Paper short abstract:

This paper will address the intersections between precarious labour, popular urbanisation and collective politics in the city through the experience of garment sector workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will address the intersections between precarious labour, popular urbanisation and collective politics in the city through the experience of garment sector workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the country, garment production takes place in medium-size sweatshops and small family sweatshops located in homes. Workers are mostly migrants and their work supplies both formal sector brands and informal markets. These sweatshops are located in shantytowns in the City of Buenos Aires and settlements created after land occupations in its peripheries. Drawing on over 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork together with workers that belong to the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy, I will address how the self-construction of neighbourhoods and residents’ struggles for material improvements and community infrastructures allowed for the consolidation of a vast sector of family sweatshops that fed the industry’s supply chain. On the other hand, and building on the notion of “people as infrastructure” put forward by Simone (2004), I want to understand how the struggles for the material aspects of popular urbanisation fuelled the development of a vibrant network of personal and political relationships that opened up possibilities for a political organisation through the development of an innovative trade union that addressed labour rights but also promoted demands for land ownership and the construction of urban infrastructure. This analysis seeks to call into question often assumed dichotomies between labour struggles and struggles for place and the right to the city, social movements advancing forms of commoning and labour movements centred on individual rights.