Uber in the Portuguese gig economy: a laboratory for platform capitalism

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/workorgalaboglob.14.2.0046
• Pages: 46-63
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Author: Emanuele Leonardi,Giorgio Pirina
• Subject Matter: gig economy,Lisbon,platformisation,Portugal,TVDE,Uber Law,wage-earning society

46 Work organisation, labour & globalisation Volume 14, Number 2, 2020

Uber in the Portuguese gig economy:

a laboratory for platform capitalism

Emanuele Leonardi and Giorgio Pirina

Emanuele Leonardi is a Research Fellow in the Department

of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Industries at the

University of Parma, Italy, and an Associated Researcher in

the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra,

Portugal.

Giorgio Pirina is a PhD student in the Department of

Sociology and Business Law at the University of Bologna, Italy.

ABSTRACT

The paper frames the emergence of the Portuguese gig economy within the

broader process of platformisation of work in Europe as set in motion by

the neoliberal turn at a global scale. Against this background the case of

Portugal in general and that of Lisbon in particular are analysed to show both

their consistency with the general trends of the European Union’s economic

dynamics and their irreducible peculiarities. These latter particularities, and

especially the so-called ‘Uber Law’, are discussed in connection with the

hypothesis of a specically Portuguese variety of the gig economy.

KEY WORDS

gig economy, Lisbon, platformisation, Portugal, TVDE, Uber Law,

wage-earning society

Introduction

The rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s deeply affected the global economy, and in

particular the core of capitalist ‘advanced’ societies, especially through a remodulation

of productive processes and accumulation strategies which eventually brought about

the great financial crisis that erupted in 2007 but is still deeply felt in many countries

(Andreotti, Benassi & Kazepov, 2018; Crouch, 2011; Harvey, 2005). By the term

‘neoliberalism’ we mean the ‘political, economic, and social arrangements within

society that emphasise market relations, re-tasking the role of the state, and individual

responsibility’ (Springer, Birch & MacLeavy, 2016:2). The main features of such a

Work organisation, labour & globalisation Volume 14, Number 2, 2020 47

comprehensive neoliberal turn have been characterised as: the transition from a

Fordist-Taylorist organisational model to a post-Fordist phase, whereby the production

process is disarticulated, deverticalised and finally recomposed on a global scale; the

increased importance of information and knowledge in capital valorisation processes;

and technological advancements in the IT, telecommunications and digital sectors

(Leonardi & Secchi, 2016). Several terms have been coined to describe the resulting

social and economic kernel of neoliberalism that this represents, including the

‘information’ or ‘post-industrial’ society, and the ‘new’ or ‘digital’ economy. Our

preference is to use the recently formulated term ‘platform capitalism’ and, within this,

the ‘gig economy’ (Rosenblat, 2018; Scholz, 2017; Woodcock & Graham, 2020).

We believe that two key elements should be taken into careful account in order to

grasp the novelty embodied by the ongoing process of platformisation of work: the

widespread disarticulation of the wage-centred society (Chicchi, 2020) – whose main

outcome is the emergence of a new logic of exploitation – and the subsequent spread of

atypical forms of labour (Huws, 2019). We explore these elements within the European

context in the first part of this article. Against this background, we assess in detail the

Portuguese case – and especially that of the capital city, Lisbon – in the second and

third parts of this article.

Twenty years ago, Portugal could still be considered a semi-peripheral country

within the world economy. Nowadays, however, the socio-economic transition it has

undergone in the last two decades has led to a significant repositioning within the

global hierarchy. Especially in the last five to seven years, tourism has emerged as a

fundamental vector of economic development for Portugal in general, and Lisbon in

particular, illustrating a distinctive national trajectory in the transition to post-Fordism.

In this context, platform capitalism has found fertile ground to take root and rapidly

spread. Unlike some other areas in the global North, where the gig economy has settled

in a relatively gradual way starting from 2012, in Portugal its development has

overlapped strongly with already existing informal practices and it has flourished by

taking advantage of existing regulatory gaps. Two platforms in particular have

prospered: Uber and Airbnb. Whereas the latter has directly tapped into the tourism-

led growth wave, initially portraying itself as a marketplace for connecting those who

have a space to rent and those who look for it, the growth of the former has been largely

independent of tourism, although some correlations can be drawn.

The proliferation of both of these platforms has attracted the attention of political

authorities at different levels, from the municipal to the national. A wide range of

scholarly works has investigated the impact of Airbnb on the real estate market and the

urban geography of Lisbon (Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019; Gainsforth, 2019; Lestegás

etal., 2019; Mendes, 2017; Seixas & Guterres Brito, 2018). However, the case of Uber is

less explored, which is why we focus on it in this article. In particular, we look at Uber’s

role as the main player in the development of a dense ecosystem of digital urban

transport platforms using light vehicles. Even more specifically, we examine the

so-called ‘Uber Law’ (lei da Uber) and its concrete effects.

The Portuguese case is particularly important in relation to Uber’s overall urban

political and economic strategy. Indeed, Lisbon was recently chosen by Uber as its

European Centre of Technology and Excellence, for testing new services and enhancing