Work at the Margins of Neoliberal Latin American Economies: Resistance, Resilience, Innovation

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

With the implementation of neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies, many workers have had to exercise ingenuity in the quest for survival. The session brings together examples of struggles "from below," whether in reconfiguring established ways of earning a living or developing new economic niches. We approach these challenges from an ethnographic perspective to demonstrate the skills and strategies necessary to overcome scarcity of financial resources, adverse market conditions, and legal restrictions, among other disadvantages confronting subaltern groups.
In this way, the session aims to raise awareness of the processes of flexibilization that have appeared beyond the formal economy and large enterprises. The effects can be found among small-scale innovators who have lost or never achieved stable employment. The session offers case studies of street vendors, day laborers, trash pickers, and tip workers whose precarious livelihoods can be understood and compared as outcomes of global change mediated through local conditions and initiatives.
With their emphasis on contextualizing discrete details of a range of work situations, the presenters join the burgeoning theoretical and empirical discussions of increasing labor insecurity in the most marginalized economic sectors in Latin America and throughout the world

Sub Track

• Labor Studies and Class Relations

Session Organizers

• Mariano D Perelman, Universidad de Buenos Aires

• Jim Weil, Science Museum of Minnesota

Chair

• Mariano D Perelman, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Individual Presentations

• Precários e Perigosos – informalidades, ilegalismos e a perspectiva neoliberal na utilização do espaço publico por vendedores ambulantes - Lenin S Pires, Universidade Federal Fluminense

• The Afterlife of Rio’s Dump: Trajectories of Labor in Brazil’s Marvelous City - Kathleen M Millar, Simon Fraser University

• Trabajo en los márgenes de las economías (pos)neoliberales: vendedores ambulantes en Buenos Aires, Argentina - Mariano D Perelman, Universidad de Buenos Aires

• Trabajadores sin salario en la ciudad de México: condiciones de vida y formas de resistencia - Angela Giglia Ciotta, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa

• “This is the Mexican Office”: Street Corner Work Strategies Among Latino Day Laborers in Colorado - Rebecca B Galemba, University of Denver

Discussant

• Jim Weil, Science Museum of Minnesota