“But I Do Work”Organized Popular Economy at the Crossroads

Abstract

This article analyzes the organized popular economy in Argentina through the experience of the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP), focusing on its dual inscription as both a social movement and a trade-union form. Drawing on long-term and engaged research, based on field records, interviews, participant observation, audiovisual materials, and organizational and legal documents, it reconstructs five scenes —urban waste pickers, community spaces of care and education, socio-urban integration, union training, and union elections— to show what the stigmatizing labels “planeros” and “vagos” —welfare scroungers and idlers— render illegible. The article examines institutional, community-based, and organizational mediations that sought to move activities of subsistence, care, neighborhood production, and social reproduction from the register of assistance toward recognition as work. From these scenes, it proposes the notion of community productivity to name a collective capacity to produce goods, care, neighborhood infrastructure, knowledge, bonds, and forms of recognition where neither the market nor the state fully guarantees the reproduction of life. Finally, it analyzes how, since December 2023, the sedimented stigmatization around “planeros” and “vagos” has intersected with an offensive of material, institutional, and symbolic dismantling that erodes the conditions of life, work, and social reproduction that those mediations helped sustain.