Local and global conflicts in Brazil's extended platform workplaces

Platform labour is organised through relations that extend beyond the immediate interaction between workers and platforms. This article asks how financial and geopolitical relations shape the labour process in Brazil's ride-hailing and food-delivery sectors, and how local conflicts and workers’ resistance, in turn, affect them. Adopting a political economy approach and drawing on Burawoy's Extended Case Method, the study combines online and offline ethnography and interviews with platform workers with documentary analysis. It develops the concept of the extended platform workplace to capture how the labour process extends horizontally across urban and social relations and vertically from local to international relations through financialisation and geopolitical competition. The analysis shows that workplace extension affects value creation, exploitation and labour control, the distribution of operational and reproduction costs, regulatory conflicts and resistance. Conflicts can be displaced across workers, clients, restaurants and the state, while reappearing in corporate and investor deliberations as reputational and investment concerns. Financial capital can support worker attraction and retention and temporarily postpone conflict, while geopolitical competition can shape corporate strategies and workers’ bargaining capacity. The article extends labour process theory by showing how platform labour is constituted through relations beyond the immediate worker–platform relationship.