ILPC 2026

In the context of a labor market in transition (2014 – 2017), I will analyze the recent evolution of the idea of ‘slave labor’, as it emerged to describe the working conditions of two particular sectors of the Argentinean economy: the seasonal migrant rural workers (“golondrinas”) and the informal textile workers (“costureros”). My ethnographic approach aims to explore the relation between the agency of the subjects of such characterization, and the way policy makers and the media have produced distinctive categories to implement public policies. While the rural and urban sectors have evident –and even radical– differences, I found isomorphic structures that explain why the logic of outsourcing, efficiently operates to generate profit by creating specific difficulties to the possibility of collective organization.

In order to illuminate what I characterize as a successful subaltern process of self-managed collective production, I will focus on the case of the Centro Autogestivo Juana Villca, a self-organized textile worker’s initiative that emerged from former immigrant home-based workers of the sector in contemporary Buenos Aires. By expanding their view not only as a working-perspective but also as a political and a vital one, this group has challenged the rhetoric of ‘slave labor’ by arguing against the exploitative conditions and combating the rhetoric of ‘rescuing slaves’ promoted by the State and the civil society. This case has contributed positively to understand the limits and the contradictions of modern unionism in Argentina, and outlines the tendencies of the future of employment in the informal sector.