At the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in 2023, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, declared that “platforms should not abolish the labor laws we fought so hard for.” The words carried the historical weight of a former metalworker who had been imprisoned by his country’s dictatorship for organizing labor strikes in the 1980s, and who, in 2023, was beginning his third presidential term after having been jailed again less than three years earlier. Yet, as Lula approaches the end of his current mandate, platform work in Brazil remains unregulated: drivers and delivery workers have taken to the streets against the government’s own proposals, while Uber supported the initial version of the bill.

The Lula government’s first proposal, backed by the platforms, sought to expand some rights while recognizing workers as self-employed, preventing their recognition as formal employees with full labor protections. It faced strong resistance from workers. Later, the government presented a new bill that expanded the recognition of platform workers as formal workers, but it encountered strong resistance in Congress. In this context of deadlock over the regulation of private platforms, another path, one that depends only on the executive branch, has gained centrality: public funding for the development of worker cooperative platforms and public labor platforms. The Brazilian case offers a path of international interest, especially given that the regulation of commercial platforms has also been blocked or weakened in places such as California, France, and Chile.

In this context of deadlock over the regulation of private platforms, another path, one that depends only on the executive branch, has gained centrality: public funding for the development of worker cooperative platforms and public labor platforms.

With USD 2.6 million in public investment, the Lula government is funding two ambitious initiatives developed by public universities: a platform for LigaCoop, a national federation of driver cooperatives; and a public white-label platform, capable of offering shared technological infrastructure and adaptable interfaces for different types of cooperatives.

These initiatives emerge in a promising national and international context. In Brazil, the city government of Rio de Janeiro, through its public IT company, IplanRio, developed Táxi.Rio is a fully autonomous public platform competing with Uber on behalf of the city’s taxi drivers. The app has already completed more than 44 million rides, with 100% of fares going to drivers. Internationally, Bharat Taxi, supported by the Indian government, is a cooperative app with 5,000 drivers and 2.5 million downloads. Beyond initiatives directly supported by the state, platform cooperativism already brings together around one million workers globally, with 640 projects in 53 countries across areas such as ride-hailing, care work, audio and video streaming, agriculture, freelance services, and software development.

Public platform development in Brazil: Worker control and a white-label platform

The first federally funded platform is the LigaCoop app, developed in partnership with the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG). LigaCoop is Brazil’s national federation of driver cooperatives, currently organizing around 5,000 workers across 18 states. The government funded the federation to build what it describes as an inter-cooperative app: a system owned by the workers, not by the state. This was a deliberate choice designed to ensure continuity regardless of future political changes.

The government funded the federation to build what it describes as an inter-cooperative app: a system owned by the workers, not by the state. This was a deliberate choice designed to ensure continuity regardless of future political changes.

The development team brings together tech workers with prior experience in major Brazilian mobility companies such as 99, later acquired by China’s DiDi Chuxing; leading figures from Brazil’s free software movement; and engineers from public IT companies. On data governance, LigaCoop has partnered with FURG to ensure that all user and worker data will be hosted in national data centers, combining a commitment to national data sovereignty with worker access to platform data.

The second initiative is a white-label public platform developed by the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). Unlike a single-purpose app, it is designed as a modular and adaptable digital infrastructure: its core architecture can be customized with different interfaces for different types of cooperatives and services, reducing the duplication of technical costs across the ecosystem. A pilot will be launched for a motorcycle delivery workers’ association in 2026, with the full system expected by 2027. The platform will initially run on UFSC’s own servers, funded by FINEP, Brazil’s innovation agency, reducing dependency on private foreign cloud providers.

What is especially significant in the UFSC case is the platform’s governance model. A multidisciplinary team of researchers designed its algorithmic logic through consultation workshops with workers. One concrete outcome is that the platform will offer workers longer windows to accept delivery requests, directly contrasting with the accelerated and punitive logic of commercial apps, which often incentivize risky behavior. In exchange for longer periods of delivery, clients get lower prices, since cooperative platforms do not extract profit beyond fair worker compensation.

Every worker will have unrestricted access to transaction records, event logs, and performance metrics, with no algorithmic black boxes.

Full data transparency is also built into the design. Every worker will have unrestricted access to transaction records, event logs, and performance metrics, with no algorithmic black boxes. The interface replicates familiar app design patterns while remaining accessible to users with limited literacy or digital skills. Open APIs will allow researchers and public agencies to audit the system, offering a meaningful step toward democratic oversight of labor platforms.

Together, these two initiatives represent a strategic response to a hard lesson. Brazil’s first publicly supported cooperative platform, launched in Araraquara in 2019, collapsed largely because the cooperative remained dependent on third-party commercial apps and foreign cloud infrastructure, with no control over its own data, source code, or operational continuity. The new platforms are designed precisely to avoid repeating that failure.

Limits and uncertainties

Yet the timing of these initiatives raises serious questions about their future. Both platforms were launched only at the end of the Lula administration, with full deployment expected in 2026 and 2027, precisely as Brazil enters a national election year. Whether an incoming government will sustain, expand, or simply abandon them remains an open question.

Both platforms were launched only at the end of the Lula administration, with full deployment expected in 2026 and 2027, precisely as Brazil enters a national election year. Whether an incoming government will sustain, expand, or simply abandon them remains an open question.

Beyond political continuity, the platforms also face structural gaps that no app alone can solve. For these initiatives to become viable alternatives, they need a broader policy ecosystem: public procurement rules that direct government agencies and state-owned companies to hire cooperative platforms, dedicated funding for marketing and user acquisition in markets dominated by digital monopolies willing to operate at a loss, public credit lines to sustain cooperatives in their early stages, training programs that prepare workers for the commercial self-management of platform enterprises, and fiscal simplification to reduce the tax burdens that often make cooperative formalization prohibitively costly. None of this is currently provided by Brazilian state policy, and without these supporting instruments, even well-designed platforms risk becoming technological experiments rather than viable alternatives to gig work: impressive in conception, but irrelevant in scale.

For a fuller account of this trajectory, my new report from the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE), Platform Cooperativism and the State: Lessons from Brazil’s Public Policies (2023–2026), traces five years of pioneering official recognition of platform cooperativism by the Brazilian state and presents a detailed action plan for overcoming the current policy bottlenecks. It covers financing mechanisms, governance reform, legal modernization, technological infrastructure, and movement-building strategies that can turn isolated pilots into enduring state policy.

The Brazilian experiment shows that the future of platform work does not have to be left to Uber, Amazon, or other Big Tech.

The Brazilian experiment shows that the future of platform work does not have to be left to Uber, Amazon, or other Big Tech. If public investment, worker ownership, and democratic data governance can be brought together at scale, public platforms may become more than alternatives to exploitation: they may become the digital infrastructure of a new solidarity economy.