Entregadores Antifascistas

Entregadores Antifascistas (Anti-fascist Delivery Workers) is a Brazilian grassroots collective of app-based delivery workers, founded in March 2020 by Paulo Roberto da Silva Lima — known by his nickname Paulo Galo (or Galo de Luta) — in São Paulo. The movement emerged from a specific incident of algorithmic deactivation: on March 22, 2020, Galo's bike tire went flat during a delivery and he called Uber to explain; he was assured there were no problems — and the next day found himself blocked from the app that supplied his sole income. That deactivation became the movement's founding origin story, through which it articulated the regime of opaque algorithmic management through which the major delivery platforms — iFood, Rappi, Uber Eats, 99, Loggi — controlled workers' access, compensation, and livelihoods without any formal employment relationship or right of appeal.

Galo's immediate response was a petition demanding that delivery platforms provide workers with COVID-19 protective equipment — meals, hand sanitizer, and PPE — during the pandemic, which garnered over 300,000 signatures. The movement he built, Entregadores Antifascistas, grew within months to a decentralized network of 40 core organizers active across 11 Brazilian states — the first significant grassroots collective in Brazil built explicitly on platform delivery workers' shared conditions rather than on sector-based union membership.

Context: gig work in pandemic Brazil

As of 2019, approximately 4 million Brazilians worked for gig economy platforms as their primary or sole income source. The pandemic-era surge in food delivery demand made these workers legally "essential" while leaving them structurally unprotected: 56.7% of delivery workers worked more than nine hours daily and 52% worked all seven days of the week, while only 19.4% received hand sanitizer from the platforms. Workers earned approximately R$2,000–R$2,500 monthly under these conditions, without access to formal labour protections, workplace accident insurance, or any appeal process for the deactivations that could end their income without notice.

The AI-mediated dimension of this precarity ran through every point of the employment relationship. As a Brazilian public prosecutor noted in the context of the movement, algorithms are used not only to organise work but also to limit collective mobilization — by creating a false sense of individual autonomy and isolating workers in competition that prevents them from recognising each other as part of the same sector. Entregadores Antifascistas' organising work was, from the beginning, a direct challenge to that logic: naming the invisible infrastructure of platform control and contesting it through collective street action, legal advocacy, and the mutual-aid infrastructure the movement built as an alternative.

Breque dos Apps — the July and September 2020 national strikes

The movement's inaugural public mobilization was the Breque dos Apps (Brake/Strike on the Apps) — a series of nationwide coordinated work stoppages in the summer of 2020. The first strike, on July 1, 2020, drew approximately 5,000 workers in São Paulo alone and co-ordinated delivery workers across more than ten Brazilian capitals, with parallel actions in Argentina and Mexico — the first gig-worker strike in Brazil to achieve national scale. A second Breque dos Apps strike followed on July 25, 2020, and a third on September 1, 2020, extending the movement's reach to 59 cities.

Core demands across the 2020 strikes:

• Higher pay per kilometre and a minimum payment per order
• End to arbitrary account blockages, with formal appeal processes
• Health, accident, and equipment insurance
• COVID-19 protective equipment and assistance
• Access to facilities (bathrooms, phone charging, rest areas) while on shift

The platforms responded by offering 30-reais bonuses (approximately $5.50) to replacement workers willing to continue delivering during the stoppages — a strike-breaking tactic the movement explicitly contested. The Entregadores Antifascistas movement also rejected institutional union involvement as a strategic choice: the Union of Motorcycle Workers of São Paulo arrived at the July 1 mobilisation with sound trucks, but workers maintained their independence from the established labour apparatus. The three-strike sequence in a single summer constituted the most significant labour mobilisation by platform delivery workers in Latin American history to that point.

iFood's covert astroturfing campaign (2020–2022)

The corporate response to Entregadores Antifascistas went beyond strike-breaking bonuses. After the July 2020 Breque dos Apps, iFood hired digital marketing agencies Benjamim Comunicação and Social Qi to run a covert counter-organising campaign targeting the movement. The campaign included:

• Creating fake Facebook pages — including "Não Breca Meu Trampo" (Don't Brake My Work) — designed to discourage delivery workers from striking
• Developing at least eight fake social media accounts impersonating delivery workers
• Posting memes and content mimicking authentic worker communication styles
• Spending approximately $2,350 promoting these pages to an audience of 3.16 million people

In April 2021, a Social Qi employee infiltrated an actual worker demonstration, posing as a delivery driver to distribute stickers promoting COVID-19 vaccination — material that national media subsequently amplified as authentic worker demands, not as platform-commissioned messaging. Marketing executives involved acknowledged the campaign had damaged Paulo Lima's reputation by spreading rumors that he sought political office, despite his non-candidacy. The campaign was exposed by Agência Pública's April 2022 investigation; federal investigations were launched after publication, and both fake pages became inactive following the report's release.

The iFood astroturfing episode is a documented case of a platform company deploying covert social-media infrastructure to suppress grassroots worker organising — operationalising the same digital-platform logic that governs algorithmic management to manufacture fake worker voices against collective action.

Casa dos Entregadores and the mutual-aid infrastructure

Beyond street mobilisation, the movement built a physical mutual-aid presence in São Paulo: the Casa dos Entregadores (Delivery Workers' House), providing meals, phone charging stations, rest areas, a library, educational space, bathrooms, and bicycle repair workshops to delivery workers between shifts — directly meeting the access-to-facilities demands raised in the Breque dos Apps. The Casa is the movement's most durable institutional expression: where the strikes were episodic direct-action interventions, the Casa represents the translation of mutual-aid organising into a standing worker-support infrastructure.

In 2022, Fundo Brasil awarded Entregadores Antifascistas a 12-month grant of R$40,000 under its "Resisting with those who Resist" support programme — the movement's first formal philanthropic backing, confirming its transition from a purely self-organised strike movement to a recognised civil-society actor with ongoing programmatic activities.

The Brazilian delivery-worker cooperative ecosystem the movement helped catalyse extends beyond its own structure. The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung-surveyed alternatives include Señoritas Courier (a São Paulo cooperative of women and trans people in bike delivery who develop their own management technology), Liga Coop (a federation of driver cooperatives operating as an alternative to commercial ride-sharing), and the MTST Technology Centre (connected to the Homeless Workers' Movement, developing platforms for labour self-management) — a broader cooperative-platform ecosystem in which Entregadores Antifascistas' organising provided part of the political substrate.

Legislative context and ongoing organising (2024–)

The movement's demands have found a contested echo in Brazil's federal legislative process. PLP 152, under debate in the Chamber of Deputies as of early 2026, proposes a base fee of R$8.50 per delivery for the first four kilometres — below workers' core demand of R$10 minimum with inflation adjustments. The bill omits the algorithmic transparency provisions and deactivation due-process protections that delivery worker organisations regard as essential, and includes a criminal background certificate requirement that workers' groups argue would effectively exclude formerly incarcerated individuals from platform registration, in violation of their constitutional reintegration rights.

An April 1, 2025 strike across approximately 60 Brazilian cities reiterated the minimum-rate demand — Brazilian delivery workers continuing to organise against the same platform conditions that produced the 2020 Breque dos Apps, now with a federal legislative debate as the explicit terrain.

Place in the movement

Within the corpus, Entregadores Antifascistas is the first Latin American and South American entry in the gig-worker organising thread anchored on algorithmic management critique. It is the Southern Hemisphere counterpart to the New York-based Los Deliveristas Unidos — the corpus's other foundational delivery-worker collective, which pursued a municipal-legislative strategy producing binding US law. The two collectives share a common analytical frame — algorithmic deactivation as the central antagonist — and a common organising substrate of migrant workers outside the formal labour union structure, while diverging in strategy: LDU's municipally anchored legislative campaign versus Entregadores Antifascistas' mass-strike mobilisation, mutual-aid infrastructure building, and counter-platform-narrative work against iFood's astroturfing.

The movement's encounter with iFood's counter-campaign is also the corpus's clearest documented instance of a platform company deploying covert social-media infrastructure specifically to suppress grassroots worker organising — a case where the same digital platform logic that governs algorithmic worker management was turned, with marketing-agency infrastructure, against the workers' own political collective action. The federal investigation and public exposure of that campaign — the direct result of the movement's sustained organising visibility — are Entregadores Antifascistas' most distinctive contribution to the broader global evidence base on how platform companies respond to organised worker resistance.