The Geography of Telework in Latin America: New Spatial Devices during the Pandemic

Abstract

The pandemic has revived attention to several problems in Latin America, among them the labor gap. The rise of remote work has led to debates centered around the future of workers in the face of cognitive capitalism and data colonialism. In this connection, the health emergency is revealed as a process of reengineering that threatens to further precarize and polarize employment, erasing the physical boundary between work and the home. An examination of the devices that have given geographical meaning to this phenomenon, addressing their impact within and across urban space, and of the problems arising from the right to digital connection and disconnection in various Latin American countries reveals a complex process of virtualization/spatialization and the disappearance of the boundary between productive and reproductive tasks because of the dissemination of teleworking.

La pandemia ha redescubierto diversos problemas existentes en Latinoamérica, uno de ellos la brecha laboral. El auge del trabajo remoto ha animado debates en torno al futuro de los trabajadores en el horizonte del capitalismo cognitivo y el colonialismo de datos; en este sentido, la emergencia sanitaria se revela como un proceso de reingeniería que amenaza con precarizar y polarizar el empleo; estallando la frontera física entre trabajo y hogar. Un estudio sobre los dispositivos que dan sentido geográfico a este fenómeno, desvelando su impacto desde y sobre el espacio urbano, y de los problemas derivados del derecho a la conexión y desconexión digital revela un complejo proceso de virtualización-espacialización, así como la desaparición del límite entre labores productivas y reproductivas como consecuencia de la difusión del teletrabajo.

The capitalist accumulation process depends on labor, and therefore labor is at the core of Marxist theory. The social division of labor reveals the social hierarchies that materialize in constructed space. Labor is capitalism’s favorite victim: capitalism abstracts it via the introduction of wages and working hours to the point of reducing it to a commodity that is prone to being shaped by the vagaries of the market economy. In the context of the pandemic, this problem has been exacerbated by the rise of remote work, a modality that was implemented in a coercive and preventive manner but that, with the passing of the months, has managed to position itself as a desired alternative. The takeoff of information technologies during the preceding decades sustains a market capable of creating value from information. A kind of digital or data colonialism illustrates the expansionist character of capitalism, now embodied in an abstract space known as the Web (Couldry and Mejias, 2019).

In The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin (1996) explains how technological progress has transformed the labor market by generating new activities that will replace traditional wage labor. It highlights remote work as a product of tendentiously delocalized production relations that eliminate the shortcomings that space imposes on workers. However, its success lies in the material conditions that make it possible, including space. Faced with this paradox, there is a need for a geographical analysis that considers the role of space in the implementation of teleworking. The biggest challenge is to identify the spaces produced by capital during a pandemic and explore the conflicts over that production. Because the city is the stage that reproduces the social inequalities that shape capitalism, we must explore the various urban scales.

The Spatial Division of Labor

Work, as a vital activity, is unclassifiable, but when it is subsumed by capital it becomes measurable and divisible. Both Karl Marx and Adam Smith identify the social division of labor as the origin of accumulation since it manages productive surplus through wages and working hours. This economistic approach omits the cultural dimension of work, the ties that unite wage earners and help build a class consciousness on material bases (Fraiman, 2019): the factory, the workshop, the company, the office, the street, and space in general. The taxonomy of employment threatens solidarity, complicating the process of self-recognition on the part of a working class that is atomized and limited in its demands (Kasmir, 2021). Differentiating and assigning roles strengthens the group’s image by strengthening the bonds between participants, but it can erode the bonds of cooperation between workers, especially when there is evidently unfair treatment of subgroups. In Latin America, the legacy of colonialism has created conditions of superexploitation that polarize the labor market in terms of a feeling of wage inequality that depoliticizes and challenges the working class (Moisá Elicabide, Silverman, and Piñón, 2018). The source of this is the sexual division of labor, a perspective that identifies the asymmetries between male and female laborers—a socially instituted inequality within the framework of the accumulation process (Mezzadri, 2022). The identity of the worker is built upon the division between work and life, traditionally the factory and the home; the latter is outside work and vice versa. However, this classic view excludes life-sustaining tasks such as housework and rest, among other activities usually located in the home. It also excludes activities historically assigned to women, which shape invisible labor and therefore exist as unpaid jobs because of the limited skill required for their practice (Gregory and Bamberry, 2014).

Examining the division of labor in depth requires the study of space, the material basis of the relations of production. While previous reflections have outlined the importance of the physical place, they run the risk of becoming abstractions by failing to consider the spatial strategies that give continuity to capitalism (Franz, 2020). This issue has been addressed in the academic field via the use of metalinguistic resources such as separation, location, relocation, concentration, center and periphery, and Global South. However, the discursive dimension has been only one of its manifestations, for the problem lies in materiality—in the physical conditions capable of creating and recreating the relations of production (Massey, 2012). During the 1970s, these ideas gave rise to the so-called metro-Marxisms, a theoretical corpus focused on urban space and the city both as a stage for the accumulation of capital and as a protagonist. It was a kind of academic activism based on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space production and the right to the city and addressed urban problems founded on the unequal distribution typical of the market economy, which generates differential rents from within the canonical center-periphery division (Merrifield, 2013). Metro-Marxisms are related to the so-called spatial turn of the social sciences, with Milton Santos and Edward Soja as pioneers; both proposals seek to reveal the violent geographies produced by transnational capital and characterize global urbanization as the flip side of the redevelopment of poverty and vice versa (Peck and Tickell, 2002).

These ideas have since been synthesized in the spatial division of labor, a theory represented by Doreen Massey, Philippe Aydalot, Michael Storper, and Richard Walker, among others. Originally, this theory focused on the location and relocation of certain productive sectors, industries, labor, resources, etc. It assigned a marginal role to physical space as complementary to production rather than its center (Gintrac, 2013). Subsequently, interest turned toward the hierarchy of work and its imprint on the territory. The relations of dependency between countries and regions of the world emerged as a topic of study, and the conflict between the Global North and the Global South served as the logical motor of these reflections. However, these ideas are rather generic: they neglect the local scale, the microgeographies of work that begin in the domestic space, crisscross the segregation system that is the city, and arrive at the crux of the conflict between countryside and city. Recent studies reassess the small-scale aspect, since it reflects the conditions of dependency mentioned above. Therefore, the new geography of work makes amends for the mistake of abstracting space and identifies it as an instrument of job insecurity (Chattopadhyay and Pandit, 2021; Strauss, 2018).

The problem with the division of labor is the method of segmentation, which may occasionally appear ambiguous and even arbitrary. The International Labor Organization’s international standard classification of occupations based on 10 large groups and 102 subgroups differentiated by the skills and specializations required to carry out each task is a clear example of the need to segment and in a way contributes to the exclusion or marginalization of emerging sectors or invisible jobs. This leads to socio-spatial segregation, an organic effect of areas dominated by the free market. In short, standardized employment becomes standardized space and vice versa.

In Latin America as in other regions of the Global South, the informal city inevitably means informal work. It produces spaces where canonical divisions are unclear, since indeterminacy prevails on issues such as qualifications, working hours, remuneration, and social benefits. Unclassifiable employment creates ambiguous spaces that, far from favoring socioeconomic integration, end up sabotaging it (Acevedo et al., 2021), given that these deregulated spheres tend to perpetuate the exploitation of the working class under the myth of popular capitalism, self-management, and self-employment (Bromley and Wilson, 2017; Soliman, 2021). The simplified division between the formal and the informal makes the labor market more precarious, since it erases a wide spectrum of people who carry out their subsistence activities in the shadow of the market economy, which worsens the conditions of exploitation. The contraction of employment during the pandemic, which motivated many people to move to the informal sector by engaging in entrepreneurship, ambulatory commerce, street work, subsistence activities, or simply inactivity, is proof of this. It is estimated that 70 percent of the employment generated during the pandemic emergency belonged to the informal sector (Maurizio, 2021).

Emergencies in the Division of Labor

Labor is capable of being objectified, reduced to a figure that makes it possible to barter it as a commodity. This process varies depending on the type of work and the degree of skill required to perform it and has given rise to the existence of intellectual work sustained by cognitive skills, including the management of work itself. Technological progress has created productive activities that produce value from ideas—an immaterial economy. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Manuel Castells anticipated that certain professions would experience a boom thanks to advances in telecommunications, a panorama identified as the “information society”—a place where knowledge is inevitably transformed into capital while generating a surplus of information, or what is now known as cognitive capitalism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Marrero, 2020). This intangible economy disrupts the meaning of the means of production, since the specialist is the sole owner of his or her intellect: the strength required for labor and the working tools are all part of one body, and the employer provides only the devices necessary for the work to take place. This causes conflicts over intellectual property and the productive value of ideas in a market economy, a little-explored scenario that gives rise to new processes of accumulation through digital dispossession whereby lax regulatory frameworks allow new relations of exploitation (Sztulwark, 2020).

This immaterial economy has strategically positioned alternatives to working modalities such as telework or remote work. This originated around the 1970s when some North American corporations introduced measures to reduce the home-to-work traveling time of their employees, “telecommuters.” ¹ They created subcenters where certain computerized tasks could be carried out, thus reducing traveling time and increasing the worker’s productivity (Peter, 1983; Pratt, 1984). Nowadays, communication technologies make it possible to further relocate activities and even colonize domestic space, the home itself. Originally, the teleworker became one at the initiative of the employer, who provided the means for the performance of the required activities—computers and telephone lines, among other things. Now, however, there is oversight regarding the conditions that sustain remote work—for example, Internet access, workspace, and office supplies. The employees are forced to manage their own work, creating larger surpluses in favor of the employer (Giniger, 2020; Marrero, 2020).

The apparent flexibility of teleworking contrasts with the superexploitation that underlies it, a consequence of the fusion of life and work. Indeterminate schedules put the working day in crisis, since overtime increases without remuneration. Therefore, the surplus value generated by teleworking is greater than that of traditional work. The disappearance of work as a physical space weakens the bonds of solidarity between workers, shaping a new virtual subjectivity whereby the individual isolates him- or herself to protect his or her identity. The so-called Web 2.0 allows people to generate and consume content with a minimum of intermediation except for the infrastructure of the network itself; it creates a sense of ubiquity and omnipotence that replaces class identity with a militancy that has little commitment to social causes (Touraine, 2018; Zajc, 2015).

Likewise, the information society has caused new problems for labor standardization due to the emergence of activities that are difficult to objectify and end up on the long list of invisible jobs such as freelancing or piecework. While it is true that these jobs offer economic growth, they also reproduce precarious working conditions given their lack of specific regulation. Consequently, digital flexibility becomes informality— “formless” activity far removed from any social protection.

Latin America during the Pandemic: The Rise of Teleworking

By March 2020 the pandemic had forced governments across the region to implement health control measures, highlighting the mandatory social distancing also known as “confinement.” This set the stage for the implementation of remote work but revived two latent problems: informal employment and the digital divide in Latin America, which increased levels of vulnerability for the population given the restrictions imposed on economic activities such as street commerce, transportation, and informal construction. It is estimated that informal employment in Latin America will experience an increase of 2.3–3 percent by 2023 as a direct consequence of the pandemic. This means that some 7.5 million people will swell the ranks of informality in the near future (Acevedo et al., 2021). Skilled jobs have adapted easily to remote work, leaving less skilled and ultimately less productive sectors behind. Information and communications technologies have emerged as instruments of adaptation for this new modality, but they have a segregating effect when it comes to both worker training and access to telecommunications infrastructure (Giniger, 2020). Approximately 44 percent of the Latin American population does not have Internet access (García-Zaballos et al., 2021).

The characteristics of the labor market in Latin America hinder the process of digital adaptation. Most workers cannot engage in telework and are therefore forced to shift to less complex and less lucrative activities. “Teleworkability” depends on the skills required to perform a job and includes factors such as the frequency of tasks requiring physical skills, the flexibility of employment, and the intensity with which technologies are used in the workplace. In this regard, it is estimated that only 12 percent of Latin American workers meet the conditions required to work remotely (Espinoza and Reznikova, 2020), though this value varies depending on the activity. For example, administrative tasks, professional practice, management, financial support, and the like are the more adaptable and therefore those more likely to enjoy its benefits.

The pandemic has created a divide between telecommuters and others that expands the boundaries between skilled and unskilled labor or manual and intellectual work. The market is differentiated by the level of teleworkability presented by both the job and the workers themselves. This modality offers advantages over face-to-face labor but is not readily accessible to the mass of workers who have been suffering from job insecurity since before the pandemic (Bojovic, Benevides, and Soret, 2020). The increase in levels of unemployment and inequality, especially during the most critical stages of confinement, is proof of this (Actis Di Pascuare et al., 2021; Valenzuela-Garcia, 2020). Teleworking is a payment option requiring that the services and equipment be covered by the employees themselves and is therefore the privilege of urban elites (Kanellopoulos, 2011), who benefit doubly both by occupying favored sectors within the city and by enjoying the ability to choose their working modalities.

The pandemic has rediscovered labor inequalities across Latin America, and these rest on gender. The work involved in caring activities or social reproduction is now at the center of the debate. By moving the work activity to the home, teleworking threatens to violate not only the privacy of workers but also the very limits of reproductive work. In a feminized labor market, the problem of remote work and its inherent physical conditions is compounded by the need to reconcile domestic work with an indeterminate working day. This means that women are doubly excluded from the benefits of teleworking, which accentuates the gender gap in domestic spaces where care is even more important (Gregory and Bamberry, 2014). In short, teleworking leads to the definitive fusion between home and office, leisure and working hours, maternity and remuneration, and reproduction and social production, creating the illusion of paid nonwork.

The geography of teleworking in Latin America rests on territorial scales. Although teleworking has led to the myth of the deterritorialization of production, the reality is that space is the real protagonist. The pandemic has also been geographically evident in its strictly local effects, as these have depended on the measures implemented by specific governments within their borders. Therefore, the first stage of our analysis focuses on the countries of the region.

Regulating Telework in Latin America

Liberalism is characterized by its limiting the actions of the state in the markets. It does not necessarily translate into an absence of regulation; rather, it entails a meta-regulation that violates the principle of authority under the flexibilization argument that precedes capital. Neoliberal policies perfect this through a process of creative destruction (Theodore, Peck, and Brenner, 2009), the weakening of certain socioeconomic structures for the implementation of a market-focused model. This process is replicated in the rise of teleworking, since flexibility is an instrument of demolition of rights when it comes to issues such as working hours, remuneration, and privacy. It subsequently establishes new relationships between the employee, the employer, and information and communications technologies (Rodriguez-Escanciano, 2021). These are mostly ambiguous links, given that the modality has little or no regulation. In this regard, it should be mentioned that most of the countries in the region established regulations regarding telework between 2020 and 2021. Brazil was the exception, as it already had implemented a law in 2017. There is consensus in Latin American legislation on the definition of teleworking as an activity that takes place in a location other than the facilities of the company or institution with the help of information and communications technologies. This is excerpted from International Labor Organization Convention 177, which preliminarily defines this modality as “home labor” (ILO, 1996) in a broad and somewhat ambiguous sense. This definition emphasizes the location of activities, leaving aside other conditions such as temporality and the basic technologies needed for its practice (Ushakova, 2015).

National standards coincide in maintaining the conditions and benefits of face-to-face labor for the remote modality. In other words, its adoption does not entail a reduction in rights. Likewise, most countries contemplate the right to digital disconnection as a mechanism for protecting the length of the working day, preventing employees from extending their hours. At the same time, the spatial dimension is conspicuous by its absence; despite the workplace’s being within the scope of these norms, they do not fundamentally internalize the role of material conditions. Physical space requirements such as home inspections for health and safety, paid travel, and transport vouchers are scarce. Therefore, teleworkers are forced to manage their own workspaces with little compensation for what they spend on equipment or Internet services (Giniger, 2020; Perticará and Tejada, 2020).

Finally, the gender approach is also absent. Latin American regulations do not contemplate the care economy and impose the idea of ideal workers who can adapt to an eight-hour day (Gregory and Bamberry, 2014). There are women, however, who find it impossible to reconcile their domestic activities with professional development. Apart from Argentina’s and Chile’s, the rest of the national regulations ignore these aspects and thus erase the groups in need of more flexible working hours (Table 1).

Table 1.

Rules Governing Teleworking in Latin America

Country	Norm	Right to Disconnection	Expense Compensation	Flexible Workday	Overtime
Argentina	Ley 27555, August 2020, legal regime for teleworking contracts	Yes	Yes	Applies to caregiving work	–
Bolivia	Decreto Supremo 4570, August 2021, special working conditions	–	Optional	–	–
Brazil	Ley 13.467, July 2017, amends consolidation of labor laws	–	Optional	–	Yes
Chile	Ley 21220, March 2020, amends labor code on remote work	12 hrs./day	Yes	Yes	–
Colombia	Ley 2088, May 2021, regulates work at home	Yes	Yes	–	–
Ecuador	Acuerdo Ministerial MDT-2020-181, September 2020	12 hrs./day	Yes	–	Yes
Paraguay	Ley 6738/2021, June 2021, establishes modality of teleworking in relationship of dependency	12 hrs.	Optional	–	–
Peru	Ley 5408/2020-cr, May 2021	Yes	Yes	Yes	–
Uruguay	Ley 19978, August 2021, standards for promotion and regulation of teleworking	8 hrs.	Yes	Yes	Yes

The Right to Connectivity during the Pandemic

The digital divide between urban and rural areas in Latin America amounts to 27 percent; only 56 percent of the population has access to the Internet, and only 45.5 percent of this population has access to broadband (García-Zaballos et al., 2021). This significantly reduced opportunities for telework during the pandemic. National governments were quick to act and declare Internet service to be an essential public service to avoid service cuts in the case of default. This provision was introduced in most countries of the region to maintain continuity of service by equating it with other basic services such as sanitation and electricity.

At the international level, Internet access is considered a human right, and the United Nations has declared it so via the 2018 resolution known as “The Promotion, Protection, and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet.” It urges states to develop telecommunications and promote access to them and includes guidelines for safeguarding digital freedom and information. This resolution is not binding, but it is certainly a major step toward the democratization of Internet services. Consequently, states have promoted subsidies for users who cannot afford the service. In Costa Rica, funds have been created to improve household connectivity, including free mobile Internet service and personal computers for educational purposes (Castro, 2020). Likewise, in Peru, the Ministry of Education has promoted the purchase of digital tablets for rural sectors to ensure the continuity of virtual classes (La República, 2020).

At the same time, telecommunications companies created social tariffs that were in force during the emergency. The Claro initiative known as Connected Colombia introduced a sponsorship program to support vulnerable families (Claro Colombia, 2020). Likewise, the Solidarity Plan in Chile proposed reduced service costs for vulnerable families belonging to the Social Household Registry (Chile Atiende, 2021). Finally, numerous organizations advanced projects meant to close the digital gap. In Peru, Internet para Todos is an agreement between Telefónica and the Inter-American Development Bank to bring satellite Internet to the most remote areas (Iadb.org, 2021).

Unionized Responses

The pandemic has precarized the working class. While it is true that states took measures against dismissals, those actions were insufficient in the face of the imminent closure of many businesses and even large companies. Social movements regained prominence, especially across the most affected sectors, such as agriculture, construction, and industry. There were recurring demands for the reactivation of items considered nonessential, and unions and employers agreed on this issue given that continuity of employment was at risk (Palomino, Garro, and Sánchez, 2020).

Despite the reactivation of unions, demands in the field of teleworking were rare because of this activity’s novel status as a labor benefit rather than a modality. Even so, in the case of Argentina, protests by the Asociación de Trabajadores del Estado (Association of State Workers—ATE), the Unión de Personal Jerárquico de Empresas de Telecomunicaciones (Union of Hierarchical Personnel of Telecommunications Companies—UPJET), the Sindicato Único de Trabajadores Informáticos de la República Argentina (Single Union of Computer Workers of the Argentine Republic—SUTIRA), and the Asociación Argentina del Teletrabajo (Argentine Telework Association— ASAT) expressed their discomfort at the precarious conditions to which they were subjected. In Bolivia, the Sindicato Nacional de Teletrabajadores de Bolivia (National Union of Teleworkers of Bolivia—SNTB) was founded during the pandemic and is a member of the Confederación de Obreros y Trabajadores (Confederation of Laborers and Workers—COT), the most important labor organization in the country (La Nación, 2021).

In terms of collective bargaining, the conflicts between the union of Banchile Inversiones workers and its employers should be highlighted for its denunciations of noncompliance with teleworking norms such as the right to disconnection (Montes, 2021). There was a similar case involving the teleperformance union and the National Union of Workers of IBM Chile S.A.C. In Colombia, the Sindicato de Trabajadores de Plataformas (Platform Workers’ Union) and the Sindicato Nacional de la Industria de Trabajadores de Call Center y Contact Center (National Industry Union of Call Center and Contact Center Workers) entered negotiations, and both achieved compliance with the connectivity bonus (AIL, 2020).

The limitations of unionism lie, in the first place, in the diversity of activities and areas involved, making it impossible to create a single list of demands. A second problem is collective telebargaining, the set of organizational strategies using remote means (Puntriano-Rosas, 2016)—creating online organizations and achieving legal validity for them. Many of the organizational difficulties are due to the absence of a set physical space (Barbosa-Junior, 2020), and one of these is protecting the privacy of the collective, an issue that affects the quality of the agreements.

Community Networks

Several organizations took on the task of managing Internet access during the pandemic, seeking to bring the service to disadvantaged places such as urban peripheries and rural areas. Community Internet networks had a history prior to the pandemic, but the health emergency reaffirmed their intention to democratize this service (Baca et al., 2020). In Latin America, these initiatives became popular with the creation of the Coalición Dinámica sobre Conectividad Comunitaria (Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity—DC3) in 2015 as part of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). This coalition promotes the creation of multisectoral organizations that manage the service to favor vulnerable populations. It is a bottom-up model that seeks not only to close digital gaps but also to empower citizens involved in networked self-determination (Belli et al., 2017).

AlterMundi in Argentina creates community networks based on free-router technologies that it manages alongside its beneficiaries. There are also projects that were cofinanced long before the pandemic by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and the Internet Society (ISOC). The most important of these are LibreGrandeNet, Los Molinos Comunitaria, Rio Los Sauces, and MonteNet in Córdova and other projects in Santa Fe, Salta, and Jujuy. Most of them are in rural areas, but there are urban examples such as the Atalaya Sur Community Network in Villa No. 20 Buenos Aires, where a system that combines the antennas and broadband that go underutilized by government entities has been implemented (AlterMundi, 2020).

In Brazil, the Organización de las Redes Comunitarias de América Latina (Organization of Community Networks of Latin America—ORCAL) is the main promoter of community networks and focuses on Amazonian areas such as Juruti Viejo, Rio Largo, Fumaca, Quilombo do Camburi, and Aldea Jaexa Pora (Ortiz and Chamorro, 2020). As in Argentina, these projects are uncommon in urban areas, but the Barrio do Souzas venture in southern São Paulo is an exception. To address the gaps within cities themselves, CooLab promoted the #liberawifi campaign, which helps Internet service users release a percentage of network services to unconnected families. At the national level, the state created simplified telecommunications licenses for operators serving populations of less than 5,000 in remote regions, thus promoting social investment (Baca et al., 2020).

In Colombia, the DataWifi startup has participated in the implementation of 1,600 digital centers throughout the country via a special fund provided by the Ministry of Communication Technologies. Mexico deserves a special mention; since 2016 it has had an indigenous social telecommunications concession known as Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias (Communal Indigenous Telecommunications—TIC A.C.) that operates autonomously in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Puebla, Chiapas, and Veracruz (Belli et al., 2017), an electromagnetic spectrum concession with an inclusive approach. However, the network has its limitations; it only supports 2G and 3G services and in most cases is incompatible with certain Web services. Nevertheless, it has managed to position itself as an alternative because, as of January 13, 2021, it has been exempted from the payment of band use rights in accordance with a ruling of Mexico’s Supreme Court (IFEX, 2021). Organizations such as Rhizomatica and Redes por la Diversidad, Equidad y Sustentabilidad, A.C., provide logistical support for this initiative with a focus on the building of local capacity.

Community networks are crucial to ensuring people’s basic rights and digital self-determination (Baladron, 2020) and enabling the appropriation of technology by vulnerable populations. Being civil initiatives, they require a minimum of state support to develop via concessions with a social focus or the rescue of idle bandwidths. All these interventions are ultimately focused on balancing the data market in the region.

Case Study: Metropolitan Lima during the Pandemic

At the beginning of the 1980s David Harvey proposed the idea of “the spatial fix,” a theory that acknowledges the territorialization engendered by production relations. Capitalism creates the specific geographies based on exclusion (Harvey, 1981) originally embodied in the dialectical struggle between the rebels and the city, the center and the periphery, and the Third and First worlds, among other opposites (Franz, 2020). With economic globalization, the problem of scale becomes especially important, since capitalist relations are also materialized in smaller dimensions such as blocks (north-south), continents, countries, cities, and other smaller-scale situations.

The pandemic represents the emergence of new socio-spatial relations that clash with the devices previously deployed by capitalism, a conflict located in the fragmented city as an inheritance of the market economy. It is therefore important to analyze urban space in detail. Metropolitan Lima is a city of more than 10.7 million inhabitants and the fifth-largest megalopolis in Latin America. Its urban area contains more than 10 million inhabitants, the most populated territory in Peru, and is made up of 43 districts and a constitutional province. The challenge here is to reveal the nature of spatial devices during the pandemic in relation to the rise of teleworking and the preexisting segregation problems in this occupation (Rose-Redwood et al., 2020).

The Affordability of Teleworking

The working-age population of Metropolitan Lima represents approximately 75 percent of the total population; of this universe, 5.11 million are employed in some manner (INEI, 2022). This situation changed during the pandemic given the health restrictions that stunted numerous productive sectors and the labor market in general. Job insecurity across the unemployed population has increased and shows a tendency to continue growing.

The reports of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática (National Institute of Statistics and Informatics—INEI) regarding the labor market do not include data on teleworking. Therefore, we have deduced the situation from aggregated data such as the branch of activity on the assumption that those with a greater degree of specialization can better adapt to remote work. The services sector was the most affected: it has not been able to reach prepandemic numbers and is still showing a downward trend. In contrast, the rest of the branches of the economy have experienced a slight growth since 2020, with the commerce sector standing out with participation increasing from 20 percent to 23.6 percent. Teleworkability was deduced from the mode of employment. In this case, there was a significant reduction in the adequately employed population, while invisible or income-deficient underemployment was on the rise. ²

The data show the new labor structure in Metropolitan Lima, characterized by a higher unemployment rate, displacement of employment from the service sector to less skilled ones, and increase in underemployment in its two versions, visible and invisible. Additionally, the INEI’s permanent employment survey shows the variations in income according to geographical units called “cones.” Indicators such as average hourly income and average monthly income reveal the differential effect of the pandemic on family economies. The most impacted areas were the central cone, the eastern cone, and the constitutional province of Callao, where the decline in income was abrupt and the recovery slower than in the neighboring cones.

The resultant cartography evidences the center-periphery relationship, which is the geographical conflict par excellence. It also rediscovers the divergence between traditional and emerging districts, those colloquially known as “young towns.” The core of the city is less resilient than the northern and southern cones, two territories with greater signs of recovery—a situation that can be understood as a sign of the deconcentration of economic activities. In other words, the decline of the center is evidenced by the emergence of new urban centers. It should be noted that this is an analysis of macrozones that carries the risk of greatly simplifying urban structures. We must therefore turn to a smaller-scale analysis in search of the features that characterize global urbanization, reassessing the fragmentary and discontinuous condition of the city.

The Data Market

The key factor for the implementation of teleworking is digital connectivity, a condition that depends on the development of telecommunications networks in a given space. In Peru, 64.4 percent of the population has access to the Internet in its two modalities, fixed and mobile. There is a significant gap between the urban population, with 72.1 percent connectivity, and the rural one, with 29.3 percent (Quiso-Córdova, 2020). The geography of connectivity derives from the distribution of networks over a given territory in which companies seek to expand supply and, consequently, profits. The corporations with the largest participation in Peru are Viettel, Entel, Telefónica, and América Móvil. Together they concentrate 69 percent of demand and approximately 81 percent of the satellite capacity employed in the country (More and Argandoña, 2020). In addition to this oligopoly there are smaller operators such as Gilat, Century Link, Winner System, and Azteca; the latter is the concessionaire of the largest interurban network within the framework of the national fiber optic dorsal network project that began operations in 2016 with four national ventures (More and Argandoña, 2020).

According to the Organismo Supervisor de las Telecomunicaciones (Telecommunications Supervisory Agency—OSIPTEL), the coverage of fixed home Internet access in Metropolitan Lima is 44.2 percent and that of mobile Internet 73.7 percent. There is no evidence of a total replacement of fixed networks by mobile ones, and therefore the laying of fiber optic networks will continue to prove decisive (Gavilano and Chahuara, 2020). The data market is based on competition—the colonization of more profitable spaces for telecommunications—and this means that Metropolitan Lima is a territory disputed by the operators. The spatial coverage of the market represents a total of 81,440 hectares, of which 52.4 percent belong to the Viettel-Telefónica subgroup and the rest to Entel-América Móvil. The highest density of networks is in the central cone, an area made up of 13 of the province’s 44 districts, where the lines of numerous companies overlap. By contrast, the peripheral areas are markets awaiting conquest. The division between the center and the periphery translates to the robustness of the networks, a quality that enables the decentralization of institutional or business headquarters because of the high demand they generate. The network as a spatial device reduces the possibilities of creating technological clusters on the margins of the city, encouraging the concentration of specialized activities in traditional districts and unqualified ones in the most remote places.

The intervention of the state in the data market through the national fiber optic network includes 18 regional projects divided into four phases or groups comprising 30,600 kilometers of fiber, equivalent to a projected investment of US$1.8 billion. This will be executed through subsidies that allow for the development of fiber infrastructure that will then pass through concessions in the hands of the operators, so that the service reaches the most remote areas of the country. Metropolitan Lima is expected to benefit from a total of 1,797 kilometers of fiber with a value of US$96.8 million from this program (More and Argandoña, 2020).

The Geographies of Teleworking

The limits of teleworking arise from the presence or absence of the skills needed to undertake a task (Gasparini and Foschiatti, 2020), along with factors such as level of education (Pérez-Pérez et al., 2002), age range, and gender. All of these conditions enable us to measure the degree of adaptability to remote work, but the shallowness of the available statistics requires us to estimate the suitable population indirectly. Labor statistics in Peru are classified into categories by branch of activity and main occupation. In the absence of specific statistics for teleworking, the first filter is a category such as information and communications, financial and insurance activities, real estate activities, professional, scientific, and technical activities, and administrative and support services. The second filter is main occupation: public and private administrators, scientific and intellectual professionals, technical professionals, heads and administrative employees, and education workers. It was by crossing these two aspects that we obtained 24 subgroups considered the most suitable for remote work.

This calculation was made regarding data from the last district census, in 2017, which revealed that Metropolitan Lima had 4.8 million workers, of whom 18.2 percent were suitable for teleworking. The district of San Isidro had the highest percentage (43.6 percent) and Ancon the least (8.5 percent). Contrasting these values with the incidence of monetary poverty revealed an inversely proportional relationship—the greater the teleworkability, the lower the poverty and vice versa. The districts with the highest rates were all in the central cone, an area that enjoys greater urban consolidation, service coverage, and transport accessibility. This modality, in short, is accessible only to an urban elite (López and Rodríguez, 2020). Coverage also reinforces the imbalance between center and periphery, for the most suitable districts are in places where fiber optic networks are much denser. Potential teleworkers not only have the skills to adapt to virtuality but also enjoy benefits derived from the urban space they inhabit.

The problem of teleworking acquires a geopolitical dimension because of the expansion of the data market across the territory of Metropolitan Lima. Therefore, coverage must be analyzed at a small scale, such as the district or even the urban sector, and the characteristics of workers and their living conditions must be examined. We used geographic information systems to examine the census data and information on population and housing with a degree of disaggregation at the urban block level in seeking to map the spatial distribution of fiber networks and their relationship with structural problems such as monetary poverty, overcrowding, and femininity. In the first case, we employed an income stratification divided into high, medium–upper, medium, medium-low, and low and selected the two lowest strata to represent poverty. The overcrowding measure came from dividing the number of inhabitants by the number of households, with a coefficient greater than 5 representing a risk of agglomeration. Finally, femininity was estimated by dividing the the number of women by the total population, with results greater than 0.65 representing the possible feminization of the sample. This is an important point because it evidences the conflict between production and reproduction.

Six representative districts were chosen in terms of the extent to which their populations were compatible with remote work. San Isidro (43.59 percent), San Borja (39.01 percent), Comas (16.23 percent), Callao (15.68 percent), Carabayllo (11.36 percent), and Puente Piedra (10.2 percent). This guaranteed the variety of the sample. The proximity analysis corroborated the previously identified imbalance, since the districts with high teleworkability had the largest network-covered areas. They also mostly served the higher economic strata. This situation was repeated when analyzing the remaining two factors: overcrowding and femininity. This demonstrates consistent digital exclusion in spatial devices, and our conclusion is that the development of the data market has consolidated urban inequality by restricting the benefits of virtuality to a small sector of the labor market.

The gap between populations with and without coverage widens in the most remote districts, a condition that is replicated when situations of poverty, overcrowding, and femininity are considered. The mapping reveals that disparities within districts are manifested in greater proportions than in the global sample. There is a dual process of exclusion that is specific to neoliberal spaces and reproduces inequalities across territorial scales (Peck and Tickell, 2002).

In short, the data show that teleworking has worsened the conditions of socio-spatial segregation. Assuming that teleworking has a democratizing character in itself entails abstracting this work from the material conditions that sustain it. In short, it ignores space and transfers external responsibilities to the workers, since their adaptation to this new modality is viewed as dependent on the individual’s skills rather than on any urban structural issues. The idea of an egalitarian society based on technology creates meritocratic justifications for connectivity, and flexible working ends up meaning that populations that lag behind will be blamed for their own exclusion in a hyperconnected world (Umoja Noble and Roberts, 2020).

Conclusions

The pandemic created the conditions necessary for the implementation of teleworking. In Latin America, this modality collided with job insecurity and the digital divide, which motivated governments to regulate it, highlighting the right to disconnection as a safeguard for workers. However, the most urgent need in the region is connection itself—access to telecommunications—as a basic human right. Most national regulations omit the problem of the reproductive work already being undertaken by teleworkers who are unable to reconcile their daily tasks with rigid working hours. At the same time, although unionized responses were not long in coming, they have gone unnoticed. Teleworkers are a small proportion of the working population and perform very diverse and innovative tasks, a fact that makes them invisible as a group. Various organizations have, however, faced the digital divide by creating or expanding community networks, recovering idle bandwidths, and even creating telecommunications companies with a social and territorial approach to try to balance the data market in the region.

The geographies of telework arise from a problem of territorial scales that already reflect conditions of imbalance. In the case of Metropolitan Lima, the differential impact of the pandemic on the working conditions of the population, such as the decrease in income and the increase in underemployment, is evidenced, as is the territorial competition that shapes the data market given that the highest density of networks coincides with the most developed districts and vice versa. It should be noted that the four main operators have centralized the service and created an oversupply of it. An analysis on a smaller scale verifies the existence of privileged places where the most skilled population coincides with the sectors better covered by the network. The population suffering from poverty, overcrowding, and feminization is in more distant places, which makes it even more difficult to adapt successfully to remote work.

Both teleworking and the pandemic have worsened preconditions of exploitation and inequality. Teleworking has subverted the traditional division between life and work and the boundary between reproduction and social production. It reveals a process of creative destruction that is typical of neoliberalism and in this case blurs the conceptual limits of work while shielding the urban borders that consolidate inequality. The ultimate consequence is the dematerialization of work as a step in the direction of the depoliticization of workers. A virtual and delocalized economy tendentiously eliminates the structuring role of space.

Biography

Yeimis Milton Palomino Pichihua is a doctoral candidate in sustainability and urban regeneration at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Javier Ruiz Sánchez is a full professor of urban development and spatial planning at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and director of LoCUS, an interdisciplinary study group on complex urban and regional spatial processes.

Mariana Ortega-Breña is a freelance translator based in Mexico City.