Latin America’s new platform-work laws recognise workers but often preserve risk-transfer arrangements while offering few protections to constrain data use, challenge automated decisions or secure collective rights and representation in these new terrains.

Over the past decade, international platform companies have established themselves across Latin America, while local firms such as Rappi and PedidosYa expanded operations in the region. Despite their different origins, these companies increasingly organised work around a common assumption: that presenting themselves as technological intermediaries allowed them to avoid employer obligations and warranted special regulatory treatment. Many workers were initially engaged as users or “partners” and, only under considerable pressure, firms started to consider them as contractors.

Groups of platform workers challenged this understanding from the outset. Disputes over pay, working conditions, deactivations and employment status prompted collective action and litigation, including campaigns and strikes coordinated across countries. Workers found allies among international union networks, labour lawyers and researchers who helped not only to document working conditions but also to connect local struggles with international debates over platform workers’ rights.

These struggles also helped drive national legislation. Chile modified its Labour Code to include provisions for platform work in 2022, followed by Mexico in 2024, Uruguay and Colombia in 2025, and Argentina in 2026. But what, precisely, are these countries doing when they regulate platform work?

As discussed in a recent study I published in the ILO’s International Labour Review a common interpretation is that governments are finally catching up with changes in work organisation and technological innovation after years of regulatory “inaction”, but a closer look shows platform companies did not expand in a regulatory vacuum. They were initially welcomed as a source of readily accessible jobs and a means of “modernising” labour markets amid global economic instability. In Latin America, the sector’s expansion was largely facilitated by flexible, often ad hoc registration and taxation arrangements, selective adaptations of transport and other local regulations, and weak or absent enforcement of labour legislation. So, even when national intervention was sometimes fragmented, contested and occasionally contradictory (especially because labour inspectorates and labour courts challenged on many occasions government decisions) the predominant orientation was enabling.

The recent laws therefore do not represent a transition from no regulation to regulation. As we argue in the research underpinning this piece, they mark instead a shift towards more explicit rules for governing the “labour issue” of platform work: determining who qualifies for labour protection, which obligations companies should assume (in general but also related to the use of automated systems and data at work), how costs and risks are distributed and which institutions have authority over these relationships. What is changing is not the presence of the State, but its orientation and role in work and employment arrangements.

Approaches to governing platform work

Rather than reflecting a single model, the regulatory instruments adopted across Latin America can be understood as following three predominant approaches. The first, regulatory strengthening, involves an attempt (not free from conflict) to extend established labour protections and institutions to platform work, as illustrated by Spain’s Riders’ Law. Mexico’s 2024 reform of the Federal Labour Law seeks to follow this approach, recognising platform work as a form of subordinate employment and establishing corresponding labour rights and employer obligations. However, this recognition is conditional on workers earning with those falling below the established threshold, classified as independent workers and retaining only certain statutory protections. To qualify for employment recognition, workers must earn a net monthly income equivalent to at least Mexico City’s monthly minimum wage. Those earnings are calculated using government-defined exclusion factors (established through implementing regulations and subsequently revised) and vary according to the means of transport used. Unions have criticised both the minimum earnings threshold and the exclusion factors for restricting effective access to employment protections. Their combined implications are certainly substantial: by June 2026, only 237,627 platform workers (14.3% of the approximately 1.66 million registered) met the earnings threshold and qualified for comprehensive social-security coverage, with the remaining 85.7% covered only for occupational risks.

A second approach, regulatory innovation, can be identified in the laws adopted in Chile, Uruguay and Colombia. Rather than reaffirming or adapting existing protections, these instruments establish platform-specific rules, categories and exceptions. All three distinguish between dependent and independent platform workers without establishing a general presumption of employment, leaving important questions about how employment status should be determined, contested and enforced in practice. While extending certain protections to independent workers, these arrangements simultaneously exclude them from others, creating a tension that, as this article shows, risks institutionalising unequal access to labour rights across a large and growing workforce. By doing so, they can cement a form of “platform exceptionalism” within labour law and employment relations systems, whereby digitally mediated work is treated as warranting departures from ordinary labour protections.

The third and final approach is what I call regulatory recoupling, whereby government intervention shifts the legal governance of platform work away from labour law and into other legal regimes. Argentina’s 2026 labour reform under Milei illustrates this. It explicitly identifies delivery and passenger-transport platform workers as “independent service providers”, thereby defining them in law precisely to exclude them from the protections of the Labour Contract Law, while providing for the supplementary application of the Civil and Commercial Code. It also narrows general presumptions of employment and specifies that the limited rights granted under the established regime do not constitute evidence of an employment relationship. Among the approaches examined, this is the most aggressively anti-worker: it uses regulation to entrench exclusion from rights and protections and it also stands in the sharpest tension with the recent ILO Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention (No. 193), particularly its requirement that employment classification be guided by the realities of work.

Taken together, the analysis reveals a contradictory process of incorporation. While laws formally recognise some protections, they make limited advances in guaranteeing substantive labour rights or properly addressing key issues such as automated management systems and the use of workers’ data. They leave largely intact the transfer of business costs and risks onto workers, while the national administration increasingly legitimise and administer these differentiated statuses and regimes of protection were workers become more legally visible and administratively incorporated (through registration, taxation and other requirements), even as their access to labour rights remains partial, conditional or denied.

As highlighted in the article, the adoption of the new ILO Convention 193, alongside the pressure for national protections, represents an important victory won through years of workers’ struggles against platform companies. Yet these gains also reflect the limits of what has been achieved in the face of corporate resistance and government policies that have largely accommodated platform business models. While the Convention offers new grounds for challenging existing arrangements, particularly through its broad scope and emphasis on the realities of employment relationships, it leaves significant gaps in areas such as minimum wages, social protection and substantive data rights. The significance of these regulatory gains may therefore lie less in the compromises they institutionalise than in their potential to provide a basis for renewed collective struggles against platform exceptionalism.