The seminar discusses the exponential growth of online intermediation economy for services and goods of various kinds, whose common element is the use of digital platforms, especially during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. This phenomenon has come to be called Platform Economy, which has produced significant changes not only in labour, but also in the subjectivities of workers and citizens.

According to Grohmann (2021, p.13), platform work is a “laboratory of class struggle”, meaning both increased exploitation by capital, through the control and management of labour, and the possibility of workers building alternatives, when engaged in processes of self-managed association. Platform work comes to be understood as an ecosystem involving human and non-human actors: companies, shareholders, investors, workers, users and consumers, the State, algorithms, tracking programmes and large databases (Srnicek, 2017, p. 43).

Theoretically, the phenomenon of the platformisation of work, presided over by large transnational companies, is approached as a new coloniality, which is not done by geographical conquest, but by capturing the subjectivities of the workers involved and by massively collecting data from citizens through the interactions generated on the platforms’ interface. From 2023 to 2024, the main denomination among activists and researchers in Brazil changed from “platform co-operativism” to “digital solidarity economy”. The seminar proposes to discuss what this change involves in terms of empirical reality and the construction of a social field around the new reality.

Bio note

Marilia Verissimo Veronese is a professor and researcher in the Graduate Programme in Social Sciences at Unisinos. She also coordinates the institution’s Research Group on Solidarity and Co-operative Economy. As an undergraduate, she lectures on Health in Latin America on the medical course and all health courses.

She graduated in Psychology from PUCRS. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Psychology and a PhD in Social Psychology, also from PUCRS. She also has a post-doctorate in Sociology from CES Coimbra.

In her academic career, Marilia has 22 years’ experience in undergraduate teaching in lato sensu and 15 years in stricto sensu. She is an associate researcher of CES Coimbra, where she did a sandwich internship and post-doctorate. She also participates in international research networks on social and solidarity economy (RILESS, a Latin American network, and EMES, a European network). Researches in the area of the intersection between health and the social sciences.

Activity within the framework of ECOSOL - CES, study group on Solidarity Economy.
 

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