Social Policy and Collective Action: Unemployed Workers, Community Associations, and Protest in Argentina

Abstract

Unemployed and informal workers seem an unlikely source of large-scale collective action in Latin America. Since 1997, however, Argentina has witnessed an upsurge of protest and the emergence of unusually influential federations of unemployed and informal workers. To explain this puzzle, this article offers a policycentered argument. It suggests that a workfare program favored common interests and identities on the part of unemployed workers and grassroots associations, allowing them to overcome barriers to collective action. State responses to demands for workfare benefits generated a pattern of protest and negotiation that strengthened those groups and dramatically expanded social policy.Unemployed and informal workers seem an unlikely source of large-scale collective action in Latin America. 1 Lacking the work ties that have typically fostered common interests and identities, and marginalized by labor unions that have often seen in their large numbers a threat to the formal workforce, unemployed and informal workers have remained at the margins of major working-class organization and 301

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