Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Grassi, Estela
Materias
Idioma
spa
Extent
413 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
ARG
2002-2015
Abstract
Toward the end of the twentieth century, the failure of the economic growth theory that promised a “trickle-down” over the well-being resulted in new concerns over social and employment issues. As soon as experts realized that work would not actually allow people to escape from poverty, social problems emerged as a critical point to solve: could work and protection continue to be thought of as intertwined issues? Or was it necessary to create new principles and institutional frameworks to extend the protections, regardless of the type of labor insertion? In the face of these questions, the approaches concerning informal work were once again updated. This thesis analyzes the relations between the problematization of informal work and the processes of restructuring the social protection of the State, from 2002 to 2015, in Argentina.
Addressing informal work as a problem posed new questions concerning the relationship between employment problems and poverty, as well as the frontiers between work and life conditions, between economic production and social reproduction. These frontiers consist in records established as separated in the capitalist modernity, but the line that divides them is both field and source of conflict, since it is there where the individual and social life reproduction rules are settled. The general guiding hypothesis is that, following the fracturing of the neoliberal hegemony, said frontier was altered and the problems around its reconstruction were concentrated on the reflection upon informal work. The new cycle of reforms developed after the 2001 and 2002 crisis in Argentina was characterized mainly by controversy, rather than by stable and widespread agreements: its core were the political fantasies about the desirable labor market formality that could be built through government interventions. As a result of the visibility acquired by informal work, the efforts to rebuild the unifying role of employment faced a prickly problem: what rights and protections may be claimed by whom in their condition as workers? Therein lies the source of the problems that social policy faced during this period. Recognizing these populations as legitimate individuals with a right to be protected strained the frontiers historically established between social assistance and security, not only during the former neoliberal cycle (that referred to them as “poor people”), but also during the Welfare State in the middle of the twentieth century (that failed to acknowledge them as “insurable”).
We follow this political storyline by a thorough archival research that allowed us to reveal the link between science and politics used to build a new field of social reform in the country and that, at the end of the period, marked its crisis. The exposition follows an analytical criterion: each chapter deals with a series of distinctive arguments for reconstructing the problematization of informal work.
The first chapter delves into the analytical hypothesis that informal work represents a specific way of reflecting upon the relationship between work and life conditions, between employment and poverty problems. The second chapter focuses on the conditions that characterized the reemergence of informal work in Argentina during the twentieth century and draws attention to the fact that, until the 2001 and 2002 crisis, the predominant keys to interpreting social issues in the specialized field were precarious work and social exclusion. Both were expressions representing the criticism against the neoliberal social reform. Expectations about rebuilding the labor market were broken as a result of the political process of creating an exit from the situation of social emergency, which altered the structure of the specialized field and its relation with politics. From then on, specialized diagnoses and prospects would be characterized by informality as a problem and formalization as a solution. The next chapters cover a diachronic analysis of the events following the unification and the crisis of the reform process, from 2002 to 2015, structured around the definition of informal work as a problem of social vulnerability. The purpose of chapter 3 is analyzing the relationship between informality and the concept of precarious work, characteristic of the social reform process. Chapter 4 concentrates on an alternative problematization that competes with the previous one and that used the concepts of exclusion and marginalization to understand the phenomenon. Both problematizations reconstruct strategic and conflicting viewpoints on the desirable work formality, going from the utopia of restoring normal employment to dystopias about the arrival of flexible work. Chapter 5 takes a closer look at the limits between informal work and the ideal space of no work, and we have identified certain convergence points in the specialized field that indicate the exclusion of an activity circuit and its individual from the projects of formalization. Finally, chapter 6 reconstructs the discussions about the restitution, reorganization and disconnection of the relationship between work and protection that arose in light of the transformations in the assistance and social security provided by the State. The thesis ends with an Epilogue where we embark on a global reading of the analysis of the reform process.
Addressing informal work as a problem posed new questions concerning the relationship between employment problems and poverty, as well as the frontiers between work and life conditions, between economic production and social reproduction. These frontiers consist in records established as separated in the capitalist modernity, but the line that divides them is both field and source of conflict, since it is there where the individual and social life reproduction rules are settled. The general guiding hypothesis is that, following the fracturing of the neoliberal hegemony, said frontier was altered and the problems around its reconstruction were concentrated on the reflection upon informal work. The new cycle of reforms developed after the 2001 and 2002 crisis in Argentina was characterized mainly by controversy, rather than by stable and widespread agreements: its core were the political fantasies about the desirable labor market formality that could be built through government interventions. As a result of the visibility acquired by informal work, the efforts to rebuild the unifying role of employment faced a prickly problem: what rights and protections may be claimed by whom in their condition as workers? Therein lies the source of the problems that social policy faced during this period. Recognizing these populations as legitimate individuals with a right to be protected strained the frontiers historically established between social assistance and security, not only during the former neoliberal cycle (that referred to them as “poor people”), but also during the Welfare State in the middle of the twentieth century (that failed to acknowledge them as “insurable”).
We follow this political storyline by a thorough archival research that allowed us to reveal the link between science and politics used to build a new field of social reform in the country and that, at the end of the period, marked its crisis. The exposition follows an analytical criterion: each chapter deals with a series of distinctive arguments for reconstructing the problematization of informal work.
The first chapter delves into the analytical hypothesis that informal work represents a specific way of reflecting upon the relationship between work and life conditions, between employment and poverty problems. The second chapter focuses on the conditions that characterized the reemergence of informal work in Argentina during the twentieth century and draws attention to the fact that, until the 2001 and 2002 crisis, the predominant keys to interpreting social issues in the specialized field were precarious work and social exclusion. Both were expressions representing the criticism against the neoliberal social reform. Expectations about rebuilding the labor market were broken as a result of the political process of creating an exit from the situation of social emergency, which altered the structure of the specialized field and its relation with politics. From then on, specialized diagnoses and prospects would be characterized by informality as a problem and formalization as a solution. The next chapters cover a diachronic analysis of the events following the unification and the crisis of the reform process, from 2002 to 2015, structured around the definition of informal work as a problem of social vulnerability. The purpose of chapter 3 is analyzing the relationship between informality and the concept of precarious work, characteristic of the social reform process. Chapter 4 concentrates on an alternative problematization that competes with the previous one and that used the concepts of exclusion and marginalization to understand the phenomenon. Both problematizations reconstruct strategic and conflicting viewpoints on the desirable work formality, going from the utopia of restoring normal employment to dystopias about the arrival of flexible work. Chapter 5 takes a closer look at the limits between informal work and the ideal space of no work, and we have identified certain convergence points in the specialized field that indicate the exclusion of an activity circuit and its individual from the projects of formalization. Finally, chapter 6 reconstructs the discussions about the restitution, reorganization and disconnection of the relationship between work and protection that arose in light of the transformations in the assistance and social security provided by the State. The thesis ends with an Epilogue where we embark on a global reading of the analysis of the reform process.
Título obtenido
Doctora de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales