The “Renda por App” (Income by App) project promoted since 2019 by the city of Recife, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the notoriously socially unequal Brazilian Northeast, was designed as a municipal employment programme aimed at combating youth unemployment by promoting their integration into the digital delivery platforms' labour market. Consisting of a lottery awarding bicycles, helmets, mobile phones, data plans and iFood or Uber Eats accounts to around 100 winners a year, the programme was widely heralded as an expression of innovative urban policy, combining income generation and social integration in the digital city.

Still, even if the widespread use of algorithmic management at the core of these delivery apps was loudly advertised by the platforms as a promise of efficiency and data-driven decisions, it is still now well known that they had a significant impact on the organizational decisions and labour conditions (Kellogg et al. 2020) of delivery workers depending on them, concealing structural inequalities and exacerbating a precarious labour environment – a far cry to principles of decent and productive work advocated by the International Labour Organization (1999).

Drawing on the Fairwork (2021) evaluation framework, this paper therefore aims at unravelling the consequences for workers when a public body ends up designing urban policies and employment programmes adopting the logic of platform labour – examining to what extent it actually promotes fair pay, safe working environment, fair contracts, transparent management and fair representation for workers.

Based on in-depth ethnographic interviews conducted around Recife's two main delivery waiting points with bike-riding workers having benefited from the programme in 2022 and 2023, this research reveals, however, more than challenging actual working conditions – plagued by low pay, extensive working hours, constant monitoring and surveillance, lack of transparency in platform decision-making and the absence of social and physical protections.

By failing to question or regulate the inner workings of these digital platforms – effectively leaving workers vulnerable to their despotic algorithmic management (Griesbach et al. 2019) – the research thus uncovers a tacit endorsement of the delivery companies' agenda, consequently fostering an inherently precarious working environment starkly at odds with promises of social inclusion and economic development. Conversely, it also highlights the leverage that such municipal policies could have achieved by promoting standards of social protection, work regulation, minimum wage, transparent data management or the development of autonomous technology reconciling technological innovation and fundamental workers' rights.