The long convergence between capitalism low cost, uberisation of services, inequality and populist democracy can lead European societies to an unstable and dangerous point of balance where low-paid employment and work on demand within a third and fourth very informal sectors they coexist with a freedom and security under surveillance, within a liberal democracy increasingly beaten by populist and illiberal currents.
The problem at hand at the European level
The European utopia, the European adventure, is at a crossroads, at least in its current configuration. In the current state of European politics, with low economic growth and growing social inequality, the unionist megalomania and omnipresence and the political and institutional superiority of the European Union bureaucratic order is everything that distributed social networks do not like.
Indeed, the younger generations, daughters of the digital revolution, will never bear the sway of the European institutions, for the simple reason that they bet on the “institutional, political and bureaucratic disintermediation” of the established order. Now, this disintermediation is the very principle of the so-called uberization of society, operated via so-called collaborative platforms of which UBER is a good example.
Capitalism low cost, uberization of services, impoverishment and illiberal democracy, this is a dangerous trend and mixture, ready to explode at any moment and that, for this very reason, need to be duly guarded by all institutions of the democratic and social rule of law, at national level and European, under penalty of serious populist and autocratic drift.
In the current situation (February 2020), I fear that we are still far from meeting the necessary political conditions for an integrated approach to this problem and that, until then, the convergence between capitalism low cost, uberization of services, inequality and illiberal democracy will continue, creating, in its passage, many negative external effects, in particular, the pauperization and proletarianization of many segments of the population.
In this regard, we already know that the digital revolution and European governance intersect on three main planes: firstly, the regulation of digital capitalism, especially the fight against its fiscal extra-territoriality within the framework of the single market, secondly, the regulation of citizenship rights in a broad sense, not only in the protection of personal data, but also in the guarantee of social and labor rights, which includes the debate on a guaranteed European minimum income, finally, the regulation of the so-called “algorithmic governance ” within the framework of multilevel governance of European public policies, which could become an additional source of exclusion and segregation in terms of territorial and social cohesion
If the European Union and national States do not act prudently and in a coordinated manner on these three levels in order to encourage and regulate their positive convergence and, in this way, prevent the progressive impoverishment of the middle classes, there is a very high risk that politics, as a higher representation instance, goes through a generalized crisis of trust and plunges into an identity radicalism with a bad memory, ending up, in the end, in hard and muscular political solutions of illiberal democracy. And these signs grow every day.
Touristification low cost, uberization of services and economy of the 4th sector
The digital revolution and the advent of the automatic society will progressively determine the end of the “employment industry” as we still know it today. From simple digitization to the “internet of things” and artificial intelligence (AI) there will be countless ways to automate industrial and service processes and procedures.
Two consequences seem ineluctable in the short and medium term: the profound transformation of the wage system as we have known it until now and the growth of a significant informality in the large transition sector, the so-called 4th sector.
capitalism low cost it is, moreover, prepared for this transition and there are two sectors where uberization will preferentially affect: tourism support services and senior society support services, both served by platforms and applications of very varied extraction.
capitalism low cost by dragging with it an important public disintermediation, it will end up causing a significant “creative destruction” and, at the same time, I think, inducing a reform of political institutions as we know them today.
First, the public economy will contract a part of the public expenditure in a regime of co-production of services to the public with private platforms. At the same time, it will reduce public employment, replacing civil servants with service providers under the outsourcing.
Second, the social and solidarity economy of the IPSS will undergo a strong rationalization and contraction as it depends heavily on public support. At the same time it will reduce social employment and many of its functions will be outsourced to the local communities of the emerging “collaborative society”.
Thirdly, the capitalist private economy, due to competition from global markets, which includes tourism, will further reduce conventional employment and outsource many tasks that will be offered by the economy. on-demand where many freelance workers will be transferred, gathered in collaborative platforms.
That is, the new economy of so-called collaborative platforms, which we call here service uberization, will branch out throughout the economy and will be a kind of geometric locus of all externalities, positive and negative, of the various sectoral economies, many of them partially informal.
Two of them are already fully operational, the low cost cluster tourism, from transport to accommodation, food to cleaning and maintenance services and low cost cluster home and personal services that is becoming more and more ramified.
This huge turntable – the 4th sector economy – will most likely be the great common house for a good part of the citizens who will start working on platforms of capitalism low cost in a regime of pluriactivity and multi-income and in a very dubious employment relationship.
On this huge turntable it is very likely that capitalism low cost provide the pluriactive worker with various incomes: a part-time job in a public service and/or a private company, a service provision under the . in a company on-demand, a few hours of volunteering at a “local time bank” in exchange for a voucher and, finally, an "inscription" in a startup collaborative part of its idle resources (idle resources) in exchange for an occasional recipe in an occasional market.
Final Notes
As is easily proven, we will be, in the not-too-distant future, due to the structural break in quality employment, condemned to a society of very different labor regimes, some in Part-time, others under ., others still in a contributory and collaborative regime, under many formats, conditions and reputations, if we like, a society where the individual produces himself.
On the other hand, the ideology of uberization transports us to liquid modernity, in the words of the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, where everything is fluid, precarious, transitory, transient, like everything that UBER transports. Who warns us of the negative external effects of this particular uberization?
It is necessary to warn, in particular, the more distracted digital natives to this virtual seduction and to the illusion of accessible self-entrepreneurship that is conveyed through a presumed post-salary relationship.
capitalism low cost, the digital revolution and the uberization process cannot lead to an increase in social inequality and a serious cleavage in the democratic society that undermines the very principles of their peaceful coexistence.
In the current European and national situation, on the verge of the digital single market, it is an ethical-political imperative that the creation and structuring of the 4th sector should be a vigorous impulse towards the collaborative society and the European common goods and not the formation of a large area -problem where the marginality and informality of employment and work grow and where embarked citizens are passengers in permanent transit in search of better living conditions.
And if, in the end, capitalism low cost, supported by the uberization of services and a more secure government regime, came to suggest the creation of a guaranteed minimum income "RMG" for all those who live below a certain threshold of existence, under the pretext that this mechanism of social reparation reduces the costs of operating and maintaining the welfare system of the welfare state (itself the object of uberization through a social platform), this proposal will not increase the political legitimacy of capitalism low cost and the government regime that supports it?
So beware of the red line where capitalism converges low cost and the uberization of services, their democratic bifurcation is always possible.
And the alert, too, for the Algarve region, because the risk of capture by capitalism is real low cost, especially if the inertia of the regional policy system leads to a convergence between touristification, gamification, gentrification, uberization of services and impoverishment of the working classes. It wouldn't be pretty!
Author António Covas is a Retired Full Professor at the University of Algarve
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