The Antinomies of Social Inclusion: How São Paulo’s Waste Pickers became Excluded from ‘Inclusive Recycling’

• In Event: 3244 - Precarious Work in Cross-national Perspective

Abstract

São Paulo’s waste picker cooperatives have won widespread accolades for improving the incomes and conditions of some of the city’s most vulnerable workers, or as public officials like to say, “recycling lives.” My findings, however, based on 14 months of field research, complicate such fanfare. By 2017, after 25 years of effort, less than 1% of São Paulo’s 20,000 street waste pickers had been organized into cooperatives and the vast majority of recycling continued to occur informally. I find that this low inclusion rate was the outcome of a historic shift. In the 1990s, São Paulo’s waste picker cooperatives centered on a paradigm of “recognition,” which treated waste picking as a source of resiliency for marginalized populations. The cooperatives therefore sought to recognize, defend, and gradually improve waste pickers’ work on the streets. City officials, however, came to see waste picking as a premodern, degraded, and degrading form of work, and pushed cooperatives to adopt a model of “formalization.” In the early 2000s, the city organized a recycling route to take over waste pickers’ traditional role of collecting recyclables on the street, and created new cooperatives inside of industrial warehouses, where waste pickers were to sort recyclables along assembly lines. But the new recycling system suffered from two weaknesses. First, the informal system outperformed it in terms of both the quantity and quality of materials collected, and produced far more jobs than did the formal system. Second, the jobs within the formal system clashed with the needs, capacities, and logics of most street waste pickers, who typically experienced greater incomes, freedom, and dignity on the street. This article thus raises questions about the state’s capacity to create spaces for the continuation of self-organized informal work.

Author

• Manuel Zimbalist Rosaldo, Penn State University