Organizing across the informality frontier: Unions, neighborhoods and class in Buenos Aires

ELBERT, RODOLFO

San Francisco

Congreso; 115º Meeting of the American Sociological Association; 2020

American Sociological Association

Recent Argentine history shows that since 2003 the labor movement became increasingly relevant due to protests organized by unionized formal workers. As part of the revitalization of labor, activism in some industrial enterprises of the Northern Gran Buenos Aires had been led by grassroots democratic unions: left-leaning unions developed strategies to unify the struggles of formal industrial workers with the livelihood struggles of the urban poor. This paper presents an in-depth study of some of those strategies and compares them to the exclusionary strategies of traditional unions that reinforced the divisions of the working class. This paper explores these contrasting strategies and reflects on the implications of the comparison to inform theoretical debates about the class position of informal workers.