World Bicycle Day: Señoritas Courier and the Logic of the Care-Based Algorithm

The ascendant AI and platform economy, driven by the forces of global digital capitalism, is driving a profound reshaping of the social and economic realms of care, labour, social reproduction and collective well-being. This growth relies heavily on hidden and precarious work – the often invisible labour of those whose underpaid and unrecognised efforts sustain the very technologies driving these transformations. How can we reclaim a feminist future of work in the AI Economy? This question will be explored in our panel discussion at this year’s Annual Conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) in Cali, Colombia in July 2026. One example of how to shape a feminist digital future is Señoritas Courier. Aline Os, the founder, shares their story on today's UN World Bicycle Day.

Señoritas Courier was founded in 2017 in São Paulo, Brazil, as a bicycle delivery collective composed of cisgender women and transgender people. The collective emerged from a desire to create a safe space for delivery workers where they could discuss the demands of their work and advocate for fair pay. The strategy adopted was to attract clients directly and negotiate delivery rates and schedules with them, allowing members to balance their work with other responsibilities, such as household chores, studies, and even other jobs.

The collective was founded as a direct response to the shortcomings of conventional delivery platforms, which systematically ignore gender issues and their intersectionalities. Among the problems identified are: grueling work hours, a lack of adequate spaces for eating, hygiene, and using the restroom, as well as penalties and account suspensions for absences without consideration of health issues.

Working conditions on delivery platforms are precarious for everyone, especially for bicycle couriers. Data from a study conducted by Aliança Bike (2019) confirms this reality. In Brazil, the lack of regulation allows for workweeks of seven days, shifts exceeding eight hours a day, and earnings below the minimum wage—all in violation of labor laws. Corporate platform companies continue to operate under the same logic as big tech firms, reproducing behaviors rooted in heteronormative colonialist patriarchy: their algorithms drive competition, the gamification of work, punishments, and the isolation of workers, with the sole aim of maximizing profit. Furthermore, workers bear all operational costs: food, rent or the purchase and maintenance of vehicles and cell phones, safety equipment (helmets, vests, lighting, appropriate clothing and footwear), and internet data plans.

The precarious situation is even more acute for women, who face additional challenges on top of the above, such as the burden of multiple work shifts—many of them care for their children and families on their own—as well as cases of abuse, harassment, and violence perpetrated by other workers and customers. Furthermore, the lack of an employment contract prevents access to social security benefits in cases of death, leave for pregnancy and childbirth, or absence to care for children.

Señoritas Courier’s journey toward decent work began with the creation of the collective and evolved into a cooperative management structure. Both models allow for active listening to all members during the frequent meetings. Señoritas collected data for years, adjusting its operational model until it found the one that best served the collective. An analysis of reports on workdays, combined with data on service rates, distances traveled, hours worked, and delivery volume, showed that it was possible to reduce costs for clients without decreasing workers’ earnings. At the same time, this approach provided control over work hours, weight and distance limits, and eliminated competition or gamification of the activity, while also fostering a support network and promoting personal and professional development.

This process gave rise to the “care-based algorithm”, which Gustavo Nicolau Gonçalves translated into programming code in his master’s thesis, demonstrating greater efficiency by suggesting shorter routes, reducing costs, and increasing satisfaction at the end of the shift. This means that while the algorithm offered lower rates to customers, it also resulted in a better quality of life and higher earnings for the team. Designed as a solution to be accessible and adaptable by other initiatives—not just feminist ones—the cooperative platform proposed worker ownership, including autonomy over the code of its algorithm.

By understanding its own system, Señoritas aims to develop new algorithms that allow for the coexistence of profit and care, recovering goals from the historic struggle for labor rights—such as time for family, leisure, and rest; control over working hours; personal and professional development; freedom of association; and decent work. These rights are on the agenda of feminist organizations and other non-hegemonic groups. Facilitating the creation of these groups means investing in a future with a new algorithmic logic.

However, the Señoritas Courier cooperative was dissolved in January 2026, after two years of operation. This closure was not due to the unviability of the cooperative model itself, but rather to a combination of structural factors: the lack of specific public policies—such as one establishing a tax burden based on revenue brackets for solidarity economy enterprises, along the same lines as what already applies to micro, small, and large companies under the general regime—combined with the sector’s high tax burden.

Like other small cooperatives, Señoritas succumbed to a 30% tax on monthly revenue while awaiting the implementation of the Paul Singer Law*—which, even if passed, does not guarantee subsidies for the continued operation of cooperative platforms. The project for a worker-owned platform lacked legal support, financial resources for investments in technology, human resources, and communication. Furthermore, there were—and still are—no proposals on the municipal, state, or federal agenda for tax exemptions or funding for training in the digital solidarity economy, aimed at cooperatives developing their own platforms.

The end of the cooperative, however, did not mean the end of the Señoritas. Today, the collective and the Señoritas Courier Association (Civil Society Organisation, CSO) remain active, focusing on carrying out projects conceived over the past six years: bicycle repair workshops, discussions on the solidarity economy, cultural bike tours, studies on social and digital technologies, and the development of new projects to expand their reach. The association continues to serve as a space for organization, training, and resistance, although there are no plans to resume operations of the delivery platform.

The great legacy of this period remains the recognition of the “care-based algorithm” and the methodology that led to it. Unlike the algorithms replicated by corporate platforms, this is a form of popular knowledge, akin to social technology: its code can be refined and, above all, it lives on in the people who developed it—delivery workers who are now programmers, bicycle mechanics, researchers, and activists. Constantly reinventing itself, Señoritas does not operate within the success-failure binary. The bet is that care is transmitted collectively, through projects, debated in studies of social and digital technologies, and multiplied in every new worker who understands that another algorithm is possible.

*The Paul Singer Act (Law No. 15068/2024) is the first regulatory framework in Brazil’s history dedicated exclusively to the solidarity economy. The legislation, named in honor of economist Paul Singer, formalizes and protects enterprises based on self-management, collective labor, and the fair distribution of profits.

Aline Os, founder of Señoritas Courier