Driving Uber: legal subordination identified from ethnography
Uberization; Subordination; Employment relationship; Ethnography
The uberization of work has been raising debates about the limits between self-employment and that constituted by an employment relationship. As these borders are blurred, a new corporate strategy of hiding the employment relationship and precariousness of rights is revealed. The object of this research is uberization, a neologism that comes from the company Uber and has become synonymous with the work carried out through digital applications available on cell phones. While companies see this as an autonomous work that excludes the application of labor laws, there is still no consolidated position on the subject in the courts. This thesis investigates whether the provision of services by Uber drivers configures one of the requirements of the employment relationship, subordination. From a multidisciplinary perspective, which combines law, sociology and anthropology, the objective of this thesis is to reveal the elements that constitute this border between the formal and the informal. The reflections presented here result from the application of different research methods, such as the bibliographic review, the survey of judicial decisions and legal texts, in addition to an empirical approach guided by ethnography that includes the analysis of the Uber platform, social networks and fieldwork. driving as an Uber driver between December 2021 and March 2022 in the metropolitan region of Salvador/BA. The thesis demonstrates how Uber's techniques, typical of surveillance capitalism, make systematic use of subordination and allow the framing of the work performed by app drivers as an employment relationship