Almost six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, many international media outlets have reported stories of silver linings in Uganda. A Kampala woman who lost her logistics job during the government shutdown has founded a new all-female ride-hailing app, Diva Taxi, that has hired dozens of Ugandan women, many of whom have been laid off or furloughed. women, providing an economic lifeline to these workers. A safer travel option for riders.
This is part of a growing digital platform initiative in Uganda over the past three years, with the proliferation of new app-based food delivery services and the country’s ubiquitous “bodaboda” motorcycle taxis being confined to their homes. It was repurposed to deliver contraceptives to people in need. , hairstylists and other small business owners advertised on digital platforms and media while their stores were closed.
Leveraging technology for the benefit of workers
In some ways, these developments have been transformative. According to a study by the Center for Global Development, by 2021, 60 percent of Uganda’s youth will be participating in the platform gig economy. The centre’s co-founder declared that balancing multiple casual jobs is the future of employment for Uganda’s youth. But in other ways, it was old news for a country where the informal economy accounts for 92 percent of total employment. The informal economy long predates gig work and is defined as employment in which workers do not have access to government social and labor protections. through their work.
In many parts of the world, informal work is just what most jobs are. In 2021, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated that around 2 billion workers, more than 60% of the world’s adult workforce, participated in the informal economy. In developing countries, the proportion may be even higher. And in many countries, women make up a large proportion of the informal workforce through occupations such as domestic workers, homeworkers, street vendors, market traders, and waste collectors. As Women in Informal Employment: Globalization and Organizing (WIEGO) points out, mainstream economists tend to think of the informal economy as a small group of “brave entrepreneurs” or people engaged in illegal activities. However, in many developing countries, the informal economy is teeth real economy.
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So what does it mean for digital labor platforms to be introduced in these countries?
Even before the pandemic, Uganda had high levels of unemployment in the government-regulated formal job market, and the informal economy has been the main driver of national economic growth for decades. But COVID-19 has caused even greater unemployment, with millions of people losing their jobs. As in many parts of the world, the pandemic has forced people to turn to digital platforms to survive. This is also due to finding new ways to conduct transactions while in-person commerce is closed, and because most of the government’s emergency aid was provided through digital payment systems. Workers have no choice but to embrace the internet. Some of this story is positive, but much is not.
A year into the pandemic, Saquib Munir, an executive at food delivery app Glovo, declared that “the gig economy is the future of work” in Africa.Contributed to a Ugandan newspaper independent person, Munir said that gig work is becoming “increasingly important as a potential route to socio-economic development and job creation, given Africa’s unique position as the continent with the youngest population but the highest youth unemployment rate.” “It’s increasing,” he said. Citing ILO estimates that 830 million young people could be unemployed on the African continent by 2050, Munir suggested that gig work was the solution, adding that “informal markets will replace formal He urged us to reconsider the conventional wisdom that we must shift to the market.
But while gig platforms started booming in Global South countries like Uganda during the pandemic, workers did not enjoy the same benefits. Informal workers already lack important legal protections, social benefits and bargaining power, making them even more vulnerable to exploitation and precarious working conditions. Technology can exacerbate these problems, giving platform owners new ways to exploit workers and circumvent labor laws, and improve workers’ working conditions through policies in which workers have no say. are often managed in opaque and abusive ways. Some digital platforms use algorithms to determine wages, worker hours, and monitor worker performance, leading to unpredictable pay and work schedules, poor working conditions, and employment stability is hardly achieved. Many workers on digital labor platforms have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, and still end up in debt.
Additionally, many gig workers lack meaningful ways to address conflicts and assert their rights, as they are often locked out of traditional means of organizing for better conditions. In many countries, gig workers are effectively excluded from existing unions. This is because many unions require full-time contracts for their members, or because many members are, in effect, reluctant to ally with those who work on platforms that disrupt their industries. , similar to the impact ride-hailing apps are having on traditional taxis and public transportation. And when gig workers try to organize, platforms have often engaged in aggressive union-busting efforts, including suspending or banning workers who try to unionize.
In this situation, women suffer even more. In every country, women’s position in the labor market is already at a disadvantage compared to men. In a world where employers are at the top of the economic pyramid, women are less likely to be employed, less likely to be formal wage earners, less likely to have a stable income, and less likely to be informally self-employed. more likely to run a business. While workers who receive a regular wage can expect a weekly income and often enjoy benefits such as stable contracts and sick leave, self-employed workers absorb all the risk themselves. And that’s where the overwhelming majority of women are.
As women enter the gig economy in Uganda, they often face additional challenges that male gig and platform workers in wealthy Global North countries tend to encounter. In Uganda, many women do not have data plans that allow them to reliably access their mobile phones, tablets, laptops, or work platforms. In many smartphone-owning households, women are at the bottom of the hierarchy in terms of who has access to a smartphone, usually behind the husband who controls the device and the children who use it for school. In some families, when women try to use their mobile phones for income-generating work, it can cause conflict with husbands who do not support women’s work, or it can lead to women earning more than they do. There is a danger that this may occur. If a woman’s mobile phone has her SIM card registered in her husband’s name, there will be disagreements, huge power struggles, trust issues, regularity, as most of the payments in the platform economy are digital It may also lead to conflicts.
Women working in the digital economy also face discrimination from customers who don’t want to hire them, sexual harassment and stalking from customers, and a lack of safety measures from employers. This has led some female ride-hailing app drivers in Uganda to bring sharp objects and pepper spray to protect themselves, install video surveillance equipment in their cars, and share their location with WhatsApp groups. , and began to use informal means of protection. , allowing fellow drivers to track them and make sure they reach their destination safely.
But women are not the only ones facing additional hurdles in accessing the technology hailed as the future of jobs in Uganda. There are also fundamental barriers for other workers, such as apps and programs that assume literacy in English as the lingua franca of the internet, and for older and immigrant workers, a lack of access to technology leaves them behind. There is a risk. We also need to address online harassment and basic internet safety and security measures for the new large groups working online.
Policy, a Uganda-based feminist collective focused on women and technology, has been working to address some of these issues through training and capacity building. Last year, Pollicy also collaborated with Fairwork, an international research project that assesses how well platform companies treat their employees, to assess how the burgeoning gig economy is working in Uganda. Of the 12 platforms she evaluated in Uganda, only one, Glovo, received points for meeting minimum standards for providing fair work.
There is much work to be done to address these issues. Around the world, especially in the Global South, labor laws often lag far behind the realities of workers’ lives. Current labor policies and regulations in Uganda, like elsewhere, are based on traditional employment in the formal economic sector, which constitutes a small minority of the national workforce. (And even those are missing, since Uganda’s minimum wage law was last updated in 1984, some 40 years ago.) Government leaders need to legislate appropriately and create an environment that supports the platform. Education and training is needed to understand digital frameworks so that people can learn how to do so. We need workers to organize to balance the power of tech companies. Similarly, police forces in these countries need a deeper understanding of this area to address crimes against platform gig workers.
Platforms that seek to live up to their claims of delivering a better future for work can play a role here too, by redesigning around worker protections and access to worker benefits. Some platforms have already taken steps to do so, such as parking app His Garage, which maintains a community fund that provides social protection for gig workers. And in some places, the Global South is leading the way when it comes to envisioning a feminist future for digitally mediated work. In Argentina, the Domestic Workers Union has developed a worker-owned and operated platform for domestic work.
But ensuring these workers receive the social protections that all workers should enjoy requires a larger community-led approach to redesigning platform work. .
Building a more just future for labor and technology requires prioritizing workers’ rights, needs, and voices in the design of these platforms and how they are managed. It will require a collaborative effort from platform owners, workers, policy makers and others. When women can take ownership at every level, a feminist future of work is not only possible, but more likely. That means power of attorney over the phone and data plans used to find work, the mobile money accounts used to make payments, and the platform itself. . After all, it’s the only way women can gain influence over the system that relegated them to the bottom of the economic pyramid in the first place.
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Read more articles by Irene Mwendwa, Bonita Nyamwire and Sally Lorber.