Very few countries have regulated employment on digital platforms and none has encompassed all its complexity and diversity. Mexico is in this difficult task and soon the federal and Mexico City governments will present a reform proposal, which will not be to the liking of all the people involved, but will change paradigms, anticipates José Luis Rodríguez Díaz de León, Secretary of Labor capital.
The population that works in private transport or food delivery through applications has suffered a process of precariousness due to the fact that their employers do not recognize their labor rightssays in an interview the head of the Secretariat of Labor and Employment Promotion of Mexico City (STyFE).
“We think that they do carry out a formal labor activity, there are elements to say that this employment does fall within the category of formality and should be recognized as such,” he points out. “In the next few days we will be presenting and promoting” a proposal to reform the Federal Labor Law (LFT).
In mid-May, he anticipates, the project will be announced, led by the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS), with a view to its being discussed in the Chamber of Deputies from September. That is to say, the next period of sessions, when the legislative agenda is free of one of the issues that occupied it for so long: the electrical reform of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The initiative of the federal and local governments proposes “recognizing the work on digital platforms like that, a job, so that other important rights are recognized directly, not only salary, working hours or the possibility of having different employers, but also access to collective rights, such as those of association and organization, because now they don’t have that opportunity,” explains the official.
lobbying for reform
The local secretariat opened a dialogue with the head of the STPS, Luisa María Alcalde, “to share the experience in Mexico City. She, with absolute clarity on the subject and very aware of the need to move forward, considers it a central issue”, explains the official.
The work meetings have been held since last February, although the process in both dependencies has more time. “Just on Tuesday I was at the STPS and we shared with your team that all that remains is to fine-tune conceptual details of the articles that we are going to propose to be modified”.
Last March, Luisa María Alcalde reported on her Twitter account that she had a meeting with Dara Khosrowshahi, global director of Uber. “We agree on the urgent need to move to a scheme of recognition of rights and social protection for platform workers”, he detailed.
On April 7, from the STPS account, it was announced that the federal official received directors from DiDi. “We talked about the transition to a recognition scheme for labor rights and social security for the workers of digital platforms. We keep moving forward!”
In various forums and interviews, the secretary has indicated the intention to regulate work in this type of economy. The new forms of employment they do not have to come with “exclusion from social security, losing protection, losing rights,” he pointed out at the Youth Meeting of the Pacific Alliance, in October 2021.
In this legislature, the Labor and Social Welfare Commission of the Chamber of Deputies has received two initiatives to reform the LFT and recognize delivery people and drivers as workers. Three other different ones have accumulated in the Senate.
“There will be people who, as in everything should always exist, have different criteria and opinions” to what his proposal raises. “We are going to launch the initiative with a base project, from there it enters a legislative process. The legislators who make up the Chamber of Deputies also have the right to give their opinion, modify or approve the bill according to their terms,” says José Luis Rodríguez.
Enrichment of some, precariousness of others
The Secretary of Labor of Mexico City points out that, since its launch in 2010 and its arrival in the country in 2014, the applications were offered “as alternatives, such as salary and income supplements. Today that is not real, a person does not spend 4 hours on an application, but 9, 10 hours, and it is his only income and his only source of work”.
But “not only do they spend more time, they put their cell phone, their bicycle, their motorcycle, their car. In other words, they put their assets at the service of a company”, which does not even recognize a right for them. “The precarious quality of life of the people who carry out this activity and the uncontrolled enrichment of the companies simply seem unacceptable to us.”
Without a doubt, he emphasizes, it can be affirmed that, even during the covid-19 pandemicThey have increased their income. That means that it was not distributed in a fair or equitable way and that the people who carry out this distribution activity were a key piece for the companies to improve their profits and get rich.”
Due to the lack of transparency in which this industry is managed, the number of people who are inserted in it is unknown, the official points out. According to the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) the estimate is more than 500,000 people.
This reform will change paradigms, he predicts, “because it recognizes new forms of organization, new working concepts, labor relations and freedom of work”. To the challenge of the approval and then the implementation of the 2019 labor reform, this other is added.
“One of the central issues is to guarantee the possibility that people continue working on one, on another and on another platform. Sometimes they are registered in two or three applications. The objective is not to harm, the objective is to help them have access to the recognition of the labor human rights”.
One of the organizations of the union, the Union of Workers for Application (Unta), has reproached that their demands for the construction of the initiatives have not been heard. “The presumed flexibility offered by the platforms makes the lack of job opportunities, social security and job stability invisible”, they have pointed out.
In 2021, Spain It recognized as wage earners the people who work in the food delivery sector, the so-called riders. With the law, they have the option to have a contract. However, a large sector has rejected the reform and advocates continuing to be autonomous, since the contracts restrict their activity and, over time, will make it even more precarious.
The United Kingdom, Italy and France are other countries that have modified their llabor eyes to incorporate part of the workers of the economy gig. In the United States, the state of California has been the only one.
It’s now or never
In Mexico and in the world, the great companies by application They have fought so that their “partners and partners”, as they consider them, do not have the category of workers. So, despite the lobbying, they could try to protect themselves if this reform were to pass.
“There are always risks in everything, but that is what the parliamentary process and that is what judging people are for. Here the three orders of government would participate, the Legislative, Executive and Judicial”, says José Luis Rodríguez Díaz de León.
“In the Executive we are detonating a parliamentary process”, the Legislature will do what corresponds to it and, “if someone feels that they have an affected right, there is the Judiciary”.
The initiative “is an opportunity and a risk that we must take. Failure to do so would imply that people are in that process of free fall, since the emergence of applications” sink deeper into the job insecurity.