by Marina Novaes, Brazil Researcher and Representative, BHRC

Digital labour platforms that match consumers with workers in the gig economy are expanding rapidly and transforming the world of work. As of late 2025, at least 653 active digital labor platforms operate globally across sectors including ride-hailing, delivery, freelance services, healthcare and domestic work.

These platforms rely on data-driven business models that develop and deploy algorithms and AI tools to recruit workers, monitor performance, set prices and regulate services. Tech-enabled workforce practices promise to make our working lives easier, safer and less costly, but they also pose existential threats to the rights of billions of workers worldwide.

Now, the international community has taken a historic step towards adapting labour rights to the age of algorithms.

When the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted Convention 193 on decent work in the platform economy last month, it was doing more than creating a new international labour standard. It was responding to a transformation of the world of work that had been unfolding for more than a decade, but which gained unprecedented scale and urgency during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Brazil, one of the world's largest markets for ride-hailing and delivery platforms, illustrates many of these broader global trends. In the last ten years the number of platform workers increased by 170%, leading the Central Bank to herald a structural alteration of the labour market.

It was during the pandemic that the limitations of this business model, promising flexibility and autonomy, were brought into sharp relief. Drivers and delivery workers, who helped keep cities functioning during lockdowns, faced higher risks of infection, longer working hours for lower pay, unstable incomes and were denied social protection.

But the pandemic also ushered in a new phase of platform worker mobilisation. In 2020, delivery workers organised nationwide strikes and brought issues that had long remained on the margins into the public debate: demands for fair pay, protection in cases of illness and accidents, and the right to organise collectively – all in the face of arbitrary account deactivations and opaque algorithms designed to limit collective power. While initiated by delivery workers, the fight for decent work, equitable treatment, human-centred algorithmic management, and corporate accountability reflected the calls of millions working across the digital economy worldwide, sparking a global stock take.

The central question shifted from whether platform workers should have rights to how existing labour protections could be adapted to new forms of work.

Brazil played an important role in this process. According to accounts of the Convention negotiations in Geneva, the Brazilian government was among those which helped build consensus and secure the adoption of the agreement, despite significant differences between governments, employers and workers. Brazil's leadership reflects not only its long-standing engagement in multilateral processes, but also its position as one of the world's most important laboratories for platform work and platform worker organising.

Indeed, like any international agreement, the Convention reflects the compromises needed to reach consensus. It does not settle ongoing debates about pay, social protection or employment status, for example, and rather than establishing a single definition of "platform workers", Article 9 leaves significant room for national interpretation. While this flexibility may facilitate ratification across different legal systems, it also raises an important challenge: ensuring that workers are not excluded from protection simply because of how their work is classified.

The Convention’s effectiveness will depend on ratification by governments and on the ability to translate broad principles into concrete policies. But it does mark the end of an idea that dominated discussions for years: that the platform economy somehow existed outside the rules and protections that govern work.

If the ILO was founded in 1919 in response to the profound transformations brought about by the industrial revolution, Convention 193 may come to be seen as one of the first major attempts to adapt that legacy to the age of algorithms. By recognising platform workers as rightsholders, rather than merely individual service providers, Convention 193 establishes an important milestone. At its core, it recognises that technological innovation does not eliminate the need for rights and protections. On the contrary, it demands their renewal.

The future of work will undoubtedly be shaped by new technologies, but its legitimacy will continue to depend on an old question: whether it can guarantee rights, protection and dignity for those who work.