Leapfrog logistics: digital trucking platforms, infrastructure, and labor in Brazil and China

Abstract Critical political economy analyses have principally conceptualised platforms as unproductive economic forms (rentier capital) skimming value off each intermediated transaction and/or illegitimately extracting and capitalizing user data. This scholarship has also focused heavily on extractive dimensions of global North platforms’ operations within the global South. However, a small but growing literature is examining the productive aspects of digital platforms, while important digital platforms are emerging in Southern economies. These trends draw attention to the prospect of platforms playing a role in leapfrog development. This article examines digital trucking platforms in two major economies of the global South: Brazil and China. We argue that trucking platforms are engendering dramatic transformations of these countries’ disorganised road transport logistics systems. Platforms are centralising investment and co-ordinating control. Utilising technologies which surpass those deployed in the global North, they rationalise disorganised and inefficient transport systems by subjecting them to algorithmic rule and minimising bureaucratic inefficiencies. Through greater centralisation, co-ordination and rationalisation, trucking platforms further serve to proletarianize their owner-operator workforces, driving down costs and eliminating barriers to the geographical circulation of capital. While this offers some benefits to workers, it also exposes them to the vagaries of market discipline in new ways.


Introduction
Digital platforms are permeating ever-more significant areas of socio-economic life (Van Dijck et al., 2018).Platforms are distinguished by their hyperscaling approach, use of network effects to lock-in users, a focus on intangible assets (and production of value through the capitalisation of data assets), the building of eco-systems of complementors (rather than either direct command and control of assets or loosely co-ordinated networks), data-driven business strategies, and the governance of their ecosystems through the creation of rules as a means of maximising revenue and profit.As they infiltrate new fields, platform firms are becoming amongst the most powerful players in the global political economy (Helberger et al., 2018;Kenney et al., 2021).The 'scale, ubiquity and criticality of use' of digital communications and media platforms has given rise to the metaphor of 'platforms-as-infrastructure' (Helmond et al., 2019;Plantin & De Seta, 2019, p. 258).However, as platform firms expand their ownership and control over critical physical infrastructures and logistics systems like cloud computing and data centres, internet cabling, telecoms networks, transport systems and satellite infrastructure, the metaphor of platforms' infrastructuralisation is becoming an increasingly material reality (Busch, 2021;Plantin & Punathambekar, 2019).Critical analyses of the growing socio-economic penetration of digital platform firms have focused on their role as rentiers (Christophers, 2022;Sadowski, 2019Sadowski, , 2020)).As socio-economic exchanges are increasingly channeled through platform infrastructures, platforms analyze and capitalize this data, transforming it into an asset which can itself circulate in markets without renumerating the 'data producers' (Birch et al., 2020;Langley & Leyshon, 2017;Van Doorn & Badger, 2021).Much research on the impact of platforms is focused on the global North, where digitalization has advanced the furthest and platform firms are concentrated.However, increasing attention is being paid to the role of digital platforms in the global South and the international political economy.Research has begun to examine how global North platforms operating in the South formalize informal labour (Goldberg, 2018); exploit and plug institutional gaps (Heeks et al., 2021); and extract rents and data by providing infrastructural services where state and private sector capacity previously did not exist (Kwet, 2019).This article interrogates three major assumptions underlying much of the critical platform studies literature: That digital platforms are principally rentier economic organizations, that platforms' main sphere of activity is in the global North, and that digital platforms' operations in the global South are principally organized according to North-South extractivist logics.It examines whether nationally-and regionally-owned or controlled platforms may begin to play a developmental role in the infrastructure and logistics systems of global South economies (Bonina et al., 2021, p. 886).To do so, we scrutinize the organizational forms comprising and socio-economic processes underlying the rapid growth of digital labour platforms operating in the road freight industries in Brazil and China.We select these cases due to their similarities as geographically large, economically significant emerging market economies with historically disorganized road freight logistics centres dominated by owner-operators.We find that new digital platforms operating in both these countries' road freight sectors engage in both directly and indirectly productivity-enhancing investments: By centralizing investment capital in an industry dominated by small-scale owner-operators, pursuing technological and organizational 'fixes' to the barriers to consolidation and growth in the sector, and (partially) proletarianizing and exerting more intensive time-discipline over workers.While this has both negative and positive consequences for labour and other economic agents associated with the trucking sector, platforms offer clear benefits for national economies more generally as they depress transport costs and enhance functionality.At the same time, they represent the potential for global South economies to pursue leapfrog developments in digital logistics and infrastructure.While platform business operations are distinct from those of ordinary firms, then, their negative upshots in many ways represent 'normal' contradictions of capitalist development rather than a rent-based perversion of this logic.We evidence three main trends of platforms in the logistics sector-concentration and centralization of capital and ownership, rationalization through algorithmic governance, and proletarianization of hitherto self-employed workforces-with reference to economic and interview data.We conclude by considering the implications for development and multipolarity in the age of platform capitalism.
The article is organized as follows.Part two surveys recent debates in the literature surrounding rent, rentierism, and platform capitalism.We dispute the increasingly prevalent claim in the critical political economy literature that platforms are simply rent-seekers.Instead, we marshal and synthesize minoritarian strands of this literature to propose that platforms-even when they do plainly engage in forms of rentierism-very often combine these functions with (directly or indirectly) productivity-enhancing economic activities.Part three introduces the potentially developmental role of platforms in the global South.We observe that even as advanced economy platforms penetrate the global South and deploy economically extractive logics, national-and regionally-owned and/or controlled digital platforms are also emerging which are neither owned nor controlled by Silicon Valley firms or global North investment capital.In summary, these arguments dovetail, to open a critical research agenda into platforms which does not presume ex-ante their rentierist and geographically extractivist basis.
In parts four and five, we introduce our cases.We note that the neoliberal development regime produced various forms of spatial unevenness in developing economies, characterized by substantial investment around extractive infrastructure complexes which distorted national space economies, while road freight remained informal and dominated by small-scale owner operators.We claim that in this context, national digital infrastructure and logistics platforms can make sustained productivity-enhancing investments.To test these claims, parts four and five examine and compare trucking platforms in Brazil and China respectively, consider why these middle-income economies have leapt to the technological frontier in the sphere of digital freight, and uncover the technological innovations, organizational structures and labour processes underlying these firms.Part six and part seven discuss the significance of the evidence presented, draw provisional conclusions, and outline a research agenda for future analyses of platform capitalism in infrastructure and logistics.

Rent and digital platforms
The rise of digital platforms is widely understood to represent a phase shift in capitalist business organisation (Boyer, 2022;Grabher & van Tuijl, 2020).Platforms are distinguished by their hyperscaling approach, use of network effects to lock-in users, a focus on intangible assets (and production of value through the capitalisation of data assets), the building of ecosystems of complementors (rather than either direct command and control of assets or single-firm co-ordinated networks), and the governance of their ecosystems through the creation and enforcement of rules.
Orthodox platform studies literature has not significantly problematized the political economy of value production/appropriation in digital platforms.Conventional business and strategy studies accounts understand platforms to engage in ambiguous and varied processes of value 'co-creation' amongst workers, users, and investors, and typologise various forms of platform organization which accord to these differential forms of value creation (e.g.Gol et al., 2019;Haile & Altmann, 2016;Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2018).By contrast, amongst critical political economists, economic sociologists, and economic geographers, the rapidly emerging consensus is that platforms represent inherently rentier economic formations (Birch & Cochrane, 2022;Christophers, 2022;Grimshaw, 2018;Langley & Leyshon, 2017).These accounts substantially concur that by making platform infrastructures unavoidable and monopolistic intermediaries in production and exchange processes, rent-based surpluses can be extracted while data streams can be developed into valuable, proprietary assets (Srnicek, 2021;Van Doorn & Badger, 2021).Sadowski (2020, p. 575) claims that platforms' rents are outstripping land rents in significance-writing that in 'becoming a (necessary) intermediary' to 'the production, circulation, or consumption process' , platforms have become the 'dominant form of rentier in contemporary capitalism' .In even stronger statements of this position, Wark (2019), Zuboff (2019) and Durand (2020) have (albeit in different ways) suggested that the strength of platform's rent-extraction capacities represents a supersession of the capitalist mode of production altogether-either by way of a return to (techno-)feudalism, or a degeneration into a stagnant but exploitative 'surveillance capitalism' .
These conceptualizations of platforms as digital rentiers have emerged in the context of a resurgence of rent theory in political economy.In the classical political economy of Ricardo and Marx, rent was broadly identified in markets for land and minerals (see Haila [1990] for an overview).Rent was theorized as an additional profit appropriated on top of 'normal' profit due to a relative monopoly in a market or the relative scarcity of a held asset, like petroleum or housing.The concept of rent has recently been extended to understand corporate ownership of intangible products encoded as intellectual property rights, such as software, pharmaceuticals and advanced Research and Development (R&D) capabilities (Christophers, 2019;Schwartz, 2022;Birch et al., 2020;Mazzucato, 2018;Rikap & Lundvall, 2022).This literature expands the concept beyond classical political economy understandings of a landlord class extracting ground-rent and applies it to various forms of capitalist activity (Huber, 2022).In this broad understanding, intellectual property rights constitute a part of an increasingly dense thicket of socio-legal apparatuses to encode, capitalize and monopolize 'rent-producing' assets (Wansleben, 2021)-most particularly intangible forms of knowledge capital.In turn, asymmetric competition allows firms possessing such assets (or financial firms holding claims upon them) to extract outsized rewards, to 'appropriate the rents [sic] generated in production and exchange' (Durand & Milberg, 2020;Kaplinsky & Morris, 2016, p. 47).
These accounts share an understanding of corporate power as being increasingly correlated less with productivity and more with capacity to extract rents (Buckley et al., 2022).For Christophers (2019, p. 323) the key problem of contemporary capitalism is that the increasingly powerful 'rentier [class] is not subject to competitive forces, and so in a rentier economy all the [competitive] coercion is experienced by labour' .Digital platforms, it is argued, are amongst the most successful practitioners of this new (anti-)competitive political economy-insofar as they seek to enclose the circulation of capital within their infrastructures and capitalize the exclusive data flows it produces (Langley & Leyshon, 2017).In turn, this 'crystallises a new set of property relations that enable financiers [and platforms] to claim a 'circulation rent' as the very condition of economic exchange' (Arboleda & Purcell, 2021, p. 1613).In this way platforms behave like the big beasts of Braudel's 'anti-market' (Peck & Phillips, 2021), establishing walled gardens and effectively becoming self-contained markets rather than firms proper (Atal, 2021).In sum, contemporary capitalism is less about production than rents, rentiers are everywhere, and digital platforms are the greatest rentiers of all.
This literature captures important dynamics associated with the digitalization and restructuring of the global political economy.Platform capitalism does possess distinctive characteristics vis-à-vis earlier forms of business organization.However, in our view, the critical platform studies literature both overemphasizes the significance of rents versus the productivity-enhancing aspect of platforms, and falsely conceives rents as simply extractive from or parasitic upon productive activities.This is not to refute the rentier features of platforms (nor to provide a comprehensive critique of the considerable literature on rent), but to qualify them in three important ways.First, productive and rentier functions can be bundled within the activities of a single firm in ways which are hard to separate and identify.Therefore, casting platforms as simply rentiers risks concealing the large-scale directly surplus-producing investments in which they also engage.The platform giants like Alphabet and Amazon are amongst the largest R&D spenders in the global economy, while a sizeable portion of their investment flows today not into intangibles but also into profitable physical hardware like datacenters and cabling (Morozov, 2022, p. 118).For this reason, Huber (2022) suggests recasting much of contemporary so-called 'rentierism' as (more ordinary) profiteering by capitalist firms-which is consonant with a Marxist framework in which (due to the equalization of profit rates) firms never receive the exact amount of value back they produce from the process of exchange.
Second, even where rent is extracted by platforms, this need not be purely parasitic but instead a particular form of differential rent (which Marx termed its second form) representing the outcome of productivity-enhancing investment in the asset at hand which disproportionately benefits its users (Ward & Aalbers, 2016). 1 Marx (1992b, p. 756) strictly delineated ground-rent from other forms of interest generated from land which some considered rentierist: Interest on the capital incorporated into the earth and the improvements that are thereby made to the soil as an instrument of production may form a portion of the rent that is paid by the farmer to the landowner, but it does not constitute ground-rent proper, which is paid for the use of the soil as such, whether this is in a state of nature or is cultivated.(our italics) Steinberg (2022) uncovers how the 'platform' concept was developed in the context of the emergence of Toyotist management of inventories and orders within Japanese automobile factories.Platform business logic can be understood as a spin-off of lean manufacturing, an 'organisational fix' for capital aimed at speeding up production via process innovation and work intensification through the use of homogenized and integrated workflows (Neilson, 2007;Piletić, 2023;Silver, 2003).Andrijasevic (2021) further analyses how Foxconn uses various temporary work agencies for the hiring of factory workers in Eastern Europe, which in turn hire workers via digital platforms.These platform agencies offer additional services to Foxconn, like transport of workers to factories and provision of dormitories for workers.Similarly, labour platforms such as Uber and Fiverr offer other additional services including HR functions (Meijerink & Keegan, 2019), resolving paperwork, and providing information about transport demand.The similarity between Foxconn's use of temporary staffing agencies and the general functions of labour platforms acting as intermediaries consists in the cutting down of faux frais of production.And the industrial internet platforms studied by Butollo and Schneidemesser (2022, p. 14) 'do not mainly aim to capture industrial data with the goal of monopolizing intangible assets… Rather, they act as service providers and/ or intermediaries that support manufacturing companies in reaping benefits from data, that is, enhanced productivity of manufacturing processes or lower transaction costs through efficient matchmaking' .In all these cases, rents could be seen to be justified by the superior services provided by the platform.
Third, even where platforms do very plainly engage in purely rent-seeking (or profiteering) behaviour (by for instance arbitrarily increasing use-fees), while this may dampen investment by productive capital, it may also alternatively stimulate greater dynamism in the productive sectors of the economy.As Cox (2022, p. 289) observes, 'increased rents, fees of all sorts, have to be covered by an increase in surplus value.This has occurred to some degree through rationalizing the labor process, but also through the reassertion of appropriation in surplus value's absolute form' .Casting off platforms as simply extractive or parasitic rentiers harming 'productive' capitals is premature.Instead, it is imperative to analyze their functions within the overall circuit of capital and their relationship with the broader economy.As Morozov (2022) reminds us, capitalism has long been an exploitative system bound up with extra-economic violence-there is no theoretical need to invoke a sui generis shift to 'rentierism' to understand these trends.In sum, while platforms hyperscale, produce ecosystems, trade in network effects and lock-in, and enforce rules-all features which make them more or less distinct from 'traditional' multinational firms-they do not solely seek to capture rents in the process.

Development, platforms and space-economies in the global South
Having raised the possibility of digital platforms performing productive functions in capitalist economies, we turn our attention to their geography-before setting out some background for our case study of trucking apps in Brazil and China.Despite rising interest in Chinese platform ecosystems, the platform literature as a whole, as Jia and Kenney (2022, p. 59) have recently argued, is characterized by a 'nearly single-minded focus on Western, in particular, US West Coast firms' . 2 The activities of the Western 'big four' digital platform firms (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) are indeed overwhelmingly concentrated in the high-income economies of the global North (Lundquist & Kang, 2021, p. 183).Moreover, their global predominance exerts a peculiar economic-geographical effect, 'rerouting commerce to centralise power while decentralising the ability to participate in the economy' (Kenney & Zysman, 2020, p. 72).The growing extension of platform giants' operations into the global South has consequently been understood largely from the perspective of North-South extractivism.As Kwet (2019, p. 10) puts it in a wide-ranging study of the role of IPR, Facebook's Free Basics, Microsoft EdTech, and surveillance technologies, 'US multinationals have designed digital architecture which… allows them to accumulate vast fortunes based on rent or data extraction' from the global South.Further studies essentially confirm this picture of North-South digital extractivism in sectors like banking (Aitken, 2017) and FinTech (Langley & Leyshon, 2017); education (Langley & Leyshon, 2017;Prinsloo, 2020); labour and gig work platforms (Gray & Suri, 2019); humanitarian disaster responses (Madianou, 2021); agriculture (Mouton & Burns, 2021); tourism (Fereidouni & Kawa, 2019); internet infrastructure (Oyedemi, 2021); and user data (Coleman, 2019).Without engaging in Silicon Valley boosterism or directly challenging the findings of these studies, given our critique of rentierism above, it is worth questioning (1) whether digital platforms only act to 'undermine local development, dominate the market, and extract revenue from the global South' (Kwet, 2019, p. 7) or whether they may simultaneously play more productive and/or developmental economic roles; and (2) whether global Northern dominance of platform ecosystems is an inevitability, or whether local, national, or regional competitors are emerging.An important and fairly comprehensive review of the nascent literature on the first question reveals that platforms in the global South very often do broaden access to knowledge, innovations, and technologies, and serve to remove frictions to production and provision of goods and services (Bonina et al., 2021).Furthermore, platforms play an important role in creating 'markets which are more efficient, more effective, more complete and more formalised'-even where this leads to classical capitalist outcomes of inequality and powerful market incumbents (Heeks, 2022, p. 11).As for the second question, as Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez (2021, p. 336) observe, 'national digital ecosystems' , including national or regional digital platforms, are indeed emerging.While these 'vary considerably in the extent to which they… rely on the transnational digital infrastructure provided by the 'Big Five' digital corporations, all of which are based in the United States' , they exist on a continuum of digital sovereignty which is never totally foreign-dominated.At the far end of this continuum is the Chinese platform ecosystem, which is substantially autonomous from dependence on US platforms (McKnight et al., 2021; see above).
Indeed, the Chinese case represents something of an incongruity for the geographical assumptions of the platform literature.A small but growing body of platform literature has begun to demonstrate how global North platforms are largely absent from China, which is dominated by domestic internet firms (see inter alia Cai & Wang, 2022;Jia & Liang, 2021;Rolf & Schindler, 2023;Shen & He, 2022).Beyond China, Walton (2022) points to a range of important nationally -and regionally-controlled platforms emerging across global South economies.This growing body of studies has not, however, entirely dislodged the two core spatial assumptions that we identify in the literature-that platforms are principally US-based and operate in the global South simply as ways of geographically extracting value.
To summarize, so far we have argued that platforms are neither necessarily (simply) rentiers, nor are they simply (geographically) extractive of value when they operate in the global South.Our critique of the critical platform studies literature consequently opens the door in principle to political-economic analyses of platforms which are open to their playing both productive and developmental economic roles.To move beyond our critique of the existing literature and demonstrate the analytical gains of adopting a more open research agenda regarding the socio-economic functions of platforms in the global South, the remainder of this article examines the rapid rise during the past decade of nationally-controlled digital trucking platforms in the Southern economies of Brazil and China.
We select these cases because important similarities make it possible to conduct a reasonably structured comparison of platform operations in the real economy (in this case, transport logistics).Both economies experienced sharply uneven spatial development under pre-neoliberal and neoliberal development regimes which produced 'zoned' geographies of advanced manufacturing and logistics contrasted with large hinterlands with low quality transport infrastructure and therefore high costs and long time periods in terms of transport access (Brenner, 2019).As such, Brazil and China remained until recently rather fragmented economies with poor transport and low interregional spatial integration.Both have engaged in extensive road-building projects during recent years, prompting an uptake in road freight (da Rocha & Saes, 2018).Finally, both countries rely overwhelmingly on small-scale owner-operators who constituted roughly 70% of this sector in 2009 (Lodoño-Kent, 2009).
In both cases, domestically-owned and/or controlled digital trucking platforms have emerged, leapfrogging economies in the global North which broadly do not yet use such platform technologies.In neither case do the predominant assumptions of rentierism or extractivism clearly fit platform operations.We show that trucking platforms are concentrating and centralizing investment capital to pursue rationalization of transport systems and enhancing productivity for their customers; generating market efficiencies in and rationalization of historically informal trucking sectors through process innovations and pursuing labour co-ordination and the elimination of bureaucratic barriers.At the same time, they are engaging in a proletarianization process of previously (relatively) informal labour, exposing workers more directly to the vicissitudes of market discipline, while preserving aspects of market inefficiency.We discuss each case in turn, before drawing more general conclusions.

Brazil
The Brazilian logistics sector, including mail, storage and transport, is valued at 628.901 billion Real (US $161.671 billion), 11.8% of GDP.In 2020, the road freight market was worth 216 billion Real (US $55.5 billion) (IGBE, 2022).Road freight is the most important subsector of logistics, representing about 61% of total freight volume (Alvarenga, 2020).The agricultural sector is responsible for most freight, generating about 37% of total volume, followed by manufacturing, which generates 29%.Brazil's total registered number of trucks stands at 2.7 million, while the total number of truckers in Brazil is somewhere around 1 million (suggesting that most trucks are not in regular use).
The Brazilian trucking sector has consisted largely of self-employed drivers since at least the 1970s.The latest available numbers on formally employed truck drivers are from 2018, when 344,231 drivers were registered (CNT, 2019).Official statistics indicate that 973,076 self-employed drivers were registered with the National Agency of Transport (ANTT) in August 2021, while a July 2021 data review revealed 600,000 active in the market (ANTT, 2022).In other words, the number of self-employed truckers is almost twice the number of employed drivers.The Brazilian road freight market is then dominated by owner-operators, which is not unusual for the sector across global South economies.
Legal regulations in Brazil prevent self-employed drivers from closing freight contracts with shippers.Therefore, many transport companies hire a small number of formally employed drivers in addition to self-employed truckers who are often disguised waged workers.Transport companies then charge a fee for the service of intermediation.Since these companies are legally not allowed to act as both transport companies and labour intermediaries, the fee is mostly charged off the books.Apart from this covert form of labour intermediation, there are also pure intermediary firms active in the transport market.In any case, the fees that self-employed truckers pay for the intermediation often account for 30-40% of the total freight prices, representing a significant cut into their earnings.
The general characteristics of the industry, and the grievances of truckers (i.e., low freight prices and high diesel prices) had not until recently changed much since the 1970s.But the conditions of self-employed truckers have deteriorated since 2014, when Brazil entered an economic crisis that persists today (Nowak, 2022).From 2010 on, the Brazilian government facilitated the purchase of new trucks, and the number of truckers started to grow faster than GDP growth.When the economic crisis hit in 2014, transport volumes decreased for several years, but the number of truckers remained constant due to a lack of alternatives on the labour market.With the excess labour in this sector, drivers are not able to obtain higher freight prices whilst the costs for vehicle repair, tires and diesel increase.
Road freight represents 61% of all road freight of all cargo transport, compared with an average of 30% in developed economies, and 42% in the global South (Schroeder & Castro, 1996, p. 176).Heavy dependence upon a fragmented road freight transport system drives up the costs for commodity producers in Brazil, since buyers pay for the transport price from the port of shipping.Rail transport only carries 15% of all commodities (CNT, 2021, p. 3), against an average of 40% in the global North and South.Road freight transport is more expensive than other transport modes for distances over 100 kilometers.Drivers face fines if they are late or if goods are stolen, and overcrowded and low-quality roads and a high amount of freight theft cut into their earnings (CNT, 2021, p. 77).About 37% of road freight trucking in Brazil is for agribusiness, and the largest single commodity transported in Brazilian road freight transport is fertilizers (which are mostly imported), followed by soy and corn, among the most important export commodities (Fretebras, 2022).
Platforms have sought to ameliorate these interconnected problems through concentrating and centralizing investment, rationalizing the industry, and contributing (in the process) to the proletarianization of workers through exposing them to market discipline (even through the use of self-employed arrangements).App-based trucking, which serves to concentrate and centralize investment capital vis-à-vis small-scale operators, started in Brazil in the mid-2000s.TruckPad, one of the first such platforms, came online in 2013.Other important platforms which have emerged are Cargo X, FreteBras, and more recently, Tmov, Freto and Carguero.It was only during the Covid-19 pandemic, however, that the use of trucking apps saw explosive growth in Brazil.For example, the CEO of Cargo X reported in a media interview a 75% growth in turnover for 2020 (Verotti, 2021), while FreteBras reported a 62% growth in terms of cargo volumes in 2020 (Ramos, 2021).The FreteBras platform dominates the market with 63 billion Real of freight shipped over the platform in 2021 and 103 billion Real in 2022 (Fretebras, 2022(Fretebras, , 2023)).Financial newspaper Valor Econômico estimates that FreteBras covers 80% of the market of trucking apps, and competitor TruckPad a further 10% (Pressinott, 2021).Given that about 80 billion Real of freights were mediated via platforms in 2021, and about 125 billion in 2022, we can assume that the intermediation via platforms now represents about half of all road freight cargo in Brazil-probably the largest share among countries with large logistics markets, and far ahead of advanced economies like the United States and the European Union.
Moreover, both foreign and local players continue to enter the market.The Chinese platform Manbang Group (known internationally as Full Truck Alliance) invested an unknown amount of capital in TruckPad at the end of 2019.In November 2021, the dominant FreteBras platform merged with Cargo X to form Frete.com.It received at the same time a new investment of 200 million US dollars, led by Japanese Softbank Latin Fund and Chinese tech giant TenCent.Other investors are Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual and former governor of Florida Jeb Bush.The merger brings together domination in terms of user numbers from FreteBras and the knowledge about digitalisation services from Cargo X. Cargo X used a similar system as Uber with freight prices calculated algorithmically by the platform.Long waiting times for unloading of freight means parts of drivers' time thus remains unpaid with Cargo X.By contrast, prior to the merger, FreteBras operated as a marketplace with no price-setting functions or control over routing.One can expect that the merger will lead to the more widespread adoption of the Uber model of algorithmic control and pricing to trucking.
Platforms which specialize in agribusiness freight have recently gained traction, both in terms of investment and market share.The platform Tmov, launched in 2018, controlled by the established agribusiness logistics company Sotran Logistica, received an investment of 100 million Real in February 2022 from the US private equity conglomerate Arlon Group and Fitpart, a global investment fund based in the Bahamas (Forbes Tech, 2022).The Tmov platform is a completely integrated system where all prices are visible on the platform, in distinction to Fretebras.Another platform closely connected to agribusiness is Carguero, created by original shareholders, the transnational agrotrading giants Louis Dreyfus and Amaggi (Pimenta, 2022), now including agrotraders Cargill and Sartco.Similar to Tmov, Freto grew out of an incumbent logistics company, in this case the French company Edenred, and was launched in 2019.In 2021, the company was spun off from Edenred, and saw 22.5 million Real investment from the capital fund of Edenred and from Brazilian families connected to large retail chains and investment banks (Del Carmen, 2022).Vector, launched in 2020 as a joint venture of Argentine logistics company Target with agribusiness trasnational Bunge, deploys a similar model to Carguero.It closed partnerships with Chinese agrotraders Cofco and Sinagro and the Brazilian producer of fertilizers Galvani, and developed a special application for logistics in industry in November 2022 together with Brazilian steel company Gerdau (Salles, 2022).One recent survey of self-employed truckers identified FreteBras as the most used freight application (by 79%), while 32% named Tmov, 17% Freto, 14% Carguero, and 11% Vector (Berbert et al., 2022).The fact that various platforms who entered the market very recently are able to advance in the market demonstrates that the market has not yet consolidated.
The rapid advance of Brazil's digital freight platforms can be explained by the possibilities for leapfrog development enabled by the informal, undercapitalized, and poorly organized nature of the sector.In particular, they rationalize the organization of the sector by doing away with some intermediaries and bureaucracy.Self-employed truckers resent the long waiting times to get transport orders and burdensome paperwork.Existing intermediaries also cut into truck driver earnings by collecting 30-40% of freight prices.Normally, they pay truckers 80% of the freight price in advance, and 20% upon completion, though this latter portion is frequently not paid.A recent survey reports that almost half of truckers experience the non-payment of the remaining value (Garcia, 2022).Before the arrival of trucking platforms, obtaining a freight contract for a self-employed driver typically necessitated waiting anywhere from several hours to several days at the office of an intermediary or a transport company to pick up an order, and then completing more than 20 official forms.Despite loading times continuing to present a problem (see above), platforms largely eliminate this wait time and bureaucracy.Trucking platforms are (until now) free to use for truckers, while transport companies and shippers pay for access.
Trucking platforms address some of these issues by displaying demand for jobs in real time and automating both payments and paperwork.However, there are limits to the platform-based rationalization of Brazil's freight industry.Most of Brazil's freight platforms, including FreteBras, do not set prices, instead functioning as bidding marketplaces comparable to eBay.Those most often bidding for services are rarely shippers-instead, they remain the same intermediary transport companies which dominate the non-platform trucking sector.This is because most shippers demand a full-service package not yet offered by platforms, including functions like insurance, tracking and planning of routes.Newer platforms offer distinct business models, however.On the one hand, platforms with organic links to agribusiness like Carguero and Vector are immediately integrated into the logistics systems of specific major multinational corporations.On the other hand, apps like Tmov and Carguero offer a tighter integration of various functions like contracting, payment and routing, etc., which enhance the advantages of the platforms for truckers, transport companies and shippers.The key question for market leader FreteBras is therefore if it will be able to make the move from a marketplace to a more integrated service.Although FreteBras offers various features like contracting, payment systems and credit, only a fraction of freight offers on the platform are announced with prices, and often contracting is done outside of the platform.This offers more flexibility for all parties, but crucially comes with security risks, and interviewed trade union officials hint at a large number of experiences with fraud, robbery and abusive charges by intermediaries which platforms were supposed to eliminate in the first place.
As intermediary transport companies increasingly rely on platforms to hire self-employed truckers, they also reduce their formally employed workforce.FreteBras openly advertises that it is 23% cheaper to hire self-employed truckers via their platform than to directly employ them.Rising platform usage thus seems likely to lead to a further reduction in the share of formally employed truckers, thereby undermining a shift towards formal employment relations of wage laborers.In this way, platforms are proletarianizing workforces by directly exposing them to more direct labour market competition (even when this takes the form of growing use of nominally self-employed workers).Should this trend hold, it will be particularly significant for the broader labour market, because, unlike gig work, driving is the primary occupation, income source, and long-term profession for most self-employed Brazilian truckers.While platforms reduce bureaucracy and time costs for truckers, they also place different segments of the road freight transport market into direct competition with one another.For instance, many truckers continue to operate in specific regions or on specific routes, since they do not want to spend too much time away from home.But the enhanced access to information on platforms motivates some truckers to alter their traditional routes or expand their field of operations, thus altering the supply of labor in different regions.Platforms aim to capitalize on return freight when truckers often return from a job with an empty truck-which can increasingly be avoided via the access to information on platforms, and also becomes an option for employed truckers to make extra money.At the same time however, work is intensified and established routes can become undermined.
Freight transport prices in Brazil increased 2% in 2021 while diesel prices rose 48%, with the effect of an enormous drop in real earnings of self-employed truckers (FreteBras, 2022).Like in earlier years, self-employed truckers lack the power to demand higher prices from transport companies, and therefore any inflation in inputs cuts into their earnings.This demonstrates that platforms are until now not a counterweight against the vulnerability of truckers to the inflation of prices of inputs like tires, car parts and fuel.
In sum, domestically-owned/controlled Brazilian trucking platforms have leveraged domestic and international investment capital to significantly rationalize the road transport sector.They have done so through the introduction of algorithmic routing technologies and new bidding platforms, eliminating some paperwork and intermediaries, and guaranteeing payments.At the same time, the open advertising of jobs has undermined truckers' existing relationships and established routes, placing them into more direct competition with one another.Along with use of self-employment and piece-rate payments, truckers are consequently more directly exposed to the vagaries of market competition, and work is consequently being significantly intensified.In turn this is driving a proletarianization process in a sector dominated by owner-occupiers, while cheapening costs of logistics and enhancing visibility of freight flows for shippers and investors.

China
China has the biggest road freight market in the world.In 2020 according to figures from the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission, the total spent on logistics was estimated at 14.9 trillion yuan (about US $2.1 trillion), 14.7% of GDP.In 2020, the market size of road freight was more than 6 trillion yuan (about US $868 billion), while the volume of road freight was more than 30 billion tons, accounting for about 73% of total freight volume (Ministry of Transport, 2021).The manufacturing sector accounts for the lion's share of the Chinese road freight market, whilst the wholesale and retail trade sector is the fastest growing end user of road freight (Mordor Intelligence, 2023).In 2020, there were about 7.3 million heavy goods vehicles in China, and the turnover of this sector was about 4.6 trillion yuan (US $670 billion), accounting for 82% of road freight.Of these heavy goods vehicles, 42% are for consumption logistics and 42% are for production logistics, such as coal, steel, and bulk agricultural products (Boston Consulting Group, 2021).China has the largest group of truck drivers in the world, with about 17.2 million truck drivers in 2020 (Chinanews, 2021).
Before the mid-2010s, the road freight market was highly fragmented and largely relied on individual truck drivers.It is estimated that more than 70% of truck drivers were then self-employed and worked on a freelance basis (Chuanhua Research Centre, 2017).These self-employed drivers owned their own vehicles, and often took on heavy debts to do so.To pay off debts, drivers lived on the road, living, eating and sleeping in their trucks.Unlike their counterparts in Brazil, Chinese self-employed truck drivers were allowed to agree upon their own freight contracts with shippers.Similar to Brazil, significant rigidities and bureaucratisation made working life even more difficult for Chinese truckers.Therefore, some truckers chose to pay to affiliate with intermediary companies, which helped truckers to obtain loans for truck purchases, finish paperwork and provided some orders.However, most truck drivers had to seek orders by themselves to secure jobs.Truckers sought orders by physically attending information stations in local logistics parks, where they paid information service fees, obtained order information, and bargained over shipping prices.It typically took three to five days for a driver to get a shipping order with acceptable routes and prices.Moreover, a shipping transaction usually involved multiple middlemen, who took advantage of information asymmetry in the vast and fragmented market and pushed up shipping costs (intermediaries accounted for about 15% of total freight fees).
The Chinese government introduced several industrial policies with the aim of encouraging the application of information technologies to the logistics sector to promote efficiency, including 'The opinions on promoting the development of modernised logistics' by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2004 and 'The plan on adjusting and revitalizing logistics' by the State Council in 2009.As a response to these policies, some websites were established by companies to match shippers and truckers in the early 2010s.However, their impact was very limited without large-scale use, and the coverage of these services was limited to certain areas or cities, instead of being province-based or nation-wide.
Platforms have burgeoned in various sectors of China's economy since the mid-2010s.The development of digital technologies like routing, pricing and matching algorithms, Internet of Things, and cloud capabilities, alongside the wider consumer access to the internet via smartphones, led to a rapid platformization of sectors like food-delivery, ride-hailing and road freight.These attracted huge flows of private and state venture capital, including significant foreign investment.Platforms have significantly concentrated and centralized investment capital in a road freight sector dominated by owner-operators.A significant event in the process of trucking platformization was the merger of the two largest players in the online truck-hailing sector: Yunmanman and Truck Alliance, in 2017, founding the largest truck-hailing platform in China-Full Truck Alliance (FTA) Group.Amongst FTA's biggest backers are global private equity and venture capital (VC) funds like Softbank and Sequoia Capital, alongside Chinese funds like Tencent Holdings and Yunfeng Capital.In 2020, FTA was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and was valued at US $21 billion.In 2021, it claimed to have gained 262.3 billion yuan (US $41.2 billion) in gross transaction value (GTV), accounted for 65.3% of market share of the GTV of the Chinese digital freight platforms, and fulfilled over 128.3 million truck shipping orders with 3.5 million truckers (Full Truck Alliance, 2021).In the fourth quarter of 2021, an average number of 1.57 million shippers posted shipping orders on FTA platforms each month (Full Truck Alliance, 2021).By 2021, the average time required to match drivers and shippers had declined to just 10 min per order, which hugely increased the efficiency of freight matching.FTA's revenue is mainly derived from membership and freight brokerage fees from shippers, alongside transaction commissions paid by truckers.Beyond its core functionality, FTA also provides some other services for shippers and truckers.For example, on FTA platforms, shippers can access a transportation management system, credit solutions and insurance services, and truckers can manage traffic ticket records, electronic toll collection services and energy services (Full Truck Alliance, 2021).
In the road freight sector, platforms connect shippers with truckers to facilitate shipments across a range of distances, cargo weights and types.In this way, these platforms improve information asymmetry, break down geographical and other monopolistic constraints on information, and increase the efficiency of matching shippers with drivers.This has the overall effect of rationalizing an industry plagued by bureaucratic and organizational inefficiencies.Shippers can post orders on their mobile phones and make informed decisions about truckers' suitability based on their profiles and track records, without having to go through intermediaries.Truckers are able to access the order information more easily over broader areas or even across provinces, without waiting for days at logistics parks.Truckers also save on the mileage and time of traveling long distance to and from logistics parks between shipments.In addition, truckers can also avoid carrying empty loads on return trips.
The platformization of road freight operations has also been strongly supported by the Chinese government to enhance efficiency in the logistics sector.In 2016, the National Development and Reform Commission drew up a strategic plan on ''Internet Plus' to Enhance Efficiency in Logistics' and the Ministry of Transport put forward 'Opinions on the Promotion of Non-Truck Operating Common Carriers and Innovative Development in Logistics' .The 'Non-Truck Operating Common Carrier' has been renamed and defined as road freight platforms in the '2019 Interim Measures for Business Operations of Road Freight Platforms' by the Ministry of Transport.
In addition to these developments, new market entrants continue to appear.By the end of 2022, there were 2,537 digital freight platform companies (including subcompanies and specialised spinoffs), which fulfilled about 94 million shipping orders-about five times the 2020 volume (Ministry of Transport, 2021).In addition to FTA, there are some other emerging trucking platforms with different business models.For example, For-U Smart Freight, established in 2015, is a platform that provides end-to-end fully digitalised services, including pricing and order placing, dispatching and transportation.It focuses on the full truckload (FTL) market, instead of the less than truckload (LTL) market.FOR-U has attracted investment from institutions including Eastern Bell Capital, Bank of China Group Investment Limited (BOCGI), Global Logistics Properties and Matrix Partners China and others.Its main shippers are large logistics enterprises, such as Deppon logistics, JD logistics and SF Express.As of the first quarter of 2021, the total number of orders is 3.2 million and over 580,800 drivers had completed orders on the For-U platform (For-U Smart Freight, 2021).For-U's revenue mainly derives from the price spread between what For-U platform charges shippers and what the For-U platform pays carriers.For-U's platform automatically generates separate prices for carriers and shippers, taking into account factors including real-time supply and demand, predicted order volume, weather and traffic (For-U Smart Freight, 2021).
In addition, some platforms such as LaHuoBao and Kuaicheng are targeted at particular goods classifications, such as hazardous chemicals and coal.Some other freight platforms, such as Huolala and Didi Freight, also provided services for drivers with light duty trucks, although their main business focuses on intra-city van delivery services.Furthermore, some localised logistics companies and logistics parks have applied platform technologies to establish their own platforms.Using platform technologies, logistics companies attract more individual self-employed truckers, in addition to their own (typically directly employed) truck fleets, which lowers their costs and enables rapid scale-up of orders during peak times.For logistics parks, digital platforms help them to facilitate and fulfil orders with their existing shippers more quickly and efficiently.
New trucking platforms are reorganizing work to more directly expose truckers to market imperatives (proletarianization).Among these platforms, FTA platforms are the most popular among 'gig' truckers and small to medium enterprises.Of 2,055 drivers surveyed in 2019 (Chuanhua Research Centre, 2019), more than 90% claimed that they have used the FTA platforms, including Yunmanman and Truck Alliance, and about 38% used these platforms to acquire more than one third of their orders.Due to the predominance of FTA in the truck-hailing sector, its platforms have established significant rule-setting and pricing power.At the early stage, FTA platforms provided a free matching service and allowed truckers and shippers to negotiate prices.Eventually, however, platforms introduced fee schemes for both truckers and shippers.In June 2018, the platforms initiated a policy that prevents truckers and shippers from contacting each other to ensure transactions and price rates were set exclusively via the apps.FTA also restricted price negotiations through automated pricing (Tan, 2018).In 2020, to increase revenue, FTA started to collect commissions from truckers for completed shipping orders.With the same motive of higher revenue, other freight platforms also started to charge drivers more fees.For example, Huolala not only collected service fees (equal to the commission fee) but also charged drivers membership fees.If drivers refused to pay the membership fee, drivers had to pay more service fees with a limited number of orders, and it was more likely for them to get less favourable orders.Furthermore, through referral and bonus schemes and zero-down payment, no-interest loans for truck purchases, platforms incentivize market expansion by encouraging truckers to enter the sector.
In 2020, sales of heavy goods vehicles hit a record high, with 1.62 million trucks sold-an increase of 37.9% year on year (China Association of Automotive Manufacturers, 2021).This caused a severe oversupply in the trucking labour market, which lowered costs while burdening new drivers with heavy debts (China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing, 2023).To meet monthly truck financing payments (typically from 5,000 to 10,000 yuan, US $700-1400), truckers often need to take on more orders and work longer hours.A wave of new labour market entrants pressures drivers to accept lower payments.Drivers interviewed for this study claimed that prices with the same routes have been reduced by as much as 30-50% in the last five years.According to figures from the China Logistics Information Center (2022), the national road freight price index decreased by about 17% over the last five years, due in part to platforms' lower cost, the increased efficiency of freight matching, weakened bargaining power of truckers and an oversupply of truckers in the market.
Therefore, squeezed payments and unstable income, combined with rising fuel costs, has led to a deteriorating situation for truckers.In addition, because platform algorithms unilaterally (or in collaboration with shippers) decide the order allocation among drivers, it is increasingly difficult for individual truckers to get stable orders.One interviewed driver felt deeply frustrated as he was under great pressure to meet monthly debt repayments; but it was difficult for him to get sufficient work on the platforms: 'When I chose to start a new job in this sector, I thought as long as I worked harder and longer, at least I could earn a bit more.But I was wrong as the platform did not allocate enough orders to me!' As another interviewed trucker bitterly warned, '…for those who just entered this sector and need to pay the monthly mortgage to get a truck, I would strongly recommend they go back to factories and make screws.There is no space to survive in this sector now' .On the 8th and 9th of June 2018, truck drivers organised protests across provinces to demand lower gas prices, higher pay for their freight, against the despotic rules of trucking platforms, and to oppose arbitrary application of traffic fines charged by the local government authorities (Lin & Ngai, 2021).
The platformization of road freight operations in China is thus continuing apace, promoting increased efficiency and lowering transportation costs.In addition to freight matching, these platforms are helping to develop a digital and smart logistics infrastructure in China with more services and powerful network effects.However, this has been accompanied by the exertion of time-discipline over and greater economic insecurity for drivers.

Discussion
Our comparative analysis of the activities of digital road freight platforms in Brazil and China confirms our thesis of their potentially efficiency-and productivityenhancing functions, existing alongside rentierist or profiteering behaviour.Building on this broader argument about the potential for platforms to play productive (and non-extractive) socioeconomic functions, we identify three fundamental similarities at play across our two cases: Concentration and centralization of investment in previously undercapitalised areas; rationalization of disorganised road freight sectors encumbered with heavy bureaucracy and other inefficiencies; and proletarianization of workforces previously somewhat insulated from direct exposure to labour markets discipline (albeit by bolstering or even increasing their nominal self-employment).Trucking platforms combine network effects due to their growing market dominance with institutional void-filling functions aimed at enhancing trust; providing technological and organizational functions aimed at enhancing productivity and efficiency; and exploitative behavior aimed at intensifying the labour process through time-discipline and increased indebtedness.Their major beneficiaries are shippers who receive lower prices and enhanced speed of service and contracting (along with tracking and other information), while drivers themselves also benefit in part from more rapid contracting.
Another common characteristic of the Chinese and Brazilian road freight market is their contribution to a systematic oversupply of truckers.Introducing significant efficiencies in hiring and paperwork while offering cheap financing for vehicle purchase has substantially reducing the costs of labour market entry for new truckers.The possibility to acquire cargo on a flexible basis during return trips is also increasing the efficiency of road transport, but also places different segments of truckers into more direct competition compared with their operations in relatively isolated markets.The gains for truckers are counteracted by downward pressure on their earnings, due to a decrease in freight prices in China and due to higher costs for inputs and diesel in Brazil.While platforms increase efficiency in certain aspects of the business, the shift away from transport companies to an increasing use of self-employed truckers will lead to less inefficiency and more congested roads since self-employed truckers tend to use older and smaller trucks.
There are three theoretical means by which we can conceptualize the value production/appropriation processes taking place on the platforms at hand.One is as a form of rent, where enhanced platform rents are both extractive (absolute rents) and the upshot of productivity-enhancing investment in the platform infrastructure (differential rent two) which in turn generates efficiencies for users.The second involves an investment in infrastructure.For Harvey (2018), investment in transport, infrastructure and logistics (along with the built environment more generally) represents a distinctive circuit of capital to that of ordinary value production.Transport is productive of value in itself, since the change of location is part of the use value of the commodity. 3Moreover, these investments are (potentially) capitalized and valorized insofar as they stimulate new value production in the productive primary circuit of commodity production (Castree & Christophers, 2015).Third, insofar as they act as de facto employers, road freight platforms engage in both relative and absolute forms of surplus value production through the exploitation of productive labour, while contributing to the more direct exposure of previously relatively informal labour to market discipline.
It is worth expanding on this final point.Despite the legal status of platform truckers (nominal self-employment), if we understand freight platforms as employers, 4 then it is possible to understand platform business strategy as being about producing greater quantities of both absolute and relative surplus value place through: (1) reorganizing the production process they control in pursuit of efficiencies (and thus shedding labour) through the process innovations detailed above, and (2) intensifying labour through time-discipline and debt-relations.The evidence presented above would suggest both of these processes are taking place simultaneously, with a stronger focus on relative surplus value production in the more technologically-advanced Chinese platforms.Productivity enhancement under capitalism means greater labour exploitation through pushing down prices without reference to the reproduction costs of labour (Cammack, 2022), and precisely such dynamics appear to be prevalent in the evidence drawn from the impact on work discussed above.
Platform-engendered proletarianization, rather than taking the shape of formalised employment, is instead pursued through disguised wage work, with many truckers purchasing their own vehicles on credit-creating a debt spiral which forces truckers to work for ever-lower freight prices.As such, proletarianization in trucking is not following the path established in the global North of formal separation of workers from the means of production, but relies heavily on nominally self-employed owner-operators without real economic freedom or control over working patterns.Self-employment contributes to more flexibility and lower costs for shippers, but at the same time paradoxically inhibits further productivity improvements-since self-employed truckers own older and smaller vehicles in comparison with transport companies, often leading to congested roads and worse fuel efficiency.It is at this point that the narrow preferences of shippers prevail over those of all capitalist firms in the economic dynamics of transport, since shippers are ultimately concerned with costs and not at the overall productivity and organization of road freight transport.As such, while the three dynamics of concentration and centralization, rationalization and proletarianization predominate, the leapfrog technological development to which they have contributed co-exists uneasily with the preservation of earlier organizational and technological forms.

Conclusion
The article shows how road freight platforms in Brazil and China have rapidly become powerful, market-shaping intermediaries, as has happened in other similar markets like food delivery and car passenger transport.In this way, such platforms are becoming infrastructural-insofar as they increasingly control critical parts of logistics systems in these economies.Concentration of market share and centralization of capital has facilitated substantial investment in generating productivity increases.These have been achieved through rationalization, including by the enhanced flow of information about supply of truckers and demand for transport, complemented by an amelioration of bureaucracy in contracting, payment and associated administrative issues.Brazil and China until very recently experienced extreme fragmentation and informality in the trucking industry, and therefore new digital platforms are able to intermediate a fairly large amount of all road freight contracts at a rapid scale.The productivity-enhancing potential of platforms increases their power even more, as they become essential constituents of markets in which transport costs are key for international competition, for example, in the competition between Brazilian and US soy production.In addition, the specific form of proletarianization facilitated by road freight platforms is the reliance on owner-operators, delegating responsibilities and the financial weight of rising prices for inputs to disguised wage workers.
The core features of platforms are now commonly identified as a focus on a hyperscaling approach to growth, the reaping of network effects to lock-in users, the development of significant intangible assets (including a capitalisation of data assets), the building of platform ecosystems of complementors, and the setting of rules.In addition to these general features, critical political economists have focused their attention on platforms' rentierist character, and identified how platforms engender extractive geographical transfers of value from global South to North.By contrast, this paper has argued that rent-and extraction-based conceptions of platforms tend to overlook aspects of platform power associated with productive investments, and therefore rather underestimate what the concentration of capital and investment centralization function of platforms can mean for industries and the prospects for developmental outcomes.In cases where platforms succeed in becoming crucial parts of the productive infrastructure, they become actors which will be hard to replace given their tendency towards monopolization of markets.We have in our case discussions emphasized the manifold productive functions platforms play in the provision of goods and services in capitalist economies.Moreover, we have emphasized that local platforms not dominated by Silicon Valley and capital from the global North are indeed emerging in Southern economies.That road freight platforms in Brazil and China are not spin-offs of Northern platform giants, and global Northern investors are not of paramount importance-with the exception of Japanese Softbank-also refutes the claims that platforms inevitably reinforce North-South hierarchies and engage in North-South data and economic extractivism.Instead, they point to the potential emergence of a new multipolarity of platform businesses, replicating similar relations of class and exploitation, but not necessarily according to preexisting North-South hierarchies.
Brazil has seen little in the way of institutional responses to the digitalization and platformization of road freight.An electronic transport document simplifying documentation, DT-e, was approved by the government in September 2021 and is currently awaiting implementation.DT-e will simplify some documentation issues which are presently resolved by the platforms.Whether this poses a major challenge to platform business models, however, remains to be seen.One result of the truckers' strike in 2018 was a legally defined minimum for freight prices.Despite patchy implementation, employers' organizations successfully mobilized the Supreme Court to rule on the minimum prices, so that fees in violation of those prices are suspended since 2020.The Supreme Court continues to drag its feet on the issue since it is neither motivated to confront truckers nor employers.
In China, labour conditions in the gig economy are increasingly coming under the direct scrutiny of the Chinese state.In January of 2022, FTA and three other freight platforms (Huolala, Didi Freight, Kaigou) were interviewed by the Ministry of Transport regarding concerns over the arbitrary power over the pricing system, increased membership fees, low-price spiral, and illegal transportation of oversized and overloaded vehicles (Li, 2022).The same issues were raised again when these four freight platforms were interviewed by the Ministry of Transport in July.The government only suggested that these platforms should publish their commission rates and membership fees, build a fair market, and protect drivers' interest.However, the government has not passed any legislation yet.In addition, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) has also attempted a new way of organizing truckers, called 'trade union plus platforms' , by developing online platforms as a recruitment and organizing tool.For example, since October 2021, truck drivers in Anhui Province can join the trade union by registering on an app which provides a range of services for truck drivers (such as legal advice, insurance services, etc.) (CNR News, 2018).However, whether joining the trade union would have any material effect on truckers' conditions and wages remains to be seen.
Far more research is urgently needed, however, to unpack Southern platforms' increasingly wide range of business functions, degrees of technological independence, impact on space economies and upon national development in the context of a still unequal global political economy.Whether the rise of powerful new market-dominating platform firms operates in the same way across the global South and North, for instance, would be one avenue of exploration.Another would be to examine in more detail the processes of class formation given rise to by platformization.This could be pursed both in terms of examinations of capitalist class reorganization via platformization (including deeper explorations of the connection between domestic and overseas finance capital and Southern platforms), and in terms of how platform workforces are being (re)constituted.

Notes
Technology and Management Centre for Development, University of Oxford.Her research interests cover international and comparative employment relations, platform work, and innovation management in the digital era.
Dr. Jörg Nowak is a visiting professor at the postgraduate program on Environment and Rural Development (PPG MADER) at University of Brasília.His research areas include labour conflicts, workers and social media, logistics and infrastructure and racial capitalism.His latest publications are 'Labour conflicts in the Global South ' (2022, with Andreas Bieler), and'Mass Strikes andSocial Movements in Brazil andIndia' (2019).
Dr. Steve Rolf is ESRC Research Fellow at the Digital Futures at Work (Digit) Research Centre, University of Sussex.He is a political economist researching the digitalisation of work, the rise of platforms, and their regulatory and geographical consequences.He has published widely on topics related to these fields and is currently working on a monograph examining the rise of platforms in the context of the long-run global economic slowdown.