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ID:
191842
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the impact of the pandemic on ride-hailing drivers and their mitigation strategies during lockdown in Africa. Ride-hailing has emerged as one of the latest paid-work opportunities for the continent's many unemployed. Yet, ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Bolt misclassify drivers to avoid regulation and responsibilities towards workers’ welfare. Drawing on 34 in-depth interviews with ride-hailing drivers, driver representatives and trade unions in South Africa and Kenya, this article makes two arguments. First, the gig economy in Africa provides work opportunities for the unemployed on the continent and simultaneously vitiates the working conditions through the commodification and informalisation of work. Second, the state-directed emergency measures act as a veneer to capital's efforts to commodify labour and the gig economy platforms have emerged as primary tools for it. Our account points to an urgent need for better regulatory systems to hold platform companies accountable and a collective bargaining mechanism in the gig economy.
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| 2 |
ID:
155421
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| Summary/Abstract |
The ride-hailing company Uber has achieved extremely rapid global expansion by means of outmanoeuvring governments, regulators and competitors. The rise of the company has been based on a deliberate strategy of acting as a market disruptive innovator through a user friendly technology and making use of the ‘sharing economy’. These attributes are not unique, but are distinctively augmented by a relentless expansionary ambition and an ability to maintain the capacity to innovate. Uber has generated great political controversy, but the challenge for governments and regulators is to embrace the benefits of the disruptive innovator, while adopting an approach that takes into account the full range of impacts. For Uber, the challenge is to maintain its expansionary style as a disruptive innovator, while also redefining on its terms the political and public debate. The case study of London provides important insights into the dynamics of these processes.
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| 3 |
ID:
174224
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| Summary/Abstract |
Using the neo-Foucauldian literature on neoliberal governmentality as conceptual lens, this paper critically examines Uber’s influence on the governance of urban transport. It argues that ‘uberization’ represents a form of neoliberal governmentality in which Uber replaces the state as the arbiter and protector of citizenship. It distils the underlying logics of uberization through four discursive moments of subjectification and subjectivation in Ghana’s transport sector. Mainly conceptual but interlaced with empirical moments, the paper makes a vital contribution to the literature on how new forms of neoliberalization manifest through varied techno-material instruments in global south cities.
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