ILPC 2027

This paper aims to analyze the transformations in popular ways of commerce in São Paulo, having in mind the recent formalization policies of street vendors activities and the translation of these activities from the streets to galleries. I intend to discuss the effects of these objective transformations on the worker's perspective about their occupation, establishing relations between these experiences and the Brazilian labour market situation. I also intend to reflect about a possible "disenchantment of the wage condition" among these workers, in face of the changes in the social position of the formal employment over the last decades in Brazil.

In the last three years, I have dedicated myself to an ethnographic observation about the work in the popular commerce in the center of the city of São Paulo, in addition to conducting interviews to recover the social trajectories of the agents – that means, the narratives about their biographic-occupational trails until their reflections about the present situation. The research indicates that the process of insertion in the activities of this market – though related to the precariousness of the labour market – is not an automatic nor an evident movement, noted the stigma that persists related to these occupations. It makes pertinent the questioning about how and in which situations the subjects insertion in the popular commerce happens.

In the last years, an intensification of the fight against the street commerce by the State agents has been happening. The legitimacy of the repression against the street vendors follows the idea of the fight against the informality, and also their association to criminal practises - such as smuggling and piracy -, allowing even speeches which associate the "messy" esthetic of the street commerce to the possibility of other crimes happening, such as theft and robbery. It is important to say that the growth of the repression against the street vendors came together with the incentive to the entrepreneurship in the popular commerce. It can be said that this process of "entrepreneuring" has been happening following two axis: strategies of formalization of the activities and "gallerization" of the commerce. After formalizing as microentrepreneurs, the merchants can amplify their access to bank credits and, paradoxically, obtain some access to social benefits through the conversion to an enterprise form – like maternity assistance, health assistance and some social security.

From the research field, we will try to reflect not only on the transformations in São Paulo's popular commerce, but also about the more general changes in the world of work, that includes the dissemination of the neoliberal logic and the entrepreneur speech. Having in sight the complexity of these processes, which has been inserting new practices and new agents in the universe of popular commerce, I see as fundamental to invest in the construction of ways to understand the implications of these transformations also in the dimension of the agents, that is to say, to observe the effects of more broad socio-economical processes from the experiences of those who need, daily, to interpret, assign meaning and adapt to the dynamism of this market and the new world of work.