The labor market is undergoing a profound reconfiguration. Because of that, new and old democracies are both facing huge transformations about their interest groups and social actors. In just a few years, delivery, transport and digital service applications have transformed the ways in which work is contracted, organized and remunerated across countries with changes that unfold at an accelerated pace and unevenly from one country to another. Understanding the existing regulatory frameworks and the public policies that accompany them is essential in order to assess how they bear upon platform work and upon the set of actors organized around it.
Platform work strains the existing categories concerning the actors that make up the economy. The distinction between dependent and self-employed work loses its clarity, platform work companies and algorithmic governance raise questions about corporate responsibility, and the management of social risk emerges as an open problem in the face of an incipient labor market in constant change.
In parallel, public policies aimed at the development of small and medium-sized enterprises and digital startups form part of the same fabric: the rules of the game defined for platform work also condition the possibilities of an innovation ecosystem. So, a question arise: how is this economic transformation impacting policies and polity?
This panel addresses the regulatory frameworks and public policies that structure platform work. It invites contributions that analyze the dialogue between the new companies and existing labor regulation, the management of social risk, the impact of regulatory frameworks, and the influence strategies and geopolitics that run through the definition of the rules of the game, as well as development policies for small and medium-sized enterprises and digital startups. The panel proposes a perspective attentive not only to the content of the norms, but also to their implementation and to the actors that contest them, oriented toward understanding how work is ordered in the digital economy and what particularities it acquires to political systems.
