Esteban Vernik

The Weberian Concept of “Labor Constitution”: The Recent Case of Delivery Workers

The concept of Arbeitsverfassung (labor Constitution) was developed by Max Weber, early in his career when he was considered a “specialist in agrarian affairs”1, that is, between 1891 and 18962. In his early works, this concept is tied to social organization. Historically, it dates back to the transition from working conditions under slavery to capitalistic forms of work. In this paper, I will first describe the emergence of Weber’s concept of Arbeitsverfassung and how he used it in the context of his analysis of the labor situation of agricultural workers in the cases of Germany, east of the Elbe River specifically, and in the province of Entre Ríos in the Argentine Mesopotamia. I will then compare the cases Weber analyzes with a contemporary empirical case based on ongoing research on the concepts of freedom, work, and alienation among delivery workers. So, this paper is organized as follows. In section two, I will provide a fairly detailed account of the concept Weber discovered and developed through his observation. I will then briefly discuss some of the theoretical relationships between the concepts of alienation, work, and freedom (section three). Section four will apply those concepts to the current neoliberal global context of flexibilization of labor relations. Section five will take that application even further, looking at the figure of the “platform worker” as expression of the “self-entrepreneur.”