A study by the Encuentro Foundation measured the cost of living for app delivery workers in Argentina. Focused on data from Rappi and Pedidos Ya, the report reveals that the average order was $2,553.6 (without tip) for September of this year in Argentina.
Thus, according to the report that calculates the Average Order Scope Coefficient (APP), a worker, in order to cover the Total Basic Basket calculated by Indec, of $1,176,852 for a household of 4 people, needs to make 461 orders per month.
The methodology is based on this simple quotient: the monthly value of the total basic basket for a family of 4 people is divided by the average value of an order on delivery platforms, considering the average between Rappi ($2,393.4) and Pedidos Ya ($2,713.8).
The Foundation also calculated that to reach a Minimum Wage (currently at historic lows) 126 requests are needed, 15 to pay the monotax, 190 to raise a child and 271 to pay an average rent.
If we take into account the minimum wage stipulated by the workers of the Indec Internal Board, the number of distributions amounts to 775 per month, more than 35 per day. According to the workers’ report, for September, a household made up of a 30-year-old couple and two school-age minors needed a monthly income of $1,979,769 to cover their basic needs: $675,671 allocated to the Minimum Food Basket and $1,304,098 for other basic goods and services.
According to the analysis of the Encuentro Foundation, a sustained growth of “the platform economy” stands out in recent years. Among them, the report highlights, “delivery applications occupy a central place: they concentrate more and more workers, especially young people and migrants, and have become part of the daily urban landscape. This phenomenon expresses a profound transformation in the ways of organizing work and income.”
Precarization Advances
While employers and the Government want to impose a labor reform, which will eliminate more rights, according to the latest data from Indec (2nd quarter 2025), informal and self-employed jobs are greater than the number of registered employees.
Compared to 2023, jobs increased by almost 437 thousand, but driven by unregistered work (+175 thousand) and self-employed work (+319 thousand) while registered jobs were destroyed (-58 thousand).
Rappi, like all delivery apps, works on the basis of the most brutal exploitation, in human-powered work, where the amounts paid by companies are truly low.
In addition, the Milei Government decided to subsidize the delivery company to pay salaries through an employment program. Last year, through the ministry headed by Sandra Petovello, an agreement was signed with Rappi that “aims to establish channels of collaboration and cooperation between the parties to develop joint actions aimed at generating opportunities for social and labor inclusion, aimed at unemployed people, providing them with skills and competencies in demand in the labor market.” A subsidy to the app’s profits with taxpayers’ money.
Big business owners only want to increase the exploitation of the workforce thanks to labor flexibility. Job insecurity is a central element for the maintenance of dependent capitalist Argentina, which compensates for its productive weaknesses by burdening the working class with the costs.
Assemblies in the workplace must be imposed on the CGT, the CTA and the unions to discuss a plan of struggle to confront the ongoing looting and anti-worker plans.
Work less to work for everyone
On the contrary, with this perspective of labor reform and structural impoverishment, the Left Front proposes reducing the working day to 6 hours and 5 days a week without salary reduction, with a minimum wage equivalent to the family basket and the distribution of working hours between employed and unemployed.
The proposal of the left is related to continuing to fight for employment with full rights, against job insecurity, and that no one earns less than what the family basket costs.
If the reduction in working hours were applied to the 12,000 large companies, one million jobs could be created in these firms in the country.
It is possible to carry out this proposal with the broad mobilization of the working class to face the resistance of the large employers who will oppose a measure that affects their profits, and with the perspective of the reorganization of production articulated not according to private profit but rather according to the needs of the social group.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
