Abstract
The editors of EPA: Economy and Space are delighted to announce that the Ashby prizes for the most innovative papers published in the journal in the calendar year 2021 were awarded to Gabriella Y. Carolini (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for her paper “Aid's urban footprint and its implications for local inequality and governance” and Katie J. Wells (Georgetown University), Kafui Attoh (City University of New York), and Declan Cullen (George Washington University) for their paper “‘Just-in-Place’ labor: Driver organizing in the Uber workplace”.
The papers have been made free to access for 1 year.
I am very grateful to the editors of EPA: Economy and Space for awarding my paper, “Aid's urban footprint and its implications for local inequality and governance” (2021) with the Ashby Prize this year. The seeds of the analysis presented in this paper grew from fieldwork conducted while researching my book (Carolini, 2022) on a related theme, namely that of how international development cooperation projects land on the ground and why the specifics of that landing matter to distributive, procedural, and epistemic equity in urban development. Over years of engaged research in urban communities across several countries on the African continent, but especially Mozambique, it was clear to me that aid organizations were no strangers to critical analyses of their funded work. What puzzled me, however, is why greater empirical attention was not paid to international development as an urban industry—with clear spatial patterns of commercial and residential settlement in especially capital cities, as well as problematic labor practices centered on short-term consultancies, currency arbitrage, and the leveraging of contracts to support “donor”-related foreign firms. The very legibility of these patterns and practices across so many African capital cities compelled me to explore how aid's urban footprint—in office spaces and residencies—interacted with aid's developmental agenda and the urban governance in the city I knew and loved most—Maputo, Mozambique.
My paper is not the first to call attention to the spatial and substantive incongruities of a self-segregating international professional cadre (see, e.g. Paasche and Sidaway (2010: 1573) and Mamadouh et al. (2015)). Nor is it the first to examine how aid programming itself can be rife with explicitly harmful decision making, prioritization, and negative externalities in its delivery within “beneficiary” countries (see Mawdsley and Taggart’s (2022) excellent recent discussion on development finance). However, to my knowledge, my paper is among the early efforts to bring these two lines of inquiry together—namely examining the interaction of spatial and substantive externalities produced by the aid industry's presence—not at the level of the country but of the city, and further, in the context of an African capital city like Maputo.
The paper sets off with the intention of bringing a grounded critical analysis of the financial architecture behind urban development in Maputo, calling attention to how equity considerations are (or are not) integrated into the financial landscape shaping the city's development. Starting off with an examination of the existing portfolio of the municipal public sector's purse and its particularly delimited volume, I position my rationale for exploring how it is that the aid community in Maputo shapes the city's spatial and financial realities as well as imaginaries. I argue that it is aid's very readiness and relative volume (vis-a-vis local own-source revenues) that together spur a logic of convenience in decision making around urban infrastructures and development. Aid—not local communities or local authorities—shapes what gets prioritized and built, and for whose benefit. Contrary to its narrative of supporting local capacity and autonomy, my paper argues that the aid community's importance is reproduced in critical part by the aid community itself in the city.
I show that a growing density of “old” and “new” donor classes has taken root in the Mozambican capital over the past decade. The physical locations where international development professionals, their offices, and the private sector actors that typically accompany them, settle help control Maputo's fate. We see this materially in the dominance of international organizations’ real estate occupation in the capital's “cement city” or business core—arguably the most prized and highly valued real estate in the country. I map out commercial and residential buildings that are, by Mozambican law, endowed with special tax treatment because of their international occupants. They are, perversely, exempt from the very taxes that some of the occupants claim as their work objective: namely, to help the city government of Maputo improve its autonomy via enhanced property tax valuation and collection. I also detail how this geography of core occupation has become embedded with middle-class Mozambicans’ income strategies, further diminishing the political will to implement tax reforms that would enhance own-source revenues. While property tax exemption is of course a normalized practice across diverse geographies, the absence of other local means of capturing taxes—such as Payments in Lieu of Taxes or PILOTS—in Mozambique means that the concentration of international development organizations in the capital city's prime real-estate neighborhoods forecloses a (relatively) significant tax resource for the local public purse. It also limits the potentiality of tax bargaining between residents—the majority of whom are low-income—and local authorities, instead favoring financial bargaining between local authorities and foreign aid in dictating urban development. In addition, the paper reveals how the international community even seeks out tax haven opportunities in its labor practices.
My paper closes with the argument that the social contract between government and residents in effect has been replaced by a financial contract between government and foreign donors in Maputo. With low own-source revenues, municipal authorities are forced to continue depending on external actors for major capital investments. Further, the lack of an effective tax bargaining tool means the urban poor in Maputo have access to a grossly delimited lobbying portfolio in their struggle to secure basic infrastructures that directly benefit them. Instead, a housing, infrastructure, and amenities divide continues to grow between the rentier and international classes, and low-income residents in Maputo—an experience likely shared in other African capitals with a large international aid presence.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
We are humbled to receive the Ashby Award. We are grateful to the editors of EPA: Economy and Space for their generous reading of our article. And we are hopeful that our examination of one workplace, in one industry, in one city offers some use to scholars, activists, and policymakers who want to support meaningful worker solidarities in the years to come.
But, at the moment, this article feels like receiving a postcard from a previous era. We submitted this manuscript in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, and revised it in the chaotic haze of Summer 2020. In the years since, the story of Uber driver organizing in the Washington D.C. area has shifted and we have been lucky enough to continue our efforts to document, piece together, and share stories about the working conditions and amorphous effects of the ride-hail industry in the D.C. area. In mid-2020, we reconnected with 31 of the original 40 drivers in this study, several of whom we had not interviewed since the first round of interviews in 2016. Our interview questions for this round were broader in nature. We asked workers to tell us about their work situation but we often focused on how COVID-19 was shaping their life. This set of interviews felt different. The stories were rawer. They included stories about chemo treatments, denied unemployment insurance (UI) claims, and an uncertain future. Then, in early 2022, one of us reconnected again with 18 of the original drivers, only 6 of whom were actively engaged in platform labor in the D.C. area.
In reflecting on this award, and the paper it recognizes, we can't help but wonder how new developments will shape, if at all, our original thesis about the socio-spatial atomization of the Uber workplace. In the paper, we argue that the big innovation of the platform economy lies in its creation of a “just-in-place” worker. We documented how Uber's efforts to keep workers “just-in-place,” which generally disempowered drivers, can unintentionally and unexpectedly enable new solidarities in select spaces. To make such claims, we drew on fieldwork from 2016 to 2019. At the end of the article, we write: “the future of driver organizing in the Uber workplace in the D.C. area is uncertain. Drivers themselves have not been sure how much longer they will work on the platform, and so have been hesitant to work toward bettering a workplace that they may leave. Other drivers have come to believe the workplace will be obsolete with the arrival of automated vehicles, and so, again, are hesitant to work toward bettering a workplace that may disappear.”
What follows is a mini epilogue of sorts to “‘Just-in-place’ labor: Driver organizing in the Uber workplace.” Here, we offer three thoughts on the state of platform labor and its politics in the D.C. area from 2020 to 2022.
Although driver organizing was a fledgling practice at the start of the pandemic, enough groundwork had been covered that local leaders launched a series of Zoom sessions about working conditions. On three Zooms in Summer 2020 with roughly two dozen drivers apiece, the biggest topic of conversation was UI, specifically how to get it. One driver stressed, “you have to keep applying every week, even though you will be denied.” Another recommended applying through two different portals at once. As became clear, the intricacies of qualifying for state-funded UI in addition to, and sometimes instead of, federal pandemic unemployment assistance (PUA) were nothing short of opaque. How much can one drive on the Uber platform in Virginia without disqualifying oneself for PUA, which was based on net incomes in 2019? Which state is faster at processing UI claims? Were claims based on gross amounts? By the end of the year, administrative questions had long eclipsed those related to collective organizing. The contact lists developed by local organizers were no longer useful as many former drivers moved from ride-hail platforms to instant delivery, construction, or other jobs. The pandemic seemed to have expedited turnover in an industry already rife with short tenure, a pattern that ensures significant barriers to collective worker agency. In early 2021, D.C.'s first, and so far only, platform labor organization decided to sunset itself. One organizer put it this way, “there was no fire, no kindling anymore.”
Even Enrique, the protagonist in our recognized article, no longer works for Uber on a regular basis and no longer organizes peers at the D.C. Airport. He has shifted his work to instant delivery platforms like UberEats, DoorDash, and Instacart. When we last connected in February 2022, he spoke about his youngest daughter, who is now 6, and his need to be able to stop work some days and go pick her up and her three siblings from school. When I asked how long he thought he’d been working for platforms, he didn't hesitate with his response of probably five more years. Until then, contingent platform work still made sense. He said if he got “put on a salary” then he might be “stuck to a schedule” that wouldn't allow him to take care of his kids. He went on to mention several new spatial and temporal strategies to block surveillance of where and when he is, and isn't, online with the delivery apps. The apps, he explained, have “a lot of holes and there's a lot of things that you can still do” to make the deliveries financially worthwhile.
Collective worker agency in the D.C. area for delivery apps may be no further than it was when we first wrote our article about the subject. But, the unequal power relations and predatory conditions that necessitate such solidarities seem to have only increased. Platform companies like the ones for which Enrique delivers seem to understand the present crisis. They know it involves widespread alienation (both in and beyond the workplace), and also that it concerns how we care for one another.