Working in informal distributed work teams to achieve a common goal has its logic, we build a whole doing their part each, you can have autonomy for many things, but also the responsibility to carry out your work. In this type of work you need to build an environment of trust, care for relationships.
Currently, the platforms, although they allow distributed wage work, were implemented in the industrial revolution and continue to maintain the same logics that follow today: optimization between the variables profit/production/time/cost. But platforms, unlike companies and traditional organizations, are generating their own dynamics that reduce workers' power, destroying workers' relationships. This phenomenon has been known as the uberization of work.
"Without criteria other than productivity, the algorithm organizes the work and the only relationship it has with the company is email, just to receive orders, email that the superiors never answer. 'Colleagues' are only the names that compete for requests received via the App. You don't know when the day starts and when the day ends. The city is your workplace, nobody takes into account the time you need to go from one point to another..." (Laboratory)
The work moratorium has been associated with the distribution sector, but it is spreading to different areas: care, hospitality, cleaning, leisure... We are closer than we think. It can greatly influence our ways of working and the ways of understanding the world.
This week I will read the Ryders on the Storm essay written by Nuria Soto under the CC 4.0 license. It exposes the dynamics created by digital platforms to organize and optimize the work and reflects on the challenges of power to the workers who depend, or will be, on them.