11.04.2026 –, Seminarraum 7 Sprache: English
Brazil has 1.5 million Uber drivers. But most of them tend to support far-right politics and oppose any kind of platform work regulation in the country. This talk shows how Brazil’s institutional left has failed to engage in dialogue with these workers, and why it matters to contest the communication and desires of Uber drivers, going beyond simply labeling them as precarious workers.
Brazil has become a global laboratory of platform work, with more than 1.5 million Uber drivers and delivery workers. However, rather than supporting unions and other worker organisations, many drivers embrace the far right and fiercely oppose labour regulation. This talk examines why the Brazilian institutional left’s “precarious work” narrative has fallen flat, while the right’s “entrepreneurship” discourse thrives on social media.
Drawing on my experience in worker organizing and advising politicians in Brazil, I argue that the left needs to compete more directly for platform workers’ communication and desires. While the left often offers cold sociological labels, sometimes implying that “workers don’t know what they want”, the far right offers a politics of enchantment: memes and aesthetics of authenticity that frame the driver’s everyday struggles as individual heroism.
The session proposes strategies to re-enchant worker-led politics by shifting the focus from what workers supposedly lack to what they aspire to become. How can we hack the logic of digital culture to organize Uber drivers? Confronting Big Tech also means hacking the infrastructures of desire that connect drivers across the world to everyday politics. We need to contest not only the code, but also the tech and labour imaginaries shaping these workers’ lives.
Organiser in Brazil’s Movement of Workers Without Rights and in Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST). Political and social media advisor to left-wing politicians, especially around struggles to shorten the working week and the future of labour.