Brazil seeks a middle ground to make the gig economy fairer

The federal government is setting up a committee involving workers’ representatives, policymakers, and companies to discuss a proposal for regulating the gig economy in Brazil — especially in the logistics and mobility sector. 

The idea is to acknowledge the often informal nature of the roles played by these workers on digital platforms, and to demand that companies meet a minimum set of financial and social obligations towards them. Easier said than done, as corporate lobbying and the tangle of decrees issued by Brazilian cities to regulate apps have created a series of legal pitfalls to carry the task forward.

According to the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea), Brazil had over 1.7 million couriers, taxi drivers, and app drivers, among other types of self-employed workers in the transport sector at the end of September last year — the most recent data available.

This type of work had been growing since before the pandemic, Geraldo Góes, a researcher at Ipea, tells The Brazilian Report. 

In the case of app drivers, the number of workers dropped from 1.1 million in 2019 to 945,000 in 2021 due to the pandemic isolation measures, before then growing again in the third quarter of 2022 to just over 1 million workers. 

At the same time, the number of couriers using motorcycles skyrocketed, going from just 25,000 at the end of 2019 to 323,000 in 2021 and 319,000 last September — the drop is possibly linked to the resumption of face-to-face activities and the deceleration of e-commerce after a pandemic-driven boom.

The numbers were extracted from the country’s main national household sample survey, which is carried out by the national statistics agency IBGE.

Most recently, Ipea examined the level of social security coverage among gig economy workers — and the result is cause for concern. 

“Only 23 percent were also contributing to Brazil’s social security system — 10 percentage points below self-employed workers as a whole,” points out Mr. Goés, warning that the proportion is not only low but has been falling over...