ILPC 2026

 The case study focuses on private security workers in a middle class housing complex in Mexico City. The personnel started as unregistered workers throughout the 90s, and by the year 2014 developed an organization that pursued two main demands: labor contracts signed by mutual agreement and access to social security. Faced with this, the diffuse employer figure of “the administration” recurred to an outsourcing company, in order to absorb the workers and fulfill employer responsibilities. The research results from an ethnographic exercise with a sustained stay in the field for a year and a half. And its main purpose is to explore the outsourcing of workforce as a mechanism in which employers can contain labor conflict and comply with national labor regulations, without this having a positive impact on the life conditions of the workers.

The concept of non-classical work is used in dialogue with the ideas of Loïc Wacquant on advanced marginality; thus making a translation that shows that, although the neoliberalization process in the countries of the global south did not have the same implications as for the industrialized countries, the conditions of those workers who historically have been excluded from the benefits of the Welfare State, did not remained intact during the pass of time.  In this sense, throughout the investigation it is argued that when the formalization of the work is achieved by the means of an outsourcing company a paradox appears: with the formalization of labor emerge a series of problems such as flexibility, and decreased waged.

The research privileges an etnographic approach of the labor relationship between workers and neighbors (using the complexities of consumer oriented services, in which the consumer plays a crucial role in the labor dynamic). Both, the neighbor and the surveillance worker, are positioned as agents with a limited, yet accurate cognition of the situation. This breaks the Manichean conceptions where neighbors are “heartless” beings whose only motor is the minimization of costs; while workers are subjects unable to cope with their circumstances. On the contrary, the research shows how the everyday order is marked by attitudes highly conditioned by morality and voluntarism, which use affection and paternalism as a way to lessen the precarious working conditions. This is permeated also by narratives that interweave, sometimes incoherently, notions about responsibility, voluntarism and care.

I refere to the previously mentioned “everyday order”  as incoherent to point out that is relays more on a paternalistic interexchange of favors than in appopiate working conditions with full labor rights. It is one of the reasons why, when formalization of labor is achieved with an outsourcing company, these everyday affection-based strategies can no longer continue; leading to the conclusion that outsourcing is not only an employer strategy for cost reduction, but a way to contain the conflict and narrow the paternalistic and incoherent, yet useful, networks between care workers and its consumers.