The Antinomies of Successful Mobilization: Colombian Recyclers Manoeuvre between Dispossession and Exploitation

Abstract

Long dismissed as too weak and fragmented to collectively organize, millions of informal workers have begun mobilizing for labour rights over the past 40 years. As informal workers gain a measure of power to reshape the structure and conditions of their work, but continue to face constraints due to their subordinated positions in the broader political economy, tensions may emerge between the imperatives of combatting exploitation and dispossession. Recent conflicts over recycler rights policy in Bogotá, Colombia are illustrative of this dilemma. For the first 25 years of its existence, the recycler rights movement experienced little tension between these two imperatives, as it had little capacity to do either. In recent years, however, recyclers have become powerful political agents, and since 2012 conflicts have erupted among recyclers and state officials over how to navigate the twin threat. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article exposes both potentials and constraints of state-led interventions to improve informal livelihoods. Such interventions are likely to entail thorny tradeoffs as long as they occur within a broader system of social relations that is based on exploitation and exclusion.

Inclusion of Waste Pickers Into Municipal Waste Management Systems: A Comparison Between Colombia and Brazil

“…Research on how integration of the IRS takes place in different low-income and middle-income countries is growing (Aparcana, 2017;Gall et al, 2020;Scheinberg, 2011). An example of this are the specific studies carried out in Latin America: in Argentina (Villalba, 2020), Brazil (Ibáñez-Forés et al, 2018;Rutkowski & Rutkowski, 2015), Chile (Navarrete-Hernandez & Navarrete-Hernandez, 2018), Colombia (Rosaldo, 2016(Rosaldo, , 2019 and Peru (Diaz & Otoma, 2012). Aparcana, 2017 mentions other countries which have started this process in national legislations, but many difficulties persist to make integration a reality at local level (e.g.…”

“…Regarding waste management, in both countries, most of the municipal solid waste generated is buried without taking full advantage of the recycling potential, which is greater than 30% of the total generated (Alfaia et al, 2017;CONPES, 2016;FMU, 2018;Larepública, 2019;SNIS, 2018). In Colombia, waste recycling was initially motivated because of the crisis of violence which deprived millions of peasants of their lands from 1950 (Abramovay et al, 2013;Coelho et al, 2011;Rosaldo, 2019); while in Brazil, this is motivated by the value chain of recyclable materials and the demand for intensive labour to collect them, mostly performed by WPs (Rutkowski & Rutkowski, 2015). It is worth mentioning that in Colombia, since the 1990s, the waste sector has been governed by the principle of free competition, encouraging a high percentage of organised WPs to be entrepreneurs, becoming the most innovative model of inclusion globally (Márquez & Rutkowski, 2020;Parra, 2016;Sing, 2018).…”

Problematizing the “informal sector”: 50 years of critique, clarification, qualification, and more critique

“…Also, informal workers provided cheap goods and services to formal workers, thereby increasing the yield of wages. More recent scholarship in this tradition has called attention to processes through which capitalists and state officials forcibly remove informal workers from their means of livelihood in order to ROSALDO -7 of create new spheres of accumulation (Rosaldo, 2019;Samson, 2015;Tucker & Anantharaman, 2020)-an example of what Harvey (2003) terms "accumulation by dispossession. "…”

Informal Work and Sustainable Cities: From Formalization to Reparation

“…If projects devolve risk and responsibility for providing basic services without resourcing worker organizations, formalization can increase the exploitation of informal workers. 45,46 The emphasis on formalization in the SDGs reflects the role of powerful, well-funded civil society organizations, largely from rich and middle-income countries 47,48 and too often lacking representation of workers. 20 Official ''invited spaces of participation'' 49 often limit dissent, discourage critical examination of underlying economic imaginaries, and carry unspoken, exclusionary codes of acceptable behavior that reflect elite norms, values, behaviors, and codes of dress.…”