‘There’s nowhere to run on the street. Go eat the bread that the devil kneaded’

Juliana Iemanjara Janaina do Nascimento dos Santos, 34, has a degree in accounting. She raises two children on her own and since 2019 has been delivering an app, in addition to working as a waitress and selling cakes. Per month, she raises $4,500 on average.

For a week, his daily life was documented by photographer Rafael Vilela, who since 2020 has researched the work of delivery people and the platform economy in Brazil.

The account below was given during several interviews during this period.

My name is Juliana Iemanjara, I am 34 years old. I am a black woman from the periphery, I raise my two children alone, with the help of my mother, in Vila Inglesa, south of São Paulo.

I’ve been working since 2019 as an app delivery guy. To supplement my income, I also work odd jobs in bars, selling products on the internet and sweets on the streets.

I have a degree in accounting and I dream of deepening my studies to help the delivery people movement — I am part of the collective Deliveradores Antifascistas — and also buy my own home.

I support my family alone. I have my two children, I have my mother. She takes care of my children so I can do all this running. I pay the rent, I pay the motorcycle installment, it can’t stop, right? You have to be on the street all the time and it gets very complicated.

The apps I make are LalaMove and Uber. These are the ones I do the most. There is also ClickEntrega, which has now become an application. There are some other apps on the market too, like Appjusto; These days I registered, I was approved, but it plays very little yet. It doesn’t have much demand, so it’s an app you end up turning on to complement the other apps you use.

From iFood I was blocked. I worked with them on the OL system [Operador Logístico, empresa que fornece mão de obra terceirizada para os aplicativos], which is like a fixed. You are an employee, there is someone who commands your service there.

When I decided to leave this system and enter the cloud system [um sistema aberto, em que o entregador supostamente decide as horas e regiões de trabalho], my supervisor at OL did not want to release my account and blocked me. He made my account, so he had access to the email and password.

I think the only good side of the apps is that you can work, there are a lot of people who can’t get a registered card, they don’t have training, they are unemployed, they left the prison system, these people go to the app. But in a very precarious job.

You work the hours you want, you can articulate your own hours, because you turn on your application. But not everyone is like that, there are applications where you do need to work a certain time to be released to work on the weekend, you know? Things like that. If you don’t fulfill what they want, they won’t release certain regions, often the ones they touch the most.

If it is already complicated for men to do this service, for women it is twice as difficult. It’s not easy. I think all women on the street have this notion. Biker also doesn’t respect the biker, if you see that it’s a woman then it got worse.

On the street you have to be unwound. There’s nowhere to run. Will suffer. Go eat the bread that the devil kneaded. One question is to use a toilet, how do you do it? At the time of the pandemic it was very complicated because I couldn’t get anywhere. Sometimes at a gas station or even a bar you need to consume something to use the bathroom, but not all the time we have money to buy a candy, to buy water.

There have been times when I’ve been told “wow, it’s a woman, that’s why it took so long”. It didn’t actually take me five minutes to arrive, but the customer probably wasn’t looking at the app as the restaurant took forever to deliver the package to me. So he thinks I was the one who took the time.

The run is calculated from the pick-up location to the customer, but it is not always calculated correctly. Considering what I went through to get to the pick-up location, this calculation that the application itself made is often not accurate. We know it goes much further. Sometimes you travel 8 km to earn R$ 5. This is how the apps are. That’s what I always say to everyone: you have to look for other means of income.

I moonlight in a bar as a waitress, selling things on the internet. When there’s money left, my mother and I make cakes to sell, we make sweets.

The guy who says he makes R$ 5,000 a month on the delivery app has no life, no family, he just works for it for a purpose for him. It is often easier for men, if he has a child, he will stay with his wife, so he can work. And the women who go out on the street, leave their children with whom? Who takes it to school?

These days I posted a colleague who works by bicycle, who went with her baby to deliver. The app does not give you daycare assistance. There’s nowhere to run. How much time do you have to participate in a collective, to run after something and claim your rights, how much time do you have for that?

You work all day carrying food on your back with hunger. I’ve seen several kids who stop, take the lunch box from inside the motorcycle and sit on the sidewalk to eat. Who are ashamed to ask to warm up somewhere, eat cold food.

This is a flag that we delivery people started to raise: that the apps could, at a certain time, have an option there that you can click on and pick up lunch at a restaurant for you to eat.

Delivery people don’t have a place to rest. They often don’t have a place to charge their cell phones. They don’t have any of that. Then you think of a guy who leaves his house early in the morning and starts doing this thing: at some point he will need to charge his cell phone.

In the apps there is no emergency button, if you have an accident you will not be compensated, supported, even for a certain time, which is the time you will be stopped because your motorcycle broke down, because you were injured, no have. That’s the bad side of it.

The risk of an accident exists just because we leave the house. The biker runs a greater risk because his body is like the body of the car, the bodywork of the car. It rained, we are already reducing speed. We still see some crazy people accelerating from time to time, but hey, it’s your life on a motorcycle.

Some apps start to promote to pay delivery people more when it rains, to compensate for the fact that many stop working because of the risk. Some couriers think, “Oops, time to make money.” I’ve worked a lot like that in the storm. But today, when it starts to get too heavy, I go home. I have three people who depend on me, I can’t be irresponsible to the point of going crazy. Money pays our bills, but that’s not all.

People are app addicts, app value addicts. Then you will talk about the value of your work and they will ask: “But in the app it’s cheaper”. At that time you have to have an argument. Explain that the application is a giant company, which has a lot of money and gives discounts to have a lot of customers.

You have to explain to him why that value, right? Look at the value of gasoline, in addition to gasoline, my motorcycle, I’m wasting tires, I’m wasting oil, engine. At the end of the year I’ll have to do the motorcycle document, there’s maintenance.].

When I was 14, I learned to ride a motorcycle, so I’ve always liked motorcycles. I do what I love, we don’t like it when we’re working like a convict, being precarious, receiving little. Of course, we were outraged.