Riders, el documental

Melissa Renau is a PhD candidate at Dimmons, a research group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia. Melissa’s research aims at understanding how platform models relate to platform workers’ working conditions focusing on flexibility.

Dimmons is an action-research group that closely links research with the needs of society, from training related topics to the co-creation of public policies. For the PLUS project, Dimmons has worked on the characterization of the platform economy, considering aspects related to governance, the economic model, data and technology policies, and social responsibility and impact.

Although on-demand delivery platforms appropriate ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ discourses with claims such as ‘be your own boss’ and ‘work as much as you want to’. Flexibility is an ambiguous notion that refers both to the flexibility of working time – offering a greater work-life balance for workers- and to the flexibility for companies as employers through contractual forms that offer the possibility of having workers on demand at the lowest possible cost.

This last point is precisely one of the key issues that it is going to be discussed in the ‘Riders, el documental’ through the personal stories of two riders, we will get closer to this complex conflict that is still not closed in which Melissa has participated.

Premiere, 11 May, on tve.es.

Documental available here: https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/riders-el-documental/riders-documental/5854989/

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Image source: screenshot form https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/riders-el-documental/trailer-riders-documental/5895455/