Paper short abstract

The paper analyses how in Colombia and Ecuador, waste pickers’ associations have gained legal status and secured work for their members by mediating with governments and industries, while engaging in forms of unionisation and association that promote unique forms of solidarity and resistance.

Paper long abstract

Waste pickers constitute a workforce of up to 40 million people globally. In Latin America in particular, waste pickers known as recicladores have achieved recognition and the legal formalization of their status as workers, through decades of struggle and the work of their cooperatives, associations, and movements. In this process, they have combined knowledge of waste management, radical and entrepreneurial visions and identity-based forms of labour and environmental struggle, while also engaging in hybrid forms of local associationism and international unionisation as part of the International Alliance of Waste Pickers (IAWP).

The paper focuses on two specific cases: RENAREC, the Ecuadorian national waste pickers’ association, and two of the largest constituents that make up its Colombian equivalent, GAIAREC and the ARB. It compares the different forms of labour organisation in each field site and examines the role of recicladores as agents of social change. Their organisational efforts in different local contexts demonstrate the potential for more inclusive urban futures, based on forms of association and collective action that don't conform to a traditional trade union model.

The waste pickers’ association as an organisational form provides a privileged standpoint to observe shop-floor dynamics and workers' perspectives on collective action praxis, as well as to investigate the tensions between workers’ individual and collective goals. The ethnographic data on workers' efforts to gain visibility for their work and its environmental impact at a local and global level show how new forms of solidarity and resistance can emerge from this kind of labour association.