By the end of the 20th century, we had already clarified the role of new technologies in production and its role in increasing productive flexibility for the formation of new organizational configurations (Kalleberg, 2009; Sennett, 2000; Vallas, 2015). Today, new individual transport applications are attracting social researchers to their consequences for working relationships. Uberism is experienced as a way of organizing and remunerating the workforce, making the regularity of formal employment and the guarantee of social and labor rights tend to be reduced. In this research, we aim to reflect on the uberization of labor relations, in view of Accredited Transport Technology Operators (OTTCs). We understand that uberization does not refer to a specific company, but to a logic of labor relations, we use the analysis of these applications, the empirical object of research, to construct a more general idea of the new flexible form of work of the society. Because of the new flexible logic, or as a more recent expression of flexibilization, what some authors will call uberization of labor (Abilio, 2017), the age of uberization (Fleming, 2017) or uberization of the labor force (Pochmann, 2017). Uberization is ‘a new stage of labor exploitation, which brings qualitative changes to the status of the worker, to the configuration of the companies, as well as to the forms of control, management and expropriation of labor’ (Abilio, 2017).
In Brazil, according to Lobel (2017), there are around 500,000 drivers working for Uber in 2017, showing a growth of 10 times compared to 2016 (50,000). Due to the almost unpublished nature of the theme and the consequent scarcity of scientific productions for consultation and analysis, we propose to carry out a qualitative and quantitative research with 50 app drivers around the Gru Airport, São Paulo. All day, hundreds of app drivers spend the night waiting around the airport for a good ride. As results, we verified that, in Brazil, uberization is part of a greater logic of labor relations, characterized by the flexibility of work. This seems to represent precariousness, loss of rights, just-in-time work, exploitation of overwork, partial work, unstable work - a kind of nano-entrepreneur-of-self. However, in Brazil, the struggles and the achievements of the working class were diverse, but insufficient to overcome the conditions of precariousness and despotism in the relations between capital and labor. In this context, for many app drivers, their work is not only an alternative to unemployment but an alternative to even more precarious jobs. 'Here, in my car, I hand, I choose my schedules and no boss shouts at me' (Driver24, 2017). On the other hand, the legislation in the city of São Paulo brings, through Decree 56.981/16 (SÃOPAULO, 2016) and Resolution 16/2017 (DIÁRIO OFICIAL DA CIDADE DE SÃO PAULO, 2017) new barriers to application companies and drivers by imposing new rules on the provision of services. In addition, there is a bill in the federal senate that, if approved, will impose greater restrictions on the use of transportation applications, “as the service ceases to be a ‘private activity’. The cars would be described as ‘rental’, similar to taxis, and with a requirement of ‘specific authorization’ of the municipal public power, besides red plate” (Fernandes & Lobel, 2017). Therefore, uberization in Brazil is being institutionalized more by the pressure of taxi services than by the demands of workers for better working conditions.
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