Precarious Migrants in a Sharing Economy| On-Demand Migrants: Entrepreneurialism, Platformization, and Migration in Brazil

Abstract

This article is based on training programs for migrant entrepreneurs and aims to analyze how the platformization of labor and the entrepreneurial discourse—as aspects of communication—shape the relationship of migrants living in São Paulo with Migraflix NGO and its partners, such as Facebook and Uber, exponents of the gig economy. We conducted interviews with 10 migrants and refugees in São Paulo over two years. The interviewees' discourses reveal that the entrepreneurial rhetoric hides situations of job insecurity, lack of transparency in hiring and paying for services, and dependence on NGOs for participation in events and markets. Migrants depend on the NGO to be able to work and cannot earn a minimum income to survive; they must also work as drivers for companies like Uber—in line with studies on migrant labor in the gig economy. Thus, in the context of platform migration, these people are turned into on-demand migrants.