How Do We Understand the Scope of Informal and Precarious Worker Mobilization? A Feminist Materialist Approach Applied to the Brazilian Solidarity Economy
How do we analyze the rise of these new labour movements represented by the mobilization of informal and precarious workers, where women play an important role, including in terms of leadership? Traditional approaches in sociology and industrial relations evoke a rise in social identities versus professional identities, as if it were the rise of specific interests. Starting from an ontological redefinition of the work opened up by the materialist feminist approach, this article offers an alternative reading of conflictuality brought about by the mobilization of informal workers. The research is based on a case study carried out in the Brazilian solidarity economy and on Melucci’s collective identity concept. It explores how these new labour movements define the processes of exploitation and domination that must be fought against and how they put into practice their visions of social change. The article thus highlights the emancipatory scope of the transformations in their relationship to work and, conversely, underlines the reductionism that drives union strategies, especially when they claim to defend the rights of workers by developing competitive cooperatives. This approach, which recognizes the fact that knowledge is “situated”, makes it possible to better understand the scope of mobilization in the solidarity economy and why there are tensions between unions and the struggles of precarious and informal workers.