UC Berkeley

Flouting 150 years of scholarship on their political impotence, millions of informal workers—whose labor is not protected by the state—have organized for labor rights over the past three decades. In order to deepen our understandings of the sources, potentials, and constraints of this unanticipated development, this dissertation analyzes the labor rights struggles of waste pickers in Brazil and Colombia. Scholars, activists, and state officials tend to frame informal worker policy in essentializing terms, as if a self-evident set of best practices existed. This dissertation, in contrast, reveals the reimagination of informal work as “decent work” to be a creative, contradictory, and contested process that varies widely across local political cultures.

Waste pickers are a “least likely” case for successful organizing due to their marginality and atomization. Nonetheless, in dozens of cities across Latin America, Asia, and Africa, organized waste pickers have recently pressured public officials to remunerate them for their services and integrate them into formal waste management. Brazil and Colombia are at the forefront of this trend, hosting two of the world’s oldest and largest waste picker movements. Drawing on 24 months of interview, observational, archival, and survey research, I study waste picker movements in São Paulo and Bogotá. I also conduct secondary research in the next three largest cities and several smaller cities in each country.

The first part of the dissertation asks why, after toiling in anonymity for nearly a century, did disconnected groups waste pickers in Brazil and Colombia suddenly begin building powerful movements during the mid-1980s? I find that waste pickers and their NGO allies seized upon opportunities created by rising global norms of environmentalism, social rights, and democracy to contest understandings of what it meant to be a worker and an employer. To do so, the movements engaged in what social theorist Pierre Bourdieu terms ‘classification struggles,’ using symbolic strategies to publically recast the waste pickers from ‘disposable people’ to ‘professional recyclers.’ The reclassification helped the movements recruit members, mobilize elite resources, and—eventually—win legal rights. In this manner, ironically, the waste pickers pulled the state into playing a greater role in ensuring their livelihoods than it does for most formal workers.

The second part of the dissertation examines why the Colombian and Brazilian movements diverged in their self-conception and demands from 2000 to 2016. I find that as the movements became integrated into the state within divergent political fields, they increasingly differed in the way that they classified their constituents and opponents. In Brazil, the movement matured with robust support from the leftist Worker’s Party, and adopted a discourse of “class struggle,” casting the waste pickers as subordinated workers whose primary threat was exploitation by capital. In Colombia, in contrast, the movement had few allies in elected office, and instead advanced its interests through lawsuits in the Constitutional Court. It adopted a discourse of “human rights,” discussing the waste pickers as akin to an indigenous group facing dispossession by the state from an ancestral territory. As these divergent classifications were refracted within the Brazilian and Colombian states, they would produce radically different laws, policies, and outcomes for the everyday lives of waste pickers. I conclude by reflecting on the fundamental questions that this comparison raises about the meaning of decent work and pathways to achieving it.