H
until about 40 years ago, In Mexico we had learned to survive in a cruel capitalism where the boss and the company barely had a counterweight to a corrupt and extortionist trade unionism. Although it was useful to maintain working conditions at their convenience, serious difficulties arose in this closed system, where the internal market was shrinking more and more. In Mexico and on a global scale, another system appeared to try to solve this world problem, as a public policy: neoliberalism. Global expansion of the market, less State intervention in economic relations and more State to shield this new way of freeing trade and maintaining iron discipline, imposing a great limitation on the rights of workers.
It was in the Washington Consensus where international financial organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, established very specific rules to implement public policies that would facilitate the global circulation of goods and lower their cost without reducing the generation of surplus value in the process of worked.
It is in this way that unprecedented forms of transferring costs of production and circulation of goods to consumers appear. Who has not paid for an object without building or assembling, with only loose parts and instructions to assemble desks, chairs and even computers? We pay to do the work ourselves.
The same thing happens in services: we subsidize the boss by paying the wages of waiters, gas station attendants, baggers and maids through tips, we assume the responsibility of the boss, hardly realizing it. If we don’t do it that way, the goat
to the worker’s house.
Among the cruelest ways of transferring costs to the client and evading work responsibilities is that of the more than 244 thousand delivery workers per application (Didi, Uber, Rappi, among others) in Mexico.
Within the working conditions, what is essential for companies is to ignore the employment relationship with their employees, simulating a relationship of partners
thus trying to evade their social and economic responsibility.
The working conditions are leonine: the workers finance the companies of each application, despite the fact that at least one of them is a financial entity (Rappi). The companies unilaterally define expenses, costs and profits of the dealer, impose debts and discounts, without the right to appeal and with the risk of being fired.
When you have to pay at the delivery site and the customer canceled the order or is not at the delivery address, the cost is borne by the delivery man, who had to pay with his money at the time of receiving the delivery order. in the corresponding place.
Companies can deactivate the application at any time for any delivery person, preventing them from working.
The distributors provide their own vehicle, the expenses that it generates, including spare parts and fuel.
They are required to register with the SAT as if their subordinate work were a business activity, with tax obligations typical of a company.
They earn approximately 2,085 pesos for 46 hours of work a week. Own cell phone, backpack and wifi.
When they are active, they receive a delivery call at the same time as their peers, forcing them to compete in acceptance speed, even without knowing the delivery conditions, ending in a fierce competition between them.
However, there are solidarity traits between them, since they support each other with the food expenses that they obligatorily pay and they have to stay sharing it among those who have not eaten, or exchanging with others who are in the same condition.
It is worth insisting that they do not have health insurance, paid vacations, bonuses, profit sharing, job stability, retirement savings, collective bargaining agreement, or the right to Infonavit to purchase a home.
They have to live registered in several applications and move according to the conditions of better payment and service demand. This, instead of raising pay, has caused labor demand to rise and delivery revenue to fall.
This modality has been implemented in Mexico for a little over 10 years and, if there is no active resistance from the workers themselves, I have no doubt that a practice already used in other countries will soon arrive: putting a delivery up for auction and the platform awarding it to who charges less for performing the service.
It is not only urgent to regulate the activities of companies and their apps, in addition to recognizing the right to unionize workers, but it is urgent to reconsider the fiscal figure to which they are subject. They need insurance against assaults and health, they need to establish labor conditions agreed between them and the companies, we have to dignify this profession.
*Historian of the trade union movement
