Moderator: Eber Quiñónez (ESAC)


Overview

Platformism, as a new stage in the capitalist mode of production, is a strategy for increasing the extraction of surplus value that tends to become a key element in changing the organisation of labour in contemporary companies. With the narrative that it brings producers and consumers closer together, under the banner of the sharing economy, it transfers a large part of the companies’ responsibilities, the fruit of decades of working-class conquests, to the workers. The purchase and maintenance of the means of production become the responsibility of workers, as do social security and occupational safety issues. The discourse of individual entrepreneurship enters the working class, which sometimes defends the model, which increasingly subjects it to an unequal relationship without rights.

At the same time, worker collectives are also starting to organise themselves with digital platforms as a central tool in their sales strategy. Are these collectives governed by the principles of solidarity economy? Do the experiences within the framework of traditional cooperativism have the potential to reduce the precarious conditions to which platformism has subjected workers? In a still incipient approach, I intend to present this field of study, the different types of cooperatives that are becoming part of the field known as platform cooperativism and the theoretical-conceptual debates that emerge from analysing these initiatives.
 

Bio note 

Flávio Chedid has a degree in Production Engineering from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (2004), a master’s degree in Production Engineering from COPPE - Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2007), a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the Institute of Urban Research and Planning at UFRJ (IPPUR/UFRJ), a post-doctorate from IPPUR/UFRJ with funding from CAPES and the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. He has been a researcher at the Technical Solidarity Centre - SOLTEC/UFRJ - since 2004, where he has worked on research and outreach projects linked to the following themes: sustainability of the fishing production chain, advice to self-managed enterprises, public policies aimed at fishing associations, local development, companies recovered by workers and platform cooperatives. Since 2004, he has been a member of the organising committee of the National Meeting on Engineering and Social Development. Today he is an administrative technician at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Development (NIDES) at the UFRJ Technology Centre, acting as deputy director of this unit, and a lecturer on the Postgraduate Programme in Technology for Social Development (PPGTDS). He is the author of the book “Autogestão em Empresas Recuperadas por Trabalhadores” [Self-management in Companies Recovered by Workers], among others.