Platform Work in Latin America: It's time to take stock and mobilize actions
For over a decade, digital intermediation platforms have been reshaping labor markets across Latin America and the Caribbean -from food delivery and ride-hailing to domestic care, skilled trades, and data work. Long enough, in other words, to pause, take stock of what we've learned, and think about what agenda we need to build going forward.
That was the starting point for a research project developed by Sur Futuro in partnership with a consortium of seven universities across the region, led by Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile, with researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru. The goal was simple yet ambitious: to understand what is actually happening with platform work in Latin America -looking backward and forward, and doing so from a situated, Latin American perspective.
The project was designed in the spirit of Sur Futuro's broader work: not to generate knowledge for its own sake, but to mobilize existing stocks of expertise –held by researchers, statistical offices, and workers' organizations, and connect them to action. Where there were knowledge gaps, the project helped create new evidence. Where there were measurement gaps, it contributed to the development of new tools. And where knowledge already existed, it worked through alliances to translate it into policy and practice.
Regarding platform work in Latin America, one lesson above all others emerged from this work: geography still matters in the digital economy. Platform companies may operate in the cloud, but their effects are deeply anchored in local labor market conditions. Thus, sound policy design must be grounded in how Latin American labor markets actually work.
Three Structural Features That Set Latin America’s labor markets Apart
When you look at platforms through this lens -not from Silicon Valley, not from Brussels, but from Lima or Buenos Aires- three critical structural features stand out. These are not quirks or exceptions; they define the terrain where platforms unfold.
1. Dual Labor Markets
Latin America is a region where a relatively protected formal sector coexists with a vast universe of workers in precarious, unrepresented conditions -what economists call a dual labor market. In Bolivia and Peru, informality reaches over 80% of employed workers. This is not a transitional phenomenon waiting to be resolved: it is a structural feature of how Latin American economies work.
This backdrop means platforms have very different effects depending on where a worker starts from. For someone transitioning away from formal employment, platform work can represent a real loss of rights and benefits, a slide into precarity disguised as freedom. Among the workers interviewed in this project, older workers with prior formal employment histories capture the tension most acutely: "I don't know who my employer is," said one transport worker. A phrase that would have been unthinkable in his previous working life and captures how disorienting the transition to platform work can be for those accustomed to legible employment relationships.
But the picture is not uniformly bleak. For workers coming from informal settings -those previously invisible to any labor market institution- platforms can represent something genuinely new: visibility, captured transactions, a digital trace. And that trace creates a rich policy design space that simply did not exist before. Governments can now, for the first time, design interventions for workers who were previously entirely hidden from view.
2. Macroeconomic Volatility
Latin America is a region of recurring macroeconomic crises, failed structural transformations, and persistent macroeconomic shocks. The Venezuelan migration wave of the last decade and a half is perhaps the starkest example, but the deeper pattern extends well beyond it. In many natural resource-rich economies, including Argentina and Brazil, the commodity boom decades did not translate into dynamic services sectors or meaningful structural diversification. The productive transformation that would generate new, high-quality employment largely did not happen.
In that context, platforms function as buffers against shocks: they absorb labor supply when the formal sector contracts and other systems fail. But they do so at a cost -generating saturated markets, oversupply, and deteriorating incomes for workers. "It is what it is," a platform worker in Colombia told researchers -in a country where, for many, the platform was simply the fastest way in.
Crucially, the shocks platform workers face are not individual labor market risks in the classical sense. They are expressions of persistent macroeconomic instability that require responses going well beyond protection against specific job-related risks. In this context, social protection policy for platform workers operates, in practice, as social policy against structural economic fragility, not just an insurance mechanism for a specific occupational category.
3. Low Productive Dynamism
Latin America has historically struggled to foster innovation and to generate new productive opportunities. Sur Futuro’s Atlas of Future Jobs puts the scale of the challenge in stark relief: only 17% of workers in the region are employed in occupations that are complementary to technological, environmental, and demographic transitions, compared to 25% in high-income countries –a gap that has widened over the past decade.
This context becomes especially relevant for high-skill platform workers selling digital services. On the positive side, platforms allow young, educated workers to integrate into global value chains, access higher incomes, and expose themselves to ideas and practices circulating internationally. On the negative side, platforms are reorganizing productive networks globally at low cost in ways that may limit the diffusion of capabilities within countries. The knowledge flows outward without increasing local technological capabilities or anchoring productive chains inside the region -a new version of a “brain drain” that requires no migration.
Not One Story, But Many
A key finding of this research is that the experience of platform work is profoundly heterogeneous, across countries, but also across occupational segments within the same country.
For delivery and transport workers, the picture is mostly grim. Long hours, volatile incomes, high physical risk, and the ever-present threat of algorithmic punishment. In Brazil, data from the Parliamentary Investigation Commission found that around 70% of critically injured patients at the Institute of Orthopedics of USP's Clínicas Hospital were platform app workers. In Uruguay, the Fairwork study found that most major platforms -Rappi, Uber, PedidosYa, Cabify- failed to meet even basic thresholds for fair pay, with only the local cooperative-style platform SoyDelivery demonstrating meaningful compliance. Workers describe a world of opaque algorithms, arbitrary penalties, and risk transferred entirely to them under the fiction of "autonomy." A driver in Uruguay captures the dynamic precisely: " “While it’s true that I can log in whenever I want, the reality is that I have to." A delivery worker from the same country describes the stakes of non-compliance: "If I don't rank well, I don't have working hours."
For data and digital work, the story is genuinely different. Here, something that looks more like labor market dynamism appears -actual job upgrading, skill development, and exposure to global opportunities. But a new tension emerges as well. These workers (often younger, more educated, and with options) frequently choose informality deliberately: they decide to operate outside the regulatory and tax perimeters of their home countries. For them, the platform represents a gateway to a different polity entirely. The policy question this raises is not about protection, but about what kind of social contract Latin American governments can offer to a labor elite to incentivize them to spill over their knowledge to the rest of the economy.
What Comes Next: A Latin American Agenda
So what does all of this -the structural features, the heterogeneity, the evidence accumulated across seven countries- actually tell us about what to do? The research points toward an agenda that goes beyond the familiar discussion “formality vs informality”, and beyond the regulatory frameworks being debated in the Global North. Sur Futuro's strategy ahead is to build that agenda in close partnership with the agents of change: actors like workers' organizations, governments, statistical institutes, and platform companies themselves, who are already shaping the platform ecosystem in the region.
The guiding principles for a Latin American agenda on the platform economy are:
Stop applying one-size-fits-all frameworks. The global debate on platform regulation tends to be dominated by the experiences of workers in the Global North, who have different profiles, starting points, and needs. A Brazilian delivery worker earning below minimum wage after deducting costs, and a Colombian data annotator choosing informality as a lifestyle preference, are not the same policy problem. They require different tools. Sur Futuro is actively working to develop a framework that captures this complexity -one that can guide differentiated responses across occupational segments and country contexts, and that is grounded in Latin American realities rather than borrowed from elsewhere.
Measure better -and cheaper. Most countries in the region lack official statistics that accurately capture platform employment, because standard labor surveys were designed around traditional employment relationships and systematically misclassify or miss platform workers. Sur Futuro wants to work directly with statistical institutes across the region to close this gap. One promising route: repurposing data that already exists. Chile has demonstrated that platform workers can be identified from existing occupational text responses in labor surveys, without adding expensive new modules. This project builds on this logic, using Chile's validated dataset and supervised machine learning to build classification models applicable across the region. It is not a perfect solution, but it is scalable and cost-efficient.
Innovate in social protection systems. Technology can be an ally here. The challenge is to redesign coverage systems that can actually reach workers who operate outside traditional employment categories without forcing everyone into a single mold or abandoning the unprotected to their fate. Given that platform workers face macroeconomic shocks as much as individual labor hazards, these systems need to function as broad social buffers, not just narrow occupational insurance schemes.
Understand the high-skilled elite -and acknowledge how little we know about them. The workers integrating into global digital value chains while exiting local regulatory systems represent a genuinely new challenge, and in Latin America they remain largely a black box. The dominant literature tends to portray online platform work as poor-quality work. But that verdict is rendered from the vantage point of the Global North, where the comparison class is stable salaried employment with benefits and career progression. The Latin American picture that emerges is more nuanced. A migrant woman in Colombia who said "my career here I haven't been able to pursue… this program opened doors for me," or a worker in Argentina reflecting on being the first professional in her family, are not simply rationalizing exploitation -and their experience deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. Sur Futuro is committed to generating the research needed to understand this population better.
Work alongside agents of change. Across the region, workers are already organizing in unions, cooperatives, WhatsApp groups, and labor courts. In Colombia, the delivery workers' union UNIDAPP negotiated a minimum rate with Rappi and secured protected union accounts to prevent arbitrary deactivations. In Uruguay, judicial claims against Uber grew from one case in 2019 to 85 in 2024. In Argentina, cooperatives like TRU (Trabajadores Unidos) are experimenting with worker-owned delivery platforms. Sur Futuro's seeks to work much more closely alongside these actors — unions, governments, civil society — to shape platform development in a direction that is genuinely pro-worker: building on evidence, bringing it where it can make a difference, and helping connect those with the knowledge to those with the power to act.
Final remarks: neither optimism nor pessimism –action!
The conversation about the future of work in Latin America has too often been trapped in what might be called a paralysis of pessimism -a sense that technological change, automation, and platforms are forces that can only bring precarity, concentration, and the erosion of rights. That framing captures real risks. But as Payal Arora has argued, when the diagnosis becomes exclusively bleak, we stop imagining alternative futures and end up ceding the future before contesting it. We cannot afford that pessimism in Latin America.
The future of work in Latin America is not written. No productive transition in the region's history has been linear or automatic -industrialization, urbanization, the expansion of digital services all generated tensions, but also new forms of mobility, organization, and value creation. The greatest risk for the region is not the speed of technological change. It is convincing ourselves too quickly that we have no margin to shape it.
This research project was one contribution to that effort: to understand the platforms as they actually operate in Latin America, to build the measurement tools to make them visible, and to generate the evidence that can inform policy. Sur Futuro's agenda going forward -in measurement, in policy innovation, and in active support for the workers, unions, and governments who are reshaping platform work from the inside- is built on the conviction that the future is still open, still to be created.
This post summarizes findings from the project "New Narratives for the Understanding and Measurement of Platform Work in South America," developed by Sur Futuro in partnership with a consortium led by Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile), with research teams from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. The project was supported by IDRC in the framework of the FutureWORKS initiative.
