Informality and class in Argentina: a study of labor trajectories (Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, 2015)

ELBERT, RODOLFO; MORALES, FLORENCIA

Congreso; Latin American Studies Association meeting; 2021

Latin American Studies Association

Latin American labor markets are characterized by persistent high levels of labor informality (Tornarolli, Battistón et.al., 2014). The neoliberal transformations of the 1990s deepened this feature, which was not fully reversed during the period of economic growth that followed the collapse of neoliberalism. The persistence of informality in the region?s labor markets has fueled debates about the class position of informal workers: Do they belong to the working class? Or they constitute a new social class? Influential authors such as Alejandro Portes consider that informal workers constitute a new social class with different interests and identities than the formal proletariat (Portes, 1985; Portes & Hoffman, 2003). In a similar vein, Guy Standing (2011) has suggested that the new ?dangerous? class in capitalist economies is the Precariat, a social class that includes the informal proletariat and self-employed but excludes formal workers. On the contrary, this paper sustains the hypothesis that the formal and informal workers are better understood as significant segmetnts of the working class. In theoretical terms, I defend this position with reference to shared objective material interests that unite different segments of the working class. In empirical terms, I study the social relations that might unite (or separate) these groups of workers at the levels of the class structure, and its implications for the subjective formation of the working class. In particular, I test this hypothesis through the analysis of full job trajectories of workers in Argentina in order to capture the weight of informal work in the trajectory of formal workers, and vice versa, the weight of formal work in the trajectory of informal workers. Examination of the biographical dimension of work in Argentina shows the prevalence of a lived experience across the informality boundary among both type of workers. In addition, I explore the effect of different type of job trajectories on the class self-identification of workers. Data comes from a survey study applied to a random sample (n=1065) of the population (ages 25-65) of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires in 2015 (PI-Clases, 2015). The study was conducted by the research team at the Programa de Investigación sobre Análisis de Clases Sociales at the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani (Universidad de Buenos Aires).