Having a name of one?s own, being part of history": temporalities and political subjectivities of popular economy workers in Argentina

FERNANDEZ ALVAREZ, MARIA INES

Cambridge

Workshop; Workshop Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity,; 2017

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

In September of 2015 I met leaders from the Confederation of Popular Economy Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular - CTEP), a union founded in 2011 with the objective of representing a wide range of activities of the working class including seamstresses, cooperatitivist, waste-pickers, street vendors among others. For the CTEP ?Popular Economy? unifies a heterogeneous group of people that has been called ?wageless lives?, but for this organization they are the ones who ?have invented work in order to survive?. As a social demand, this term highlights two attributes: to recognize this people as workers and their lack of labour rights that in Argentina are part of waged worked (e.g. social security, paid leave, health insurance). There for claim is ?we are what is lacking? (?somos lo que falta?) and their principal demand consist on granting the same right to this workers as those of the waged workers. As a union, and following the same logic as the workers movement in this country, the CTEP is organized in branches according to labour activities with the aim of unifying demands and identifying common goals. I carry out my research with a collaborative perspective working together with the branches of ?public space workers?. This includes street venders in public transportation or stadiums, craftsmen and street markets. In the conversations I have had with them, I frequently heard about their life experiences which many times included a childhood wanting for basic needs which forced them to work from an early age, systematic violence that they had been exposed to due to their ?illegal? activity, uncertainty about their future or a general lack of protection for them and their families. These descriptions are directly linked to a conceptualization of their experiences as precarious conditions that include and exceed the working conditions. This conceptualization has become relevant in recent years in order to define living conditions of growing populations in today?s capitalisms in the north and global south. At the same time, throughout my research I have noticed other dimensions that necessary to broaden the understanding of precarity in others ways. On one hand, because this deals with life experiences that can be traced back a in a deep temporality which goes back at least two or three generations. It is therefore possible, to think about a socialization in this labour that begins at an early age sharing a day`s work with their parents, older siblings or others family members. As a result, one same person that recognizes deep uncertainty about their future working, at the same time may express their love for what they do, the freedom they feel at working without a boss, managing their own schedule and owning their income, which are attributes embodied in their own trajectories and their elders´. On the other hand, the enthusiasms and commitment that I have observed in everyday acts of solidarity (e.g. organising a football tournament to race funds for a workmate (compañero) in need) energized the construction of their own organization as public space sellers from which they project their desires and hopes for a future of well-being. This observations invite an approach to political construction of this space not only as strategic response to the ?needs? and demands that are created around an ideal of wage salary (e.g having social security) but also as a horizon from which to build political subjectivities as popular economy workers. In other words, rather than approaching this subjectivities as something to be transformed (to stop being popular economy workers in order to become wageworkers) they became the bases for the production of collective rights. In this paper, I will aim to contribute to recent discussions about the experience of precarity as a condition of life and basis for a collective politics of labour focusing on the dimension of temporality I mentioned before. I analyze how the process of collective construction that the CTEP carries out links a past which is alive in their subjective experience with a future that this experience builds in political terms under a union organization capable of representing popular economy workers.