Position de classe, trajectoire d informalité et identité de classe en Argentine

ELBERT, RODOLFO

Pauvreté au travail, transformations des marchés de l'emploi et trajectoires de résistance : Un dialogue Nord-Sud

Presse de l Université du Quebec

Año: 2021; p. 45 - 63

The dynamics of peripheral capitalism in Latin America includes the employment or self-employment of a significant proportion of the working class under informal arrangements. The neoliberal transformations of the 1990s deepened this feature of Latin American labor markets, and it was not reversed during the period of economic growth that followed the collapse of neoliberalism. For example, in 2017, around 45% of the labor force in Argentina was part of the informal workforce (either salaried or self-employed). 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 and Guy Standing consider that informal workers constitute a new social class with different interests and identities than the formal proletariat. On the contrary, this paper sustains thatthe two kinds of workers belong to the same social class because of the fluidity of the boundary that separates them (i.e. they are better understood as different fractions of the working class). In order to sustain this claim I analyze full job trajectories of workers in Argentina 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 showsthe 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 trajectorieson the class self-identification of workers. Data comes from a survey studyapplied to a random sample (n=1065) of the population (ages 25-65) of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires in 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).