Paper short abstract:

I analyze new forms of policing informal waste work through interventions from the repertoire of 'poverty management' as multiplying forms of 'atypical labor' and thus suggest a perspective that seeks to overcome the epistemological divide between survival strategies and work

Paper long abstract:

Today, in Belgrade and other Serbian towns a growing interest in extracting value from communal waste goes hand-in-hand with new forms of policing increasingly illegalized economic activity of scavenging through interventions from the repertoire of "poverty management". These interventions include the introduction of micro-finance and subjecting informal waste pickers to "activation measures" for the unemployed. Sanyal (2007) explains such 'rehabilitating' interventions directed at informal labor as a "modern politics of exclusion", which secures the legitimacy of the accumulation economy by managing the space of those permanently excluded from it. In contradistinction to Sanyal, I suggest that the idea of economic activities outside the accumulation economy relies on problematic understandings of un/productive work. I will argue, instead, that measures of 'poverty management' directed at waste pickers establish a disciplinary regime that redraws the very distinction between productive and unproductive work. In that I seek to contribute to an anthropology of unemployment, which seeks to overcome the bifurcation of studies of poverty/survival strategies on the one hand and work/labor relations on the other (Perelman 2007). I will show how a perspective on 'poverty management' as a labor regime gives new insights into the processes that contribute to multiplying forms of 'atypical labor'. Here I refer especially to the production of 'quasi-entrepreneurial' or as Denning (2010) says, 'disguised wage-labor'. This does not only challenge the distinction between work and survival strategy, but also blurs the line between of formal and informal economic activities.