Making a global gig workers’ movement meaningful locally: Friction in activists’ everyday strategies

Abstract

Research by critical technology researchers shows platform-mediated (“gig”) work has increased the precarity of workers worldwide and sparked resistance to unjust working conditions. I build on the growing scholarship about the transnationalization of gig work, which has taken structural and organizational approaches. I argue that to understand gig workers’ transnational activism, we must ethnographically attend to “friction,” or the work it takes to make global concepts meaningful locally. Drawing from 20 months of ethnographic research with an Ecuadorian gig workers’ union, I take an actor-focused approach to highlight activists’ work making a particular kind of global movement gain traction: resituating words with contentious histories, reframing issues to resonate with global causes, and contesting the moral meanings of practices. My analysis shows that although global connections are facilitated by the transnational reach of platform companies, activists must work to make a particular kind of global movement “stick” in their local contexts.

Introduction

Transnational corporations such as Uber have created precarious work arrangements mediated by platforms. Workers have resisted unjust conditions, both individually and collectively (e.g. Chen and Sun, 2020; Lei, 2021). This article builds on prior studies of resistance in platform-mediated “gig” work and attends to how the global scale is claimed by gig worker activists, through their transnational activist strategies. The term “gig” work is contested for its implication that informalization and informality are primarily linked to digital platforms. This is especially untrue in the Global South, where informality is often the norm. However, the term is used here since it is the English-language term that activists studied here are using. The gig worker activists discussed in this article are primarily app-based food delivery workers, but also include rideshare drivers and online “cloud” workers.

Woodcock (2021) argues that the common work experiences, labor conditions, and labor process across similar (or the same) platform companies operating in different locations has led to increased international connections among gig workers. Rather than seeing themselves as independent businesses who gain clients through the platform, as companies such as Uber would claim, gig workers have a common identity and frame of reference that comes from Uber’s rhetoric in recruiting workers. While common identities set up by platform companies’ recruitment and experiences in the labor process on platforms certainly lay a foundation for international connections, I draw on the theories of STS scholar Anna Tsing (2005) to complicate this claim. I argue that friction, or the contingent work that it takes to make global concepts and movements meaningful locally, must be attended to ethnographically so scholars can understand how different kinds of global alliances are formed and gain traction. My approach thus builds on and furthers existing studies that highlight the structural and organizational aspects of the transnationalization of gig work (Borghi and Murgia, 2024; Woodcock, 2021).

This article adds to research on gig worker organizing and studies of transantionalization in gig work by taking an actor-focused approach to understanding, ethnographically, how global concepts are made meaningful locally. I argue that we should attend to friction in the ways activists worked to make a particular pro-union kind of global movement gain traction: resituating words with contentious histories, dynamically reframing gig worker issues to resonate with global causes, and contesting the meanings of practices with ambiguous moral reputations. These each brought the global scale into being while facilitating activists’ fight for better working conditions and protected labor rights. Attending to the work of making gig workers’ movements global is crucial because multinational corporations and consolidated capital dictate the terms of (and disproportionately profit from) the gig economy. This article will proceed by reviewing scholarship on resistance in platform work and transnational labor activism. I add the theorization of friction from STS as an important and underexplored lens through which to understand transnational organizing among gig workers. I will then elaborate on the background of my field site, which focuses on the union FRENAPP in Ecuador. FRENAPP is part of a global network of union and pro-union organizations, mobilizing for the rights of gig workers. Based on my fieldwork, the next sections will detail three ways, beyond membership in a global network, that activists work to make global concepts meaningful locally in their everyday organizing. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of renewed possibilities for global organizing among gig workers, their attendant risks and rewards, and their potential for an alternative to corporate globalization.

Resistance in platform work

Critical technology scholars have theorized about the emerging resistance to conditions of platform-mediated work. Gruszka and Böhm (2022) propose a framework of perceptible, institutional, and individual (in)visibility to draw together concerns about how platform employment exacerbates vulnerability. In response to these conditions, studies have analyzed gig workers’ individual strategies for resisting algorithmic control on the job. Across lenses of temporality (Chen and Sun, 2020), calculative rationalities (Shapiro, 2018), and visibility (Mosseri, 2022), scholars have shown that oppressive conditions are not totalizing and that gig workers find ways to individually resist and exercise agency in their work. Workers fight “platform scams,” or the dishonest and uncertain logics behind the business models of platform companies, by attempting to manipulate the algorithm and by breaking rules to access work when they are unjustly blocked (Grohmann et al., 2022).

Beyond individual resistance tactics, researchers have begun to study collective action by gig workers, focusing on how social media and factors within the workplace enable collective action. These studies have found that sociality in virtual spaces allows for airing collective complaints and grievances in otherwise isolating work (Bulut and Yeşilyurt, 2023; Glaser, 2020; Grohmann et al., 2023; Zhou and Pun, 2022). Scholars have proposed frameworks to understand what might facilitate or inhibit platform workers’ organizing. The concept of “platform architecture” differentiates “technological, legal, and organizational aspects of control and management in the labor process and the variable relationships between them” (Lei, 2021: 279). Through this framework, Lei explains the difference in overt resistance via protest among different modalities of Chinese delivery workers. In a cross-national comparative study, Muñoz and Martinez (2022) discuss the common labor processes that lead to similar patterns in delivery worker organizing in Chile and Peru. Tassinari and Maccarrone (2020) use a labor process framework to investigate contradictions in the work arrangement of delivery workers in Italy and the United Kingdom. While analysis of labor conditions is crucial for understanding organizing in the workplace, I follow scholars also attending to factors outside of labor processes. Jiang and Korczynski (2024), in their study of labor unions’ alliances with migrant-oriented community organizations, argue that an intersectional framing of identity can support mobilization more than an essentialized, competing identity. Wolanski (2019) proposes that meaning-making and collaboration across stakeholders and allies outside of the immediate workplace such as medical professionals can also produce a cause for mobilization.

Scholars have begun to turn to the connections formed transnationally in the fight to improve conditions in gig work. Ford (2024) describes forms of labor collectivity in the gig economy as being mostly very local. She argues that since several key platforms serve as a “global pseudo-employer” for many nonstandard workers, the gig economy is an important area for union and nonunion actors to deploy the strategies of transnational labor activism. This article takes up her call in investigating transnational labor activism in gig work.

Some studies have begun to analyze the transnational aspect of resistance in gig work. Woodcock (2021: 3) proposes the framework of “digital workerism” to understand how three dynamics are “driving struggles in the platform economy: 1) the increasing connections between platform workers [. . .] 2) the lack of communication and negotiation from platforms [. . .] and 3) the internationalization of platforms, which has laid the basis for new transnational solidarity.” Woodcock analyzes these three dynamics across various in-person and online cases of platform work from the perspective of workers’ experiences. He argues that since workers are recruited through common rhetoric and work for the same or similar platform companies across locations, their work experience facilitates international connections. Borghi and Murgia (2024) take trans-organizational and transnational alliances as the focus of their case study of gig worker organizing in Italy and the United Kingdom. They propose a typology of values-driven alliances and purpose-driven alliances, where the first describes alliances that are loosely based on long-term goals, and the latter describes alliances that focus on specific struggles. Their analysis reveals that although alignment in values can help bridge some of the common divides between union and nonunion (or less traditional union) actors in alliances, purpose-driven alliances are more effective in mobilizing collective action. These studies of gig worker resistance across borders begin to converse with the literature on transnational labor activism, which will be reviewed next.

Transnational labor activism

Ford (2024) defines transnational labor activism as

a form of labor activism in which various actors—both union and nonunion—collaborate across borders or promote or oppose change within the international system or in other countries with the aim of improving working people’s capacity to pursue their rights and interests. (p. 191)

Ford proposes a framework that includes actors from the Global North and Global South across unions and worker groups, national and subnational labor networks, and nonprofits and other non-union organizations. These actors combine in different ways to form transnational labor networks, which then target states, multinational corporations, international governance bodies, and cultural issues that surpass workplace or employment relations.

The concept of transnational advocacy networks is often deployed by scholars of transnational labor activism, from early conceptualizations of counter-hegemonic globalization (Evans, 2000) to more recent field-building efforts in the “New Global Labor Studies” (Brookes and McCallum, 2017). Responding to theorizations that interpreted the growing role of transnational actors and institutions as the diffusion of Western culture (e.g. Boli and Thomas, 1997), Keck and Sikkink offer the concept of a transnational advocacy network to highlight mutual transformation and horizontal, voluntary participation in a globalized civil society. They use the term to refer to “those actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services” (Keck and Sikkink, 1999: 65). “International and domestic NGOs, research and advocacy organizations; local social movements; foundations; the media; churches, trade unions, consumer organizations, intellectuals,” and different scales of government are potential actors in a transnational advocacy network (Keck and Sikkink, 1999: 67). Keck and Sikkink highlight the “boomerang” pattern that characterizes the emergence of transnational advocacy networks: when local Global South actors cannot directly agitate for change with the state, they can participate in transnational advocacy networks. By participating in the networks, local actors can bypass local governments and draw on the support of international allies to pressure the state from outside positions. For example, a local organization can ally with a United Nations agency or large international NGO, which can then use international conventions, trade agreements, or transnational consumer boycotts to persuade local governments to change their policy and behavior.

Scholars of transnational labor activism have elaborated additional patterns in how networks form transnationally to address labor rights. Ford (2024) highlights the ways global union federations target corporations and other private actors, adding “corporate campaigns” and “thematic campaigns” to the “boomerang” model. In these cases, alliances including transnational unions and local organizations across borders collaborate to target corporate actors based on specific labor issues or even broader objectives such as the treatment of labor migrants.

These studies provide important insight at an organizational level, typifying different alliances of organizations that have had various degrees of success in collaborating on labor issues. I build on these by drawing on ethnographic approaches to understand how a global-scale gig workers movement is not only made based on different kinds of alliances with different kinds of organizations, but through the work of activists to make certain global concepts meaningful locally. By applying the lens of friction, this study is complementary to studies of labor conditions that facilitate international connections due to common work experiences and exposure to common recruiting rhetoric.

Friction

This article takes an ethnographic approach to studying the global nature of gig workers’ movements. Rather than taking the concept of the “global” for granted, Anna Tsing (2005) proposes that it “introduces a way of thinking about the history of social projects,” which “grow from spatially far-flung collaborations and inter-connections” (Tsing, 2005: ix). She argues that attention to friction—the “awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference”—“opens the possibility of an ethnographic account of global interconnection” (Tsing, 2005: 4, 6). Ethnographers can study global connections in practice by attending to the work necessary for a universal to make a local difference.

Tsing uses the concept of “activist packages” to theorize how universals travel in cases of transnational movements: “when an activist package is brought to a new location, it must enter new fields of meaning and social action to make a difference in its new home” (Tsing, 2005: 228). Such packages do not travel on their own but require the help of institutions in addition to the activists who use them: “Activist packages travel when they are unmoored from the contexts of culture and politics from which they emerged and reattached as allegories within the culture and politics of those with the institutional strength to spread the word” (Tsing, 2005: 234). Tsing describes the frictive work required for stories of rainforest protection in Brazil to gain traction in the context of Indonesia and why the masculinist culture of trade unionism had to be excised in the retelling of the narrative. Millar (2013) develops the concept of “compound friction” to highlight the way that traveling activist packages compete with one another. He analyzes how international agencies promote different global models of justice and peace in the same context. The concept of activist packages helps to trace the travels and transformations of universals as they are made useful in activist contexts around the world.

Levitt and Merry develop a complementary concept of “vernacularization” to describe the “process of appropriation and local adoption” of the universal concept of human rights (Levitt and Merry, 2009: 446). In this process, human rights “take on some of the ideological and social attributes of the place, but also retain some of their original formulation” (Levitt and Merry, 2009: 446). Their framing draws additional analytical attention to the role of “vernacularizers” who “take the ideas and practices of one group and present them in terms that another group will accept” (Levitt and Merry, 2009: 446). These scholars attend to the social position of vernacularizers, centering the role of those who must translate universals into different activist contexts.

Ethnographies of social movements have illustrated that political opportunity structure can constrain the travel and uptake of universals (McAdam and Tarrow, 2018). Nagle (2020) shows that certain universal activist packages cannot gain traction despite the efforts of activists because of closed political opportunities, as in the case of post-conflict Lebanon. In response to changing political opportunities, activists may draw on varying activist packages and engage different universals over time to “frame” their causes (Borgias and Braun, 2017). The concept of framing is used by social movement scholars to analyze how movements communicate their causes to different audiences (Benford and Snow, 2000). Activists work to achieve frame alignment among individuals’ beliefs and frame resonance to improve public interest in their cause (Snow et al., 1986). Borgias and Braun (2017) document how the engaged universal of environmentalism facilitated alliance with international environmental organizations, which provided resources and media support for an anti-dam campaign in Patagonia. However, the political opportunities that arose in Chile led to a strategic reframing of the cause from one of environmentalism to one demanding democracy and government transparency. These studies demonstrate that activists working to make universals travel must negotiate the limitations and opportunities of their local political structures.

This study draws on the above rich body of research that has taken up friction to analyze how universals travel and are taken up, rejected, and hybridized in uneven ways. Studies highlighting friction in different contexts have shown that ideas that claim universality among hegemonic international organizations are put into frictive contention as actors in different positions of power contest and adapt them to their own ends. The universals take work to be made useful, yet this work may often be worthwhile as activists are connected to resources that would otherwise not be available. Universals taken up and deployed by gig worker activists are no exception, and the concept of friction is crucial for ethnographic understandings of how transnational organizing occurs among gig workers.

FRENAPP: a gig workers’ union

The following sections will detail how gig worker activists made global concepts meaningful in their daily organizing activities. This article focuses on the gig workers’ union Frente de los Trabajadores de los Plataformas Digitales del Ecuador (FRENAPP or “Front of the Digital Platform Workers of Ecuador”). FRENAPP grew out of Glovers Ecuador, a grassroots group of gig workers who provided mutual aid during the pandemic and organized strikes and protests without institutional support. The organizations’ members are primarily gig workers who do app-based delivery, although some members and allies are rideshare drivers and online workers. Many members of FRENAPP are part of the Venezuelan diaspora, who came from different backgrounds before the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and rise in violence led them to flee. Prior professions included working as lawyers, business administrators, airplane pilots, and engineers. Some Venezuelan gig workers I met were school-aged when they left Venezuela. Members of FRENAPP also included Ecuadorian nationals from different backgrounds and education levels. Glovers Ecuador was spurred by the collective rage felt during the pandemic as delivery workers were hailed as heroes and left to die of COVID and traffic accidents, lacking support from the companies or the government. Later, the Glovers Ecuador movement became dormant as the leaders were effectively retaliated against for their protesting.

I met Carolina Hevia, a leader of the union and its Secretary of Legal Defense, on Zoom for the first time in August 2022. She was a member of the Venezuelan diaspora who had worked in business administration before she fled the country. She first worked as a delivery worker and organized protests in Colombia. Carolina worked with the Solidarity Center in Colombia to spearhead the formation of the gig worker union UNIDAPP before her success in organizing made her the target of union persecution by delivery companies. She moved to Ecuador and connected with the Glovers Ecuador movement to help found FRENAPP as a union, again with support from the Solidarity Center, a transnational NGO affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Although FRENAPP’s registration with the Ministry of Labor of Ecuador was rejected, they have continued to fight this decision with appeals to the International Labor Organization (ILO) and lawsuits in the Constitutional Court of Ecuador. FRENAPP is part of a global network of union and regulation-oriented organizations which has members from around the world, and which hosted the First International Gig Workers’ Congress in 2023. At the time of writing, member organizations come from the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Over the course of Glovers Ecuador and FRENAPP’s history, some of the original organizers have migrated to other countries or have found a different job and discontinued their activities with the organization. After facing retaliation for their activism, some members have continued to participate in FRENAPP while working other jobs for subsistence. Some new members joined after FRENAPP was no longer organizing large visible protests and have not experienced retaliation. In addition to retaliation, a few delivery worker members have suffered traffic accidents that prevent them from continuing to work. They continue to support the organization virtually.

I conducted 20 months of ethnographic research from 2022 to 2024, including 5 months in Ecuador, where I worked closely with Carolina and other members of the FRENAPP organization, and 15 months of virtual ethnography where I continued to stay in touch with organizers, participate in WhatsApp groups, and host zoom meetings. A typical day of in-person field work might start with going to Carolina’s home office, out of which she conducted daily activities to keep FRENAPP existing. I observed and supported tasks like applying for grants from foundations, compiling reports for funders, managing social media posts, and hosting Zoom meetings for workers. Outside of the office, I accompanied members of FRENAPP while running various errands at the bank, police station, and migration office, and participated in activities such as protests, meetings, and hearings for allied causes. In addition to participant observation, I analyzed the documents produced by FRENAPP, followed international news about gig work regulation, and reviewed policy documents related to gig work. This deep involvement in the day-to-day work of organizing allowed me to both contribute to the cause as well as to gain a thorough and embodied understanding of the material and discursive everyday of organizing.

Carolina has chosen to be named in this research. She is only too aware of the risks and backlash of being a known union organizer, since she was forced to flee Colombia after being followed and threatened by those who were against her activism. Given that she is already a public figure in this space, she is named in this research to give credit to the tireless work she has put into the cause of gig workers’ rights. Other members of the organization remain anonymous to protect them from retaliation. This study received IRB approval from the author’s home institution. Quotes have been translated from Spanish by the author. The following sections will analyze three strategies through which FRENAPP’s activists made a union-oriented global gig worker’s cause meaningful in their context.

Friction in FRENAPP’s organizing

Resituating the sindicato

FRENAPP’s activists made a conscious decision to follow a strategy of organizing under the concept of the sindicato (labor union). Although it was difficult to make the concept of labor unions stick, activists chose this path for a combination of material, strategic, and ideological reasons. Importantly, organizing this way promised access to financial and legal resources from transnational union organizations. While the term sindicato exists across Latin America, regional history has given the term different connotations. Members of the Venezuelan diaspora held particularly negative connotations of the term. For gig worker organizing to proceed under the concept of unionization required significant re-contextualization.

At an iteration of an Escuela Sindical (union school) held on a rainy day in a dimly lit hotel room in Quito, Carolina was presenting a slide that detailed the Greek etymology of the term sindicato, displaying Greek letters and linking the term to justice. The gathered gig workers had a variety of responses. One attendee was an Ecuadorian sociologist working full time as a rideshare driver. He was enthusiastic about the term and suggested that the group study strategies from anarcho-syndicalism. A delivery worker raised his hand to say that unions were the best way to act collectively. He talked about the ongoing court case he had against his unfair dismissal by the delivery company Pedidos Ya. He stated his gratitude to the leaders of FRENAPP who had supported him in the legal process and reiterated that he believed union organizing could lead to justice for his case and for others like him. Next, a rideshare driver who was not already affiliated to FRENAPP asked about union fees. He was concerned that unions easily became scams for union leaders to enrich themselves from the already miserable wages of the platform workers. Carolina replied that FRENAPP was not currently collecting union dues, to avoid precisely this reputation. She explained the reasons that unions do collect dues and indicated that it was a possibility for the future of the union if the members all agreed that the benefits were worthwhile. A longtime member of FRENAPP then recounted that whenever he talked to other delivery workers, saying the word sindicato often meant that the person stopped listening and became defensive. He lamented that almost no one responded well to the term, even when they were fed up with the abuses of the platform company.

The slides detailing the Greek etymology of sindicato were shown repeatedly at other FRENAPP events and training sessions. At another, online meeting held by FRENAPP to publicize their stance about the ongoing efforts to legislate regulation for platform companies in Ecuador, the slide was shared again. However, this time the response was different. Several attendees who were not already affiliated with FRENAPP responded with hostility to the term. They accused the Venezuelan hosts of the meeting of being Chavistas, or supporters of the regime of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. The hostile attendees claimed that the Venezuelan leaders of FRENAPP had come to bring “socialism” and would cause expropriation of companies, leading to the same kind of hyperinflation and social instability that Venezuela was suffering. These sorts of accusations also occurred in WhatsApp chats and in the comments of Facebook and Instagram posts made by FRENAPP. While FRENAPP’s organizers vehemently denied being Chavistas, pointing out the evidence that they had left Venezuela as proof, these arguments often reached a strongly emotional register and ended without any common ground being found. In these cases, xenophobia and concerns about the socialist connotations of unionism combined to block the possibility of sindicato becoming a means through which gig workers could come together in collective action.

The repeated appearance of the slide with its Greek letters is an example of the frictive work of preemptively resituating the term sindicato such that it was more authentically and originally connoted with justice. My observations show that while sometimes it was possible to successfully resituate the term with these strategies, other times a mix of past political experiences and prejudice meant that activists were not able to convince gig workers to organize under this concept.

On another occasion, we were on a Zoom call with Venezuelan delivery workers living in Peru who wanted advice about organizing themselves. Carolina’s voice crackled through my headphones: “I know that as Venezuelans, when you hear the word sindicato, you will think of socialism and crime.” Sharing her screen, Carolina paused to type in a word document with bold letters: “Mitos sobre los sindicatos cuando hay intención por parte de los trabajadores de plataformas digitales de sindicalizarse” (Myths about unions when there is an intention on the part of digital platform workers to unionize). She rattled off the names of sindicato organizations in Venezuela that she considered to be criminal gangs. “The only way you will stop getting blocked, the only way you can raise your wages, is to unionize,” Carolina declared. She pasted the text of ILO Convention 87, which protects workers’ right to association, into the document. “I will put you in contact with the Solidarity Center in your country. They will help you with the process. I did it in Colombia and I did it here in Ecuador.”

The complex history of the Venezuelan diaspora and their negative experiences captured by sindicatos made gig worker organizing under a union model in Ecuador challenging. Gig worker activists do not work with a clean slate when they try to mobilize their coworkers under the universal concept of a labor union. There are many other places where unionism has a negative reputation, and the history of both US unions and local traditional union federations in Latin America is certainly fraught (Anner and Evans, 2004). Although it was a choice that might have alienated some workers who otherwise were willing to act collectively against platform companies, the uphill battle of excising sindicato from its Venezuelan connotations held the potential payoff of receiving material and legal support from organizations like the Solidarity Center. Making sindicato stick was not an easy job, but it would facilitate access to benefits from networks of transnational union organizations.

Framing the cause of gig workers as one of labor unionism made the fight of FRENAPP part of a worldwide struggle for workers to associate freely without retaliation from their employers. Highlighting the ILO conventions signed by their host countries further asserted the global scale of the gig workers’ cause. The work Carolina and other FRENAPP activists did in making the universal concept of a labor union travel improved the effectiveness of those concepts in different places in the world (Tsing, 2005). These concepts became truly global only thanks to the work of activists implementing their promise in local contexts.

Dynamic framing with global causes

Gig worker activists worked to make the primary global causes of unionization and labor rights and regulation meaningful in local contexts. However, activists also opportunistically reframed the issues of gig workers to take advantage of other global causes that were salient at a particular moment, deploying a common tactic in transnational activism in the context of gig worker organizing (Benford and Snow, 2000; Borgias and Braun, 2017; Snow et al., 1986). These other global causes included feminism and women’s rights, migration and human mobility, artificial intelligence (AI), and security.

Carolina had started her presentation at an International Women’s Day panel on women’s labor issues with a video taken by a fellow gig worker organizer. After she hit play, a singing voice asked, “Dónde está el bebe?” (Where is the baby?) The video zoomed on an insulated delivery backpack as a hand reached out to open the unzipped flap. “There she is!” A toddler giggled from inside as her mom closed the flap to play another round of repartidora (the feminine form of the word for “deliverer”) peekaboo. The video showed how the constant material presence of the delivery backpack led it to double as a plaything, illustrating the intimate relationship between motherhood and gig work. Carolina then highlighted another gendered element of work that was subsumed into the repartidora identity:

Each morning, my repartidora friend had to make sure that everyone had a clean uniform to wear and a clean backpack to carry. She worked while carrying her baby on her motorcycle. When customers demanded the food to be delivered to their door, she carried the baby with the food up the stairs. Every day, she faced harassment, xenophobia, men who answered the door in various states of undress. Then she had to go home and take care of the housework.

Seizing the opportunity of International Women’s Day, the cause of gig workers was reframed for a new audience through the global causes of feminism and women’s rights. Carolina also drew on the framing of the “second shift” and gendered harassment faced by working women. She formed a common cause with women workers who faced overlapping oppressive conditions. In addition to feminism and women’s rights, migrant rights and human mobility framed the gig worker cause to other audiences. At a congressional hearing that solicited feedback about migration policy in Ecuador, we heard from Ecuadorian return migrants and the Afghan refugee community. Venezuelan leaders commented on the ongoing amnesty program and the needs of the newly arrived. Into this context, Carolina added her testimony about the exploitation faced by irregular Venezuelans in gig work.

Other opportunities to participate and reframe the cause of gig workers in terms of a relevant global issue included a panel run by the UN on the need to regulate AI, where gig work was reframed as controlled by unethical AI, and exploitation was explained as a result of the lack of worldwide regulation. At the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, attacks on gig workers and robberies carried out by people dressed as gig workers were highlighted as concerns for regions around the world experiencing conditions of insecurity. Gig worker regulation and protection were reframed as needed to address cross-border issues of illicit drug trade and generalized violence.

Across the primary framing of labor unionism and secondary framings of women’s rights, human mobility, AI, and security, activists work to make different global causes meaningful in the context of gig work among people who were primarily Venezuelan diaspora members. Using these global framings to describe the issues of gig workers allowed for greater visibility and access to new audiences and resources for the activists. At the same time, by giving these global causes traction in their local context, activists allowed concepts like the “second shift” to make a difference in a new place (Tsing, 2005).

Condemning cuarterización: contesting moral meanings

FRENAPP’s activists sought to give traction to union-oriented mobilizing by assigning a particular moral value to practices that were understood differently by different gig workers. They worked to promote formalization and regulation of platform work as a path to improve workers’ conditions, instead of other approaches such as pressuring companies to voluntarily improve conditions without regulation. This section details how FRENAPP’s activists condemned the practice of subletting accounts to be worked by another person, usually someone who did not have legal status or who had been blocked from their own account on the app.

In one example, Carolina and I met with the Defensoría del Pueblo (Ombudsman) of Ecuador. As Carolina detailed the injustices faced by delivery workers, the man attending to us interjected to ask what the word cuarterización meant. The word in Spanish for outsourcing is tercerización, which is a nounification of a verb form of the word for “third” (tercer). Carolina explained that delivery workers, especially those without regular immigration status, often rent an account from someone else. To account for this additional layer of subcontracting, she upped the third ordinal number in tercerizacion to four, creating the word “cuarterización.” Her frown deepened as she tapped her acrylic nails on the stack of papers in front of her for emphasis:

It is so sad to see how Venezuelans are exploiting their own countrymen. The ones who made it through the Darién and are in the United States now. The ones who worked 12-and 16-hour days in the pandemic and had maintained high ratings on the app, have left their accounts to be worked by newer migrants. The account owners take a huge cut of the earnings, after the companies already took a huge cut. Not just Venezuelans taking advantage of other Venezuelans, of course, Ecuadorians are doing it too. And in Spain they are putting out videos to teach people who have papers how to rent out accounts.

Carolina paused and began scrolling back through her WhatsApp messages with another activist to play the video from Spain.

At a Zoom meeting that included unaffiliated delivery workers, Carolina acknowledged that some people might be blocked or might not have papers, leading them to work on rented accounts. She argued that the people renting out accounts were dangerous and exploitative. One reparitdor unmuted to say that without papers, he had so few options that he appreciated being able to work on a rented account. Carolina firmly insisted that Venezuelans needed to invest in the regularization process. She shared the names of nonprofits that could support the cost of getting paperwork and posted the link to the Ecuadorian government’s ongoing immigration amnesty program. To audiences ranging from sympathetic pro bono migration lawyers to impatient fellow activists, Carolina explained the practice of cuarterización as a negative, exploitative practice with local variance worldwide.

Members of FRENAPP used a negative diagnosis of cuarterización to contest different meanings that might be given to charging a fee to let someone else use one’s account to work. One example of an alternative understanding could be providing opportunities. For example, Venezuelans (or others) with papers who rent their accounts to undocumented Venezuelans could be understood as doing an act of solidarity with a little bit of profit. They provided people with no options for employment with the opportunity to work, even if they were going to take a cut of their earnings. This could be viewed as an individual, idiosyncratic way of getting around the rules so that a friend or relative could draw an income. Such alternative understandings of renting one’s account were taken up by groups of gig workers who were against regulation. These workers were identified by members of FRENAPP as allied to platform corporations, since they campaigned against the regulation of gig work. Regardless the extent to which platform companies materially supported these anti-union and anti-regulation gig workers, this case demonstrates the alternative moral meanings that could be assigned to the practice of subletting accounts. Diagnosing and condemning cuarterización was needed to make progress with a particular type of organizing focused on union formation and regulation. By diagnosing the same phenomenon happening in Spain, Ecuador, Brazil, and elsewhere, a common problem was identified which called for common responses: formalization and regulation.

Discussion

The strategies of FRENAPP reflected several of the concepts scholars have used to characterize social movements. In their fight for union recognition, they followed a classic boomerang pattern (Keck and Sikkink, 1999) by reaching out to the ILO and seeking to pressure the government of Ecuador from above since the state had rejected their registration and was ignoring their direct appeals. Other networked actions went “beyond the boomerang,” such as the cross-border grassroots advice shared between Carolina and gig workers based in Peru (Ford, 2024). Regarding activist packages, FRENAPP sought to make the engaged universal of a labor union stick in the context of the Venezuelan diaspora despite the strong negative connotation of the term sindicato (Tsing, 2005). Akin to scholars who have shown the strategic changing of a main framing of a cause to respond to changing political opportunities, this movement also deployed opportunistic use of framings to take advantage of a global event such as International Women’s Day (Benford and Snow, 2000; Borgias and Braun, 2017; Snow et al., 1986).

In addition to revealing the applicability of various concepts from global social movements in the context of gig work organizing, my analysis demonstrates how activists expanded their movement through strategies that each consciously and effortfully called the global scale into being in different ways. Attending to friction ethnographically allows us to highlight the work that activists do to make global concepts and a particular, union-oriented global gig workers’ movement gain traction in the context of Ecuador.

Tentative allies

The concept of friction does not preemptively assign a liberatory or oppressive valence to the travel of global causes and movements. Following this, my analysis remains open in its assessment of alliances formed in the case I present here. The opportunities and resources that can be obtained when allying with actors promoting a similar vision of the global are important for activists who operate with minimal resources. Activists may consider increasing efforts to connect with transnational networks and international organizations to unite their advocacy further. However, the history of transnational labor movements would caution against overly optimistic readings of transnational alliances. The legacy of US Labor interventions in Latin America that were specifically trying to destroy leftist and communist movements among people and workers in the region cannot be ignored or forgotten (Anner and Evans, 2004). The model of unions, though able to make important moves to protect workers, is not a silver bullet. The history of organized labor in both North and South America includes movements that have upheld racist, sexist, and imperialist agendas. Transnational labor solidarity can too easily become what South African labor scholar Buhlungu (2008) has called “labor philanthropy,” where power relations between Global North and Global South labor movements are reified rather than unsettled (Gill, 2009). Allyship with other transnational labor actors should thus remain strategic and open-ended, with continual vigilance against co-optation.

A different vision of globalization

The ubiquity of transnational gig companies has made it so a traveler from the United States can open their phone in another country to get around with the same Uber app and order food to their hotel with the same Uber Eats app that they use at home. Seamless convenience across borders, on offer for those who can afford it, is one vision of the global that companies and consumers of upper-class positions have made to exist (Del Nido, 2022). This vision operates through what del Nido calls “post-political reasoning” to ensure that the local claims of taxi unions and city government cannot stop Uber from operating in Buenos Aires. The work carried out by FRENAPP’s activists to make a global, union-oriented movement for gig workers’ rights responds differently to the vision of app companies. Unlike the case del Nido documents, where local and national scales are asserted in opposition to Uber’s capitalist version of globalization, FRENAPP counters gig work companies with an alternative global vision. In this sense, their work shares a legacy with the alter-mundializacion (alter-globalization) movement launched in the 1990s by the global solidarity for the Zapatista movement (Rovira, 2019). Alter-mundializacion was erroneously reported in the media as an anti-globalization movement. Rather than eschewing it, alter-mundializacion also demonstrated a commitment to the global scale, as a means for resisting capital rather than as a paradigm for unfettered capital. These forms of counter-hegemonic globalization (Evans, 2000) are not automatically found in the contradictions of corporate globalization, but rather take the contingent work of activists to be made meaningful. Gig workers’ efforts to make a global movement in defense of their labor rights represents a means by which a different kind of globalization is imagined and enacted, however partially and contingently.

Conclusion

This study reminds us of the many ways gig worker organizing can happen, even when the basis for collective identification as gig workers is laid by the global reach of platform corporations (Woodcock, 2021). For it to happen in a particular global way requires work from activists to call up the global scale, which does not exist neutrally but must be asserted against other possible ways of viewing a phenomenon (Tsing, 2005). This article has analyzed the daily, contingent work done by activists to make global concepts “stick” in mobilizing gig workers who are primarily a part of the Venezuelan diaspora living in Ecuador. Although they are not always successful in persuading their coworkers to mobilize under the global union-oriented movement they work toward, activists’ work allows for tentative alliances to form and resources to be gained in defense of gig workers’ rights. This adds a different, actors-focused ethnographic perspective to prior work, which has focused on more organizational and structural analyses of transnationalization in gig work (Borghi and Murgia, 2024; Woodcock, 2021). This article also contributes an angle beyond the current focus on labor process theories that explain how and why gig workers organize based on working conditions (Lei, 2021; Muñoz and Martinez, 2022; Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020), by focusing on the analytic of friction. Through their work in making global concepts meaningful locally, gig worker activists work toward not only the rights and protection of the workers in their sector, but also toward an alternative vision of the global that is not dominated by profit.