Ganhadores of the twenty-first century: app drivers, informality and racial relationships

Abstract

This essay is dedicated to exploring the condition of the ganhadores, urban workers and slaves, in nineteenth-century Bahia and their organizing practices as references to a broader phenomenon that informs us about the reality of app drivers in the twenty-first century. The article is structured in three steps: first, to identify the remarkable elements of the ganhadores’ labor and then reflect on the contours of the app work nowadays; after, to recover the control speeches consummated by the authorities of the province of Bahia when the black strike of 1857 was imminent; then, to reflect about the reactions of the Judicial Power in face of the mobilization of app workers; at last, to make a critical assessment on the potential of collective and autonomous articulation of these workers. The hypothesis that crosses the three stages is that, in Brazil, the labor legal order was historically shaped by a slavery and precarious logic, and structured based on the exclusion of the informality. The conclusion will be that precariousness as a process and a project can be stopped by the self-organization of the proletarian class. Methodologically, the essay was supported by an interdisciplinary review of the available thematic bibliography. At the same time, some exemplary judicial precedents were analyzed on the matter.