Technolegal Expulsions: Platform Food Delivery Workers and Work Regulations in Colombia

Precariousness of the Colombian urban economy provides an ecosystem for the development and expansion of digital platforms, intersecting informal working relations with digital surveillance. Reconstructing legal obstacles to gaining recognition as legal and formal workers, it is argued that platforms have assembled a techno-legal network which translates discussions about workers’ rights into the less regulated arena of information and communication technologies. The role of ‘regulatory displacement’ is examined to analyse the evolution of digital platforms for food delivery workers. Drawing on a review of the regulation of it and labour, discussed in Congress in 2017–2018, we explore the regulatory expulsions that digital workers experience, analysing this information with a grounded theory approach, in which we have followed discursive patterns that emerge from legal documents. Addressing this strategic use of the law is key to understanding and overcoming obstacles that platform workers face in their attempts to organize in the Global South.