App-based drivers worldwide work long hours for often minimum wages while facing safety risks every day—and these issues are compounded for women platform workers, according to speakers at a Commission on the Status of Women (#CSW67) side event, Women Workers Organizing: Transforming the Gig Economy through Collective Action.
“Not just in Colombia, but worldwide, women are always the ones that are the most vulnerable and paid the worst,” said Luz Myriam Fique Cardenas, president of Unión de Trabajadores de Plataformas (UNIDAPP) in Colombia. “We suffer harassment. We don’t have security in the streets because we’re women.”
Cardenas joined three women app-based drivers from Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria and the Philippines who are mobilizing platform workers to form unions and stand up for their rights. The March 7 Solidarity Center panel, spearheaded by the organization’s Equality and Inclusion Department, was co-sponsored by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
Although most countries have hard-won labor laws in place, app-based workers are among 2 billion informal sector workers with few legal protections. Women platform workers experience sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence on the job along with the risks of injuries from traffic accidents, yet the multimillion dollar companies employing them provide no workplace injury or health coverage.
In Nigeria, where one app-based driver is killed each month, “you are your own security. Every trip you go on, you are at risk,” said Ayobami Lawal, an app-based driver, business graduate and mother of three. Earlier this year, Lawal and other drivers in Nigeria won the country’s first union covering platform-based workers, the Amalgamated Union of App-Based Transport Workers of Nigeria (AUATWN). (Nigerian platform drivers’ campaign for rights on the job is highlighted in this Solidarity Center video, part of the panel presentation.)
“Taxi drivers are seen as informal employees and we have no protections whatsoever,” says Gulmayram Batirbekova, a platform taxi driver in Kyrgyzstan. A single mother of five, she has become an active leader in Kabylan, a platform worker union she says is named after an animal “that is fiercely independent, a leader.”
“Our main effort now is to become recognized as employees so we are entitled to all the protections enshrined in the law, to make sure we make enough money for ourselves and our children.” (Kyrgyz platform drivers’ campaign for rights on the job is highlighted in this Solidarity Center video.)
On the Frontlines of a Tech-Driven Revolution
Hearing from each others’ struggles, panel participants noted the similarities of their experiences trying to support themselves while working within an exploitative employment model that updates what panel moderator Emily Paulin called the “grinding nature” of the work in the industrial revolution.
“You are on the front lines of shifting this tech-driven industrial revolution to shift the perspective that working 14,16 or even 18 hours is even remotely appropriate for us in the 21st century,” said Paulin, Solidarity Center senior organizational development and labor education specialist.
While mobilizing to form unions, platform workers also are pushing for legislation and changes to labor laws in their countries, urging lawmakers to ensure app-based workers have the same rights and protections guaranteed by international law for all workers. Some, such as in Nigeria, are filing class-action lawsuits against platform companies for wage theft and other worker abuses—all part of broad-based campaigns to achieve workplace dignity and respect.
Company Calls the Shots—but Doesn’t Call Them ‘Employees’
Throughout their discussion, panelists homed in on two areas: classification of app-based workers as “independent contractors”—meaning platform companies are not required to follow labor laws such as ensuring a minimum wage and providing basic health and safety coverage—and the lack of transparency and unpredictability of algorithm-based employment.
Whether the companies are global, such as Uber or Glovo, or regionally based, like Deliveroo and Yandex, their business models are the same: Maximize profit by moving operating costs onto workers by calling them independent contractors.
Panelists cited a long list of company requirements they must fulfill to keep their jobs—demonstrating the extent to which they are employees of platform companies and not independent contractors. For instance in the Philippines, where Mary Rose Evardone is a delivery driver for GRAB, the company “has denied we work for them, but they have full control on us. First and foremost they can control the fare. Grab can make it higher or lower anytime.
“Wearing a uniform and bag with Grab logo is compulsory—you need to do that to be identified as a Grab rider,” she said, noting that the company deducts the uniform and bag expenses each month from their paychecks.”
Evardone, a union leader and organizer with the United Delivery Riders of the Philippines (RIDERS-SENTRO) and single mother of five, says she was suspended from the app for organizing her co-workers but has been reinstated while waiting for a court decision on her firing. RIDERS-SENTRO has organized workers in four chapters across several Philippines islands.
Said Batirbekova: “They tell us what to do and we must do that but they won’t give us anything in return. For instance, if we reject a fare, we are blacklisted. When they block your account they do not give you the details, they just lock you down. For you to re-open the account and get reinstated is a real struggle.”
“The fact that we are not recognized as employees is the problem.”
An Algorithm Boss
Not only are app-based drivers directed by employers, the “employer” directing them minute-by-minute is an algorithm.
“Companies want to make everyone think, and even the government think, the algorithms are independent. We all know there is someone programming these conditions and this affects us. Why? Because they’re giving us orders constantly through the algorithm,” says Cardenas.
“It affects women because we often have to accept trips to risky areas. They don’t give us the address where we are going. After we accept the trip we realize we are going to a risky area and we have to go or otherwise we will be blocked.”
Cardenas and others described the unrelenting demands of the algorithms that “make all the decisions on our orders, the distance, but us drivers don’t have any opportunities to choose the order or to assign a value to that order. The algorithm decides on temporary or permanent blocks on drivers. These temporary blocks can last hours or days and don’t allow us to work so we can’t generate income.”
Says Lawal: “We have increase in oil prices, it doesn’t change our fare. We have increases food, it doesn’t change our fare.”
But working through their unions, panelists were optimistic they are improving work for all app-based drivers. “I am sure that this union we have now will be able to talk about this so we all can have a good working environment,” said Lawal.
“Without us, they can’t be an app company. Without drivers, the company won’t function.”
Part of the United Nations, the CSW is the main global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. This session’s focus is Innovation and Technological Change Education in the Digital Era for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.
When teachers in Kosovo went on what ultimately became a five-week strike for better pay and improved classroom resources last autumn, they did so as a last resort, says Rrahman Jasharaj, chair of the teacher’s union, SBSSHK.
“For nine months we tried to negotiate with the government. When the government decides to block the doors and dismiss dialog as a tool for a solution, then there is no other option but striking. And this is very difficult situation for all of us,” Jasharaj said on the latest episode of The Solidarity Center Podcast.
Kosovo teachers waged a five-week strike as a last resort after months of seeking talks with the government. Credit: RTE / RL
With no salary increase for years, “Kosovo teachers can hardly afford their livelihood of their families, and they cannot even manage to pass through from one month to another,” he said.
Jasharaj, who in the late 1990s taught children under heartbreaking conditions during the war, said that while the government indicates it will raise salaries in coming weeks, it has shut out teachers and their unions from salary discussions.
He told Solidarity Center Executive Director and podcast host Shawna Bader-Blau that during the war and again throughout the recent strike, teachers and their unions from around the world, including Education International and the U.S.-based AFT, offered their support and resources.
Ultimately, Jasharaj says, it is essential the government see teachers and their unions as partners in building a first-class education system for Kosovo children.
“We’re trying to establish a mutual cooperation network,” he says. Meanwhile: “My colleagues in all Kosovo schools are currently battling for education only by a chalk, sponge, whiteboard, and lacking basic tools and requisites for conducting the proper teaching process.”
Discrimination, marginalization and powerful political forces like authoritarianism do not stop at a country’s border—and that is why it is so important for black women worldwide connect through their unions and allied organizations, panelists said Thursday at a Solidarity Center-sponsored event.
“We need to strengthen this kind of international unity as a way to strengthen our fight in Brazil. Racism does not manifest only in one society,” said Rosana Fernandes, a leader at the national Central Union of Workers (CUT) in Brazil.
Fernandes spoke at the panel, Black Women’s Power: Advancing Partnership Between Unions and Global Racial Justice Movements, a conversation with union leaders and members of the Black Women’s Roundtable on advancing racial and gender justice through labor movements worldwide. Members of the Black Women’s Roundtable, part of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, were joined by the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) and the Global African Workers (GAW), along with Sarah McKenzie, Solidarity Center program coordination director.
“The Black Women’s Roundtable seeks the liberation of Black people so they can strengthen the healthy wealthy and wise opportunities for Black women here and around the world,” said Carol Joyner, director of the Labor Project and policy lead at the Black Women’s Roundtable. Members of the Black Women’s Roundtable have engaged in exchange programs with Black women workers in Brazil, Cameroon, Colombia, Ghana, Guinea and Kenya. Elsie Scott, founding director of the Ronald Walters Leadership and Public Policy Center at Howard University and Black Women’s Roundtable member, also took part. Scott is the former president of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
Panelists engaged in conversation with Solidarity Center staff from around the world, including from Albania, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Kenya, Jordan, Lesotho, Mexico, Morocco, Niigeria, Palestine, Serbia and South Africa. Solidarity Center’s Viviana Osorio Pérez, equality and inclusion director and Hanad Mohamud, program coordination and leadership associate director, moderated the panel.
‘We Have to Unite in Our Struggles’
From CBTU’s founding in 1972, members recognized they needed to connect with Black workers globally, Apollos Baker told the audience. CBTU began by coalition-building alongside unions in South Africa, where workers struggled under brutal apartheid laws.
Baker, special assistant to the New York State AFL-CIO secretary treasurer and CBTU activist, said that now, as union officials around the globe are threatened and attacked for “pressing their countries to be pro-worker, pro-Black,” CBTU and GAW work to ensure they and their families have the support they need. “We have to make sure asylum is available to people,” he said.
Agripina Hurtado, former president of the Afro Colombian Labor Council in Colombia and a GAW member, described her conversations with Black women in Colombia about how racial discrimination impacts them in workplaces, and pointed out that it is important for workers to be aware of international laws and “all the instruments of international justice.”
“We have to unite our struggles, our fights, especially women, who suffer discrimination because of their gender, their color,” she said. “We have to be agents of change to transform our society.”
Uniting Globally to End Racism
Hurtado lifted up the game-changing national election of a progressive slate of candidates in 2022 that includes Francia Márquez, a former housekeeper, union member and Colombia’s first Black vice president.
We now “have a vice president who comes from the neighborhoods, who’s Black, worker, the first African descendant woman” a milestone that shows that “women in particular can get to what we work toward.”
Fernandes also described the difficult conditions Black and Indigenous women face, including lack of access to water in marginalized communities and job discrimination even when they have university educations.
CUT has long tackled racism and discrimination, and recently produced videos in which Black men and women describe how racism impacts their lives. The videos also show alternatives, offering ways to fight racism in society. But “the anti-racist struggle must be international,” Fernandes said.
“This kind of international forum is helping us and strengthening our capacity to fight for workers.”
Global labor unions and the international human rights community are denouncing the arrest in Tunisia of a top leader in the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT).
Anis Kaabi, general secretary of the highway workers’ union, was arrested January 31 after leading a strike by toll booth workers. A coalition of 66 human rights groups and Tunisian political parties denounced the action, calling it a “desperate attempt to criminalize union work.”
Kaabi was charged with causing financial loss to a state-owned company because of the strike. A court hearing is set for February 23.
Toll booth workers walked out to urge the government to renegotiate the contract for the biggest highway link in the North African country, which is mired in economic crisis.
For months, the Tunisian government has been negotiating a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to shore up the country’s rapidly deteriorating economy, but the IMF often conditions such support by demanding curbs on state spending and austerity measures like cutting subsidies for the country’s poorest.
Workers in the 1 million-member UGTT say they should not bear the cost of the IMF’s conditions for the $1.9 billion financial aid package, and public employees repeatedly have gone on strike to demand the government address the rising cost of living and sinking wages rather than negotiate steep cuts to secure a loan.
Arrest Part of Larger Assault on Union Freedom
Union members who legally exercise their rights in Tunisia, such as the freedom to strike, have been increasingly targeted, according to data from the UGTT, which found that the percentage of cases filed against union members rose in 2022, with a quarter of them directed against women.
Already this year, the government has filed more than 60 cases against union members for exercising their internationally recognized labor rights, according to UGTT, which says the numbers indicate a stepped-up effort to diminish the union’s power and turn public opinion against it.
Workers are taking part in a series of marches across the country through March 11, after the UGTT approved the actions to protest Kaabi’s arrest and in light of the government’s increased aggression against the union and its members.
In January, UGTT, the Tunisian Human Rights League and two other organizations launched a National Salvation Initiative to offer a “rescue initiative” to the president to find solutions to the economic and political crisis in Tunisia, including the growing consolidation of the presidency and the closing space for civil society.
Following Kaabi’s arrest, UGTT Secretary General Noureddine Taboubi said President Kaid Saied is “trying to divert attention” from the election result and “the utter failure of his economic and social decisions.”
Drivers in Nigeria won the country’s first union covering platform-based workers, a victory that shows it is possible for “unions to organize workers in the gig economy,” says Ayoade Ibrahim, secretary general of the Amalgamated Union of App-Based Transport Workers of Nigeria (AUATWN).
Platform workers in Nigeria join with Labor Ministry officials to finalize recognition of their union, AUATWN. Credit: AUATWN
The Ministry of Labor’s recognition of AUATWN empowers it to have a say in determining the terms and conditions of drivers working for Uber, Bolt and other app-based transportation companies in the country, and covers drivers who deliver food and passengers or engage in other services. The union worked with the Nigeria Labor Congress throughout the campaign for recognition.
In a statement approving AUATWN as union representative of app-based workers last week, the Labor Ministry pointed out that while the freedom to form unions and collectively bargain are internationally protected rights, workers in the informal sector, such as app-based workers, often are not included.
“Today, we are breaking new ground with those in the informal sector who are employing themselves,” the Labor Ministry said. Some 80 percent of Nigerians work in informal sector, as the lack of good jobs—the official unemployment rate is 33 percent, with youth unemployment at 43 percent—leaves workers with few options beyond selling goods in the market, domestic work or taxi driving.
In Nigeria, as in countries around the world, app-based drivers often must work long hours to support themselves and pay for expenses like vehicle maintenance, insurance and car leasing. Excessive hours lead to accidents, says Ayoade.
“I work 15 to 18 hours a day. Long hours working is actually not safe for drivers,” says Ayobami Lawal, a platform driver in Lagos. “That is why you see in the news that the driver had an accident. It is because of fatigue, because there is no time to rest.” Drivers also risk being assaulted and even killed on the job, as platform companies do not screen riders. By contrast, riders have access to drivers’ name and personal phone numbers.
In April 2021, platform drivers and their associations in Nigeria went on strike, demanding that Uber and Bolt raise trip fares to make up for the increased cost of gas and vehicle parts. They also launched a class action suit in 2021 against Uber and Bolt, seeking unpaid overtime and holiday pay, pensions and union recognition. Following the protests, Uber increased fare costs on UberX rides and UberX Share in Lagos, a move that did little to improve drivers’ pay and nothing to improve conditions.
‘We Must Be United’
App-based drivers in Nigeria began seeking union recognition in 2017, after drivers’ income was slashed by 40 percent, says Ayoade, a father of three who that year was forced to drive 10-hour days to make the same income he had previously earned for fewer hours. When Uber and Bolt first launched, drivers were paid enough to work without putting in long hours. But the companies’ price wars to lure passengers and increased driver fees, including commissions up to 25 percent per rider, slashed driver pay.
As the process to register a union with the government dragged, platform worker associations made key gains in mobilizing workers through Facebook, WhatsApp and, most recently, Telegram. The campaign also includes legal action and lobbying Parliament to extend labor laws and social protections to workers in the informal sector.
Three worker associations engaged in the campaign—the National Union of Professional App-based Transport Workers (NUPA-BTW), the Professional E-hailing Drivers and Private Owners Association of Nigeria (PEDPAN) and the National Coalition of Ride-Sharing Partners (NACORP)—last year joined together to form AUATWN.
“We cannot go to war with a divided mind,” says Ayoade. We must be united before we can achieve. The fact that we are united now, we are fierce. We’re trying to involve everybody.”
App-Based Workers Making Gains Worldwide
Unions face unique challenges organizing app-based workers, but by mobilizing members through online apps, unions also have the ability to involve more workers in meetings, education and other opportunities.
“Everybody is included,” says Ayoade. “It’s a more democratic process. We have delegates for unit leadership. If the delegates can’t join for a physical meeting, they can join anywhere.”
Members’ questions can be quickly answered on social platforms and the union operation is more transparent. For instance, he says, members “will see how the money to the union is moving from the app to the account. Every member knows how the money will be used.”
Platform workers in countries worldwide are joining together to better wages, job safety and other fundamental rights guaranteed by international laws. In Kyrgyzstan, gig workers at Yandex Go formed a union and won better wages, while a new report finds that workers on digital platform companies who are pursuing their rights at work through courts and legislation are making significant gains, especially in Europe and Latin America. The Solidarity Center is part of a broad-based movement in dozens of countries to help app-based drivers and other informal sector workers come together. Members of the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network (ILAW), a Solidarity Center project, have assisted platform workers in many of these cases.
While celebrating the new union, Ayoade also is mindful of the cost some workers paid for a lack of decent work.
“Some of the people we started together with in this campaign, they lost their life along the line,” he says. The lack of insurance or social benefits mean that if drivers are attacked or robbed or even die on the job, they and their family are left all on their own. “They have children, they have parents, who received nothing,” he says.
Although he is bullied and even threatened for his work, Ayoade says such tactics only make him see his efforts are effective. “God gave me the opportunity to help people in this struggle. I am doing something that is improving people’s lives.”
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