Suzana Quinet de Andrade Bastos (p), Fabio Gama, Matheus Mauricio Patrocinio

Daniela Antonescu

The uberization of the labor market is associated with a new labor dynamic, being made possible by the advancement and popularization of remote technologies. The so-called "gig economy" is marked by a flexible labor market, without barriers to entry or exit of workers, with a large amount of people on hand, also called crowd work. In some cases, the service provision depends on a work on demand relationship, in which the service is provided only when it is requested through the platform, and may incur in an extended workday, since there is no remuneration for idle time while waiting for new calls.
In Brazil the market for app drivers has been growing in recent years. Part of this increase may have originated with the economic slowdown that began at the end of 2014. In addition, in 2017, law 13.467/17 came into effect, referring to the labor reform that instituted intermittent work and exclusive autonomous work, which allowed greater flexibility of labor contracts, as well as weakened the ability of workers to negotiate given the dispersion of union influence.
Aiming to broaden the discussion about the market of app drivers and uberized jobs, this paper proposes to evaluate factors related to: i) worker characteristics - non-white race and male population; ii) worker's activity sector - transportation and food; and iii) legal - labor reform; that determine the uberization of the labor market in Brazilian states. For this purpose, a panel data model is used. The period of analysis is the years 2012 to 2018.
With regard to the results, we highlight: i) non-white people are those who most resort to self-employment. This is due to the fact that the sectors where unemployment is increasing the most are sectors with the worst salaries and are mostly employers of black people; ii) the positive sign of the labor reform dummy suggests that law 13.467/17 moves towards the dismantling of labor rights, historically conquered; iii) a positive relationship between the number of informal workers and the labor market in the transport and food sectors. One of the characteristics of the uberization of work in Brazil is that faced with the loss of formal jobs, the population has been turning to informal activities that are related to the transport and food sectors, for example, motorcycle taxi drivers, food delivery drivers, snack vendors, app drivers, among others.