worker-owned platforms. In this work, social scientist Rafael Grohmann provides an overview of studies on work and technology through 38 interviews with the main researchers in the field in Brazil and around the world, such as Virginia Eubanks, Jamie Woodcock, Ursula Huws, Ludmila Costhek Abílio and Ricardo Antunes . One of the many lessons from this book is that the current platform work landscape is not as inevitable as it seems; it is, on the contrary, a laboratory. If, on the one hand, capitalism is experimenting with new mechanisms of subjugation of the working class, on the other it is possible to formulate alternatives, build prefigurative projects and fight for the non-precariousness of work managed by algorithms and carried out by thousands of workers around the world.