Migration and Precarious Work: Community Basis of Informal Textile Workshops in Argentina

MAGLIANO, MARÍA JOSÉ; PERISSINOTTI, MARIA VICTORIA

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; The 35th International Labour Process Conference: Class and the Labor Processes; 2018

Universidad de Buenos Aires

The aim of this paper is to analyze the economic potential of community resources to the development of labor insertions of migrant population in Argentina distinguished by precariousness and uncertainty. In particular, we focus on informal textile workshops; one of the main contributors in Peruvian migrant´s insertion in the labor market in Argentina. Contemporary migration to this country has been marked by a mobility of workforce that arrived especially from South American countries (mainly Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru). In Argentina textile industry, turned into a «migration labor activity» during the last decades, has become a paradigm of labor informalization and exploitation. The intersection between nationality, ethnicity and class shapes and segments labor markets according to industry strategies aimed at outsourcing certain productive processes (Caro et.al, 2015:1607). The findings that we present in this paper are principally based on an ethnographic fieldwork we conducted between 2012 and 2015 in peripheral neighborhoods in the city of Córdoba (Argentina), composed of Peruvian migrants who have moved to the city during the last 15 years.The close relationship between peripheral neighborhoods and informal textile workshops introduces the community dimension ? understood as the «practical capacity of diverse human communities to cooperate between them» (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2008: 35) ? as an important element to recognize the complexity involved in this productive process. Community bonds and practices are connected to singular ways of living in those peripheral areas and, at the same time, are central to the production and maintenance of modes of intensive labor exploitation.In our analysis, informalization reintroduces the category of community as a central resource that enables family and labor reproduction. Moreover, it is the same informalization that allows the reproduction of labor as well as the delegation of costs to the community. At the same time, community practices also work as a way of competition and dispute among migrants based on the resources obtained from community mobilization but used subsequently by textile workshops for their own profit. These practices explain how the current restructuration of the labor market has delegated some of its function into the community.As part of an economic global system reproduced in a particular localization, the community dimension not only expresses modes of social exploitation but also self-management capacities of people who live in the margins of the cities. Our premise is that community resources and practices become a useful alternative to manage the daily reproduction of migrant population who reside within peripheral urban areas and have precarious jobs. Those community resources and practices are important in order to assure migrant livelihood, but also to maintain the particular and submerged way of production that involves informal textile workshops.