Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
Laura Valle Gontijo
Where are you from?
University of Brasília, Brazil.
What is your current area of study?
Sociology
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2025.
The research I will present is entitled “The Political Economy of Platform Work: Drivers and Couriers in Focus”.
This article presents an original perspective that seeks to contribute to the political
economy of platform work analysis. It argues that platform work combine value extraction both in the form of surplus value and in the form of rent.
To test the hypothesis, and based on the classical perspective of the labor theory of value, a literature review of Volumes I, II, and III, as well as the unpublished Chapter VI of Marx’s ‘Capital’, was conducted. It is argued that transport adds value to goods by enabling them to be consumed, in the case of couriers. Likewise, passenger transport plays a role as part of what Marxs refers to as an autonomous branch of industry: the transport sector. Therefore, both types of work constitute productive labor. The following characteristics of this work emerged from the interviews with 20 workers and 4 restaurant owners:
- the existence of a monetary and subordinate relationship between workers and the digital platform;
- the fact that the digital platform operates as a monopoly that subordinates workers in order to valorize its capital;
- the existence of workers’resistance to the exploitation of their labor by the platforms;
- the deterioration of workers’ living conditions and health as evidence of surplus value extraction in these two types of platform work.
It is also argued that there is an ongoing process of monopolization and centralization of capital. In this process, the platforms additionally extracts parte of the restaurants’ surplus value in the form of intermediation fees (rent) and begin to subordinate them to the valorization of their capital.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If so, what was your experience? If #AoIR2025 in
Niterói is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do you expect from it?
I have not yet participated in any AoIR conferences. What led me choose this conference is the fact that it is one of the main associations of researchers working on my field of study, in addition to being held in Niterói (RJ), which makes it much easier for me to attend.
