Book Review, Unemployment and the Popular Sectors’ Pursuit of Inclusion

:::::: Book Review ::::::

Book Review: Unemployment and the Popular Sectors’ Pursuit of Inclusion
by Ray Bromley


The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina
Rossi Federico M. The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.


Writing as a political scientist with a wide-ranging and comprehensive knowledge of social movements, popular organizations, and politics in Argentina, Federico Rossi provides an insightful review of “the second incorporation,” the period from 2001 till 2008 in which the piqueteros had a major impact on Argentine politics and public policy. Argentina’s piquetero (picketer) movement consists of dozens of different organizations, some emerging from union federations, some from political parties, some from radical Catholic (liberation theology) movements, and many representing provincial, municipal, and local interests. They continue as significant participants in Argentine politics, and Rossi provides some information on post-2008 changes, but his main focus is on events and transformations leading up to 2008.

Book Review, Historical Contexts of Street Vendor Politics in the Mexican State

:::::: Book Review ::::::

Book Review: Historical Contexts of Street Vendor Politics in the Mexican State
by Walter E. Little


Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Mexico
García Sandra Mendiola Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017.

Street vendors constitute one of the largest sectors of the global economy. Their presence is ubiquitous in the Global North and South, where they may be incorporated into the formal economy as taxpaying and permit-holding business owners or vilified by elites, fixed business owners, and government officials as a blight on urban aesthetics, unfair competitors, and health and zoning hazards. Latin American street vendors’ economic practices, lifestyles, and struggles have been well documented by anthropologists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and sociologists, but in Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Mexico the historian Sandra Mendiola García makes significant contributions to our understandings of how street vendors organize and survive in a politically hostile environment and how grassroots democracy functions. Despite her claim to bring together their economic and political histories (2), little of her book relates to economics. Rather, it is a well-researched description of how street vendors organize politically and re-envision their social and political relations with each other and with social and political actors such as students and neighborhood associations. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and on oral history and interviews, she reconstructs the struggles of street vendors in Puebla, Mexico, from roughly 1970 to 1990 to form the Unión Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes (Popular Union of Street Vendors—UPVA) and resist the efforts of the local government and its elite allies to squash their sales and remove them from the historic center of the city.

Book Review: Day Labor in Two U.S. Cities

:::::: Book Review ::::::

Book Review: Day Labor in Two U.S. Cities
by David Stoll

Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA
Ordoñez Juan Thomas Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015.


Against the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter, Florida
de la Vega Sandra Lazo & Steigenga Timothy Against the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter, Florida. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.



Day laborers and open-air labor markets are not new in American history, but in the twentieth century, thanks to high employment and increasing job security, they almost disappeared. Now they’re back, fed by heavy migration from Mexico and Central America, and a bone of contention in the U.S. immigration debate. For immigrant-rights activists, the increasing visibility of day laborers is irrefutable evidence of the demand for immigrant labor. Since most day laborers lack legal status, their advocates continue, they also illustrate the need for a comprehensive legalization program. For critics who wish to reduce immigration, in contrast, the resurgence of day labor is a sign that job markets are being flooded and labor laws are being ignored.

Abstract, Informed But Insecure: Employment Conditions and Social Protection among Paid Domestic Workers in Guayaquil

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Informed But Insecure: Employment Conditions and Social Protection among Paid Domestic Workers in Guayaquil
by Erynn Masi de Casanova, Leila Rodriguez and Rocío Bueno Roldán


Salaried domestic labor in private homes in Latin America is informal, precarious, and exploitative, but for thousands of women who have no other options it is their occupation and the sustenance of their families. The results of a study based on 400 surveys of paid domestic workers in Guayaquil, Ecuador, about social protection and labor rights show that workers possess a high level of knowledge about their labor rights but the majority do not belong to the social security system and many do not enjoy any of the benefits guaranteed them by law. Understanding the situation and experiences of these workers is a precondition for creating strategies to recognize the importance of their work and to guarantee their labor rights.

Abstract, Women’s Small-Scale, Home-Based Informal Employment during Cuba’s Special Period

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Women’s Small-Scale, Home-Based Informal Employment during Cuba’s Special Period
by Daliany Jerónimo Kersh


There is consensus in the literature that adherence to the traditional division of labor in Cuban society caused women to be disproportionately affected by the cutbacks to state services and shortages during the post-Soviet economic crisis known as the Special Period. After the devaluation of the state wage, many Cubans had to look for alternative forms of employment. Highly skilled professional Cuban women turned to feminized informal activities that made them similar to women in capitalist countries in the region and amounted to a partial reversal of the revolution’s substantial progress on gender equality. In contrast to the regulated self-employment on which existing studies focus, women’s informal labor up until 2010 was often small-scale, home-based, and unregulated. An analysis of oral histories and press archives identifies changes and continuities in women’s informal work during the crisis and shows where the interviewees locate themselves within this watershed in the Cuban Revolution.

Abstract, Pensions, Peasants, and the Informal Economy: Family and Livelihood in Contemporary Peru

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Pensions, Peasants, and the Informal Economy: Family and Livelihood in Contemporary Peru
by Susan Vincent


A Peruvian case study explores how urban informal workers negotiate their livelihoods as they age, highlighting reciprocity among urban informal workers, retired formal sector workers, and peasants in a pattern of rural-urban circular migration. Labor-intensive mining in the twentieth century created a proletarian workforce that included men from the peasant community of Allpachico. Their wages became an anchor for kin-linked clusters of households. Now, despite an economic boom, the lack of formal jobs forces younger Allpachiqueños to undertake precarious and informal work. Resource-sector-funded state social spending, such as through state-administered pensions for retired workers and the elderly poor, has replaced wages as a stable source of cash. This state mediation between the technology-intensive resource sector and citizens elicits suspicion and uncertainty. Dispossessed of the right to work and subjected to conditions of eligibility for social programs, urban informal workers continue to rely on kin and community.

Abstract, Paid Domestic Work: Gender and the Informal Economy in Mexico

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Paid Domestic Work: Gender and the Informal Economy in Mexico
by Georgina Rojas-García, Mónica Patricia Toledo González


A consideration of paid domestic work as an aspect of the informal economy in Mexico identifies some distinctive features: a paternalistic view rather than a labor relation based on a contract, a reluctance on the part of the state to regulate this employment area, and a devaluation of this work as something largely performed by women who are poor and of rural or indigenous origin. The lack of social security is almost universal among paid domestic workers, and coverage is one of the principal demands of organizations formed in defense of their rights.

Abstract, The Informal Economy and Social Programs in Mexico: A Critique

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Informal Economy and Social Programs in Mexico: A Critique
by Tamar Diana Wilson


In the wake of neoliberal reforms that devastated the country, Mexico and the World Bank converged on providing at least two social programs in the guise of “humanitarian” capitalism. Progresa, also known as Oportunidades and more recently Prospera, involves a workfare-based cash transfer program aimed at enhancing the human capital of future generations. The program has been criticized for its exploitation of the work of mothers. Seguro Popular involves extending basic health care to those employed in the informal economy. Both, with all their weaknesses and exploitative aspects, serve the function of providing skills and enhanced health status to the subproletariat in the hope that a competitive formal economy will expand and employ them; they are also intended to mute social protest.

Abstract, Solid Waste Management and Social Inclusion of Wastepickers: Opportunities and Challenges

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Solid Waste Management and Social Inclusion of Wastepickers: Opportunities and Challenges
by Marta Marello and Ann Helwege


As informal workers, wastepickers gather recyclable material without adequate social benefits and occupational protection. In response to wastepicker demands for legalization and access to the waste stream, cities have created inclusion programs to improve livelihoods and promote recycling. While inclusion yields benefits for many participants, it brings challenges at each step of development. In the poorest countries, workers lack the skills, capital, and managerial experience to operate profitably, while projects in wealthier cities employ few wastepickers and face stiff competition from the formal sector. The most sophisticated municipal systems mechanize waste processing and threaten wastepickers’ livelihoods because capital-intensive methods yield few jobs. To realize genuine inclusion, policies to support wastepickers must enable workers to compete throughout the broader economy.

Abstract, Environmental Protection, Work, and Social Inclusion: Formalizing the Recycling of Urban Solid Waste in Buenos Aires

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Environmental Protection, Work, and Social Inclusion: Formalizing the Recycling of Urban Solid Waste in Buenos Aires
by Johanna Maldovan Bonelli


The changes in the paradigms regarding urban solid waste management that have occurred in the past few decades have led to a reformulation of Argentine social, labor, and environmental policies. In the case of the city of Buenos Aires, the presence of thousands of “informal” recyclers dedicated to the recovery of recyclable materials for their subsistence has given a particular imprint to the design of these policies, the focus of which has been the social inclusion of these workers through the creation of cooperatives. An examination of the assumptions underlying the use of the concept of informality in the development of cooperatives for recycling from 2007 to 2013 shows that they are part of a complex process in which measures for increasing rights and protections are associated with various forms of labor instability.

Abstract, Living on the Construction Site: Paraguayan Construction Workers in Buenos Aires

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Living on the Construction Site: Paraguayan Construction Workers in Buenos Aires
by Álvaro del Águila


Argentine enterprises subsume Paraguayan migrant workers into the construction industry in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, subordinating them to the demands of production by temporarily housing them on the construction sites themselves. Ethnographic fieldwork carried out on various construction sites between 2006 and 2015 shows how this practice overlaps with wider processes of global transformation in labor relations. The lodging of workers on construction sites is an increasingly widespread strategy for capitalist entrepreneurs to exploit the migrant workforce even further.

Abstract, Unions Opposing Labor Precarity in Chile: Union Leaders’ Perceptions and Representations of Collective Action

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Unions Opposing Labor Precarity in Chile: Union Leaders’ Perceptions and Representations of Collective Action
by Dasten Julián


The systematic deregulation of labor relations was a cornerstone of the imposition of the neoliberal model in Chile. This process had a significant impact on both the strategies and the structure of unionism. A study of the perceptions and representations of precarious work of union leaders contributes to a discussion of the relationship between precarity and repertoires of collective action in workers’ pursuit of regulation, institutionalization, social improvement, and well-being in employment relations.

Abstract, Informality, Class Structure, and Class Identity in Contemporary Argentina

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Informality, Class Structure, and Class Identity in Contemporary Argentina
by Rodolfo Elbert 


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. In this context, sociological debates have focused on the relationship between the formal and the informal fractions of the working class. Examination of the biographical and family linkages between formal and informal workers in Argentina and the effect of these connections on the patterns of class self-identification of individuals shows that lived experience across the informality boundary makes formal workers similar to informal workers in terms of class self-identification. This research provides preliminary evidence that the two kinds of workers belong to the same social class because of the fluidity of the boundary that separates them. Instead of a class cleavage, this boundary is better defined as the separation between fractions of the working class.

Abstract, From Structuralism to Neoliberal Depredation and Beyond: Economic Transformations and Labor Policies in Latin America, 1950–2016

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From Structuralism to Neoliberal Depredation and Beyond: Economic Transformations and Labor Policies in Latin America, 1950–2016
by James Cypher 


From the 1930s until the early 1970s, national industrialization programs in Latin America were part of an effort to introduce social policies that broadened the national market, indirectly creating employment opportunities. Yet, Celso Furtado and other structuralists found the pattern of investment in Latin America predetermined by the unequal composition of aggregate demand, skewed toward the landholding-industrial-financial elite and newly emerged professional strata, leading to constricted employment. In reaction to the inclusive policies urged by the structuralists, insurgent neoliberal policies created a new climate of hostility toward unions and indifference to employment. Neoliberal doctrines deconstructed labor’s eminence, forcing flexibility and precariousness while labor laws and unions were conjured as market distortions. Social neoliberalist, neostructuralist, and neodevelopmentalist regimes arose in the early twenty-first century as a reaction to the failure of neoliberalism to create growth and employment security. These temporary regimes have focused largely on income transfer policies, deploying economic surpluses arising from reprimarization as serendipitous exogenous forces generated export income windfalls from the commodities boom. Fundamental issues such as the pervasiveness of informal work, the recent introduction of flexible employment regimes, and deunionization have not been addressed.

January 2018 Issue!

The Urban Informal Economy Revisited

Issue Editors : Ray Bromley and Tamar Diana Wilson

Table of Contents

The distinction between “formal” and “informal” jobs and enterprises was first introduced in the 1970s and has been very widely used ever since.  The underlying assumption was that the formal economy would gradually expand and dominate, and the informal economy would gradually disappear.  The reality, however, associated with neoliberal economic development and growing socio-economic inequality, is that the informal economy has persisted and sometimes grown, and that job security and benefits in the formal economy have often diminished.  This theme issue focuses on the informal economy under neoliberalism, with case studies of some of the most significant and persistent occupations. Several of the articles focus on the process of the “formalization” of informal workers, a goal expressed by the International Labour Organization, but often fraught with difficulties.

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Introduction, The Urban Informal Economy Revisited

:::::: Introduction ::::::

The Urban Informal Economy Revisited
by Ray Bromley and Tamar Diana Wilson                                     


One of the most cited definitions of the informal economy is “a process of income generation characterized by one central feature: it is unregulated by the institutions of society, in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated” (Castells and Portes, 1989: 12). Among those the International Labour Organization (ILO) (2013: 3) identifies as being part of the informal economy are those who work in the informal sector as employers and employees in informal enterprises and as self-employed workers. Also included are those who labor outside the informal sector and are informally employed in formal firms or as domestic workers, not covered by labor law protections. The employees in the informal economy also include unpaid family workers, whether employed in informal enterprises or in formal firms or in domestic service.

For decades there have been debates over whether the informal economy is procyclical, expanding as the capitalist economy expands, or countercyclical, contracting as that economy expands. Both things may be happening, depending on which part of the informal economy is under scrutiny: the informally self-employed or informalized wage workers in either informal or formal enterprises (FORLAC, 2015: 2). For example, informal microenterprises that market their products directly to customers or retail outlets may show countercyclical tendencies, whereas informal microenterprises that are subcontracted by large businesses, whether national or multinational, may show procyclical tendencies. More domestic workers may be employed when the economy expands, whereas self-employment in artisanal work and vending may expand when waged employment dries up.

Book Review: Day Labor in Two U.S. Cities

:::::: Book Review ::::::

Book Review: Day Labor in Two U.S. Cities
by David Stoll

Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA
Ordoñez Juan Thomas Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015.


Against the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter, Florida
de la Vega Sandra Lazo & Steigenga Timothy Against the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter, Florida. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.



Day laborers and open-air labor markets are not new in American history, but in the twentieth century, thanks to high employment and increasing job security, they almost disappeared. Now they’re back, fed by heavy migration from Mexico and Central America, and a bone of contention in the U.S. immigration debate. For immigrant-rights activists, the increasing visibility of day laborers is irrefutable evidence of the demand for immigrant labor. Since most day laborers lack legal status, their advocates continue, they also illustrate the need for a comprehensive legalization program. For critics who wish to reduce immigration, in contrast, the resurgence of day labor is a sign that job markets are being flooded and labor laws are being ignored.

Book Review, Historical Contexts of Street Vendor Politics in the Mexican State

:::::: Book Review ::::::

Book Review: Historical Contexts of Street Vendor Politics in the Mexican State
by Walter E. Little


Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Mexico
García Sandra Mendiola Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017.

Street vendors constitute one of the largest sectors of the global economy. Their presence is ubiquitous in the Global North and South, where they may be incorporated into the formal economy as taxpaying and permit-holding business owners or vilified by elites, fixed business owners, and government officials as a blight on urban aesthetics, unfair competitors, and health and zoning hazards. Latin American street vendors’ economic practices, lifestyles, and struggles have been well documented by anthropologists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and sociologists, but in Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Mexico the historian Sandra Mendiola García makes significant contributions to our understandings of how street vendors organize and survive in a politically hostile environment and how grassroots democracy functions. Despite her claim to bring together their economic and political histories (2), little of her book relates to economics. Rather, it is a well-researched description of how street vendors organize politically and re-envision their social and political relations with each other and with social and political actors such as students and neighborhood associations. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and on oral history and interviews, she reconstructs the struggles of street vendors in Puebla, Mexico, from roughly 1970 to 1990 to form the Unión Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes (Popular Union of Street Vendors—UPVA) and resist the efforts of the local government and its elite allies to squash their sales and remove them from the historic center of the city.

Book Review, Unemployment and the Popular Sectors’ Pursuit of Inclusion

:::::: Book Review ::::::

Book Review: Unemployment and the Popular Sectors’ Pursuit of Inclusion
by Ray Bromley


The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina
Rossi Federico M. The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.


Writing as a political scientist with a wide-ranging and comprehensive knowledge of social movements, popular organizations, and politics in Argentina, Federico Rossi provides an insightful review of “the second incorporation,” the period from 2001 till 2008 in which the piqueteros had a major impact on Argentine politics and public policy. Argentina’s piquetero (picketer) movement consists of dozens of different organizations, some emerging from union federations, some from political parties, some from radical Catholic (liberation theology) movements, and many representing provincial, municipal, and local interests. They continue as significant participants in Argentine politics, and Rossi provides some information on post-2008 changes, but his main focus is on events and transformations leading up to 2008.

Abstract, Pensions, Peasants, and the Informal Economy: Family and Livelihood in Contemporary Peru

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Pensions, Peasants, and the Informal Economy: Family and Livelihood in Contemporary Peru
by Susan Vincent


A Peruvian case study explores how urban informal workers negotiate their livelihoods as they age, highlighting reciprocity among urban informal workers, retired formal sector workers, and peasants in a pattern of rural-urban circular migration. Labor-intensive mining in the twentieth century created a proletarian workforce that included men from the peasant community of Allpachico. Their wages became an anchor for kin-linked clusters of households. Now, despite an economic boom, the lack of formal jobs forces younger Allpachiqueños to undertake precarious and informal work. Resource-sector-funded state social spending, such as through state-administered pensions for retired workers and the elderly poor, has replaced wages as a stable source of cash. This state mediation between the technology-intensive resource sector and citizens elicits suspicion and uncertainty. Dispossessed of the right to work and subjected to conditions of eligibility for social programs, urban informal workers continue to rely on kin and community.