Meu Corre App: a tool co-created with Brazilian workers to understand the Gig Economy
Igor Dalla Vecchia  1@  
1 : Martin-Luther-Universität Halle Wittenberg - Martin-Luther-University Halle Wittenberg  -  Website

This presentation examines the development and preliminary results of the Meu Corre App, a methodological digital tool that has been co-created with delivery workers in the individual goods transportation sector in Brazil since 2020. The application is part of the doctoral research of geographer Igor Dalla Vecchia, whose main objective is to investigate how digital labor platforms produce processes of territorialization in urban space, while workers undergo processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization through the spatial practices shaped by platformization in the sector.

The methodology combines technological development with engaged research, involving delivery workers from the initial conception of the tool to its testing, refinement, and discussion of results. Meu Corre serves a dual purpose: it supports workers in individual financial management and simultaneously generates unprecedented aggregated data on earnings, expenses, and income targets—data not previously captured by national studies. Since its launch in April 2024, the app has registered over three thousand sign-ups and approximately 350 regular users.

Preliminary analyses show an average monthly income of R$ 1,295.07 among users, an amount lower than figures reported by national research institutes such as IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) and Cebrap (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning). Only 15% of regular users met their gross monthly earnings goals at least once, and only 1.5% did so consistently. These findings reveal not only the economic vulnerability of this type of work but also challenge the dominant entrepreneurial narrative widely promoted by the platforms.

Meu Corre App's resistance strategy lies in the fact that workers themselves become producers of data about their activity, thereby contesting the platforms' informational monopoly. By recording, organizing, and interpreting their own labor metrics, delivery workers reclaim part of the value generated by their activity, value previously appropriated asymmetrically by companies through data extraction. This autonomous knowledge production constitutes a form of political reterritorialization, strengthening workers' capacity to organize and assert new spatial practices in the urban environment.

This research contributes to a critical understanding of digital labor by demonstrating that workers do not merely react to technological transformations but actively construct digital alternatives for resistance and organization. In doing so, they contest not only physical territories but also data itself, and its interpretations, within the context of the gig economy.

 


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