Financialization from the margins

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This article investigates how the Argentine subproletariat perceives the recent consumer credit boom, based on several field visits carried out in one of Argentina's industrial hubs between 2007 and 2016. It analyzes the credit boom in relation to the wider social transformations induced by the leftist Peronist governments during 2003–2015 (especially the incorporation of informal workers into the social protection system). It argues the rise of consumer credit is perceived by those who use it with ambivalence. While it has allowed the subproletariat to access a form of consumption that was previously restricted to upper classes, it also exposes this population to a new form of exploitation based on the discrepancy between the (monthly based) time of finance and the (erratic) time of work.</jats:p>

COVID‐19 and the Unequalizing Infrastructures of Financial Inclusion in Tamil Nadu

“…However, the relentless requirements of finance are often at odds with the insecurity and precarity that characterize income streams of the poor. As Saiag (2020) has shown in Argentina, the time demands of finance in the form of credit repayments are not always reconcilable with the time patterns of work, particularly in instances where people are precariously employed. This resulted in a feeling of losing control over one's time due to credit taking — where finance, and not the individual, ‘dominates the time of labour’ (Saiag, 2020: 24).…”

“…As Saiag (2020) has shown in Argentina, the time demands of finance in the form of credit repayments are not always reconcilable with the time patterns of work, particularly in instances where people are precariously employed. This resulted in a feeling of losing control over one's time due to credit taking — where finance, and not the individual, ‘dominates the time of labour’ (Saiag, 2020: 24). Put simply, the ceaseless demands of debt repayment rendered those with insecure incomes even more precarious, increasing their exposure to risk.…”

Credit, land and survival work in rural Cambodia: Rethinking rural autonomy through a feminist lens

“…Accounts highlight how the ceaseless demands of microfinance repayments often deepen livelihood insecurity, given the discrepancy between irregularity of income and demands for regular repayments. This can lead debtors to feel they are losing control over their lives (Saiag, 2020). Ensuing insecurity has a gendered inflection as Paprocki (2016) identifies: ‘with the proliferation of microcredit lending, women's responsibilities for household labor persist and remain invisible, while their gendered role as microcredit borrowers becomes the basis of their further social and economic dispossession’ (p. 33).…”

Challenging the financial inclusion-decent work nexus: evidence from Cambodia’s over-indebted internal migrants

“…12 This means that households with poor income-generating prospects are able to take on multiple loans, or loans that far exceed their income capacity. The rigidity of repayment schedules jar with the insecure and temporally diffuse nature of available work, hence leading to what Saiag ( 2020 , 23) terms ‘the mismatch between the time of labor and the time of finance’. Furthermore, acceptable forms of collateral have also been deregulated.…”

“…Duvendack and Mader (2019: 7), in their systematic review, found that 'the effects of financial services on core economic poverty indicators such as incomes, assets or spending, and on health status and other social outcomes, are small and inconsistent'. Furthermore, far from the promised beneficial outcomes, microfinance has often been called into question for increasing the reliance of marginalized and lowincome workers, as well as unemployed or underemployed people, on credit for social reproduction (e.g., Soederberg, 2014;Taylor, 2012), reproducing inequalities and, specifically, unequal gender relations (e.g Kar, 2018;Roberts, 2015;Young, 2010), as well as causing extreme stress to its users (e.g., Rankin, 2013). This paper contributes to this critical literature on microfinance and further problematises the links between this development project and labour conditions.…”