In Latin America, the number and representation of unpaid workers have grown in recent years. In 2018, for the sixth consecutive year, self-employment expanded more than wage employment, growing by 3,0% compared to 1,1% for wage employment. Within this sector, domestic service accounted for 1,1% and unpaid family work for 0,4% (ECLAC, 2019). As a result of new capitalist practices, not only has the number of workers without a visible relationship to an employer increased, but working-class sectors—especially women and young people—are subjected to greater pressures related to inequality. In 2017, 54,3% of women working informally represented the percentage of men, while the rate for men was 52,3%. Furthermore, the majority of "auxiliary family workers" are informal, unpaid, and women. The gender gap is largely explained by caregiving responsibilities associated with family structures, combined with an increasingly concentrated economy that exploits the commons. Most of the work necessary to sustain life (care, domestic, reproductive, and community work), primarily performed by women, is unpaid. When this work is addressed through the market, it leads to a commodification of life that does not promote equality and well-being for the majority. It is estimated that there are 606 million women of working age worldwide—compared to 41 million men—who are not even part of the labor market. Despite the changes brought about by feminist movements, between 1997 and 2002, domestic work and caregiving decreased by only 15 minutes (men's time spent on these tasks increased by only 8 minutes) (ILO, 2019 ayb).  

In the face of these contexts, the study of the practices, forms of organization and strategies of workers of different generations of popular economies, also called social and solidarity, feminist (Federici, 2018; 2019), diverse and postcolonial (Gibson and Graham, 2011), local and interdependent (Collin, 2015) becomes increasingly important to understand and contribute to their leading role and struggle for the need for expanded sustainability of life in common (Coraggio, 2014; Carrasco Bengoa, 2017).

These workers organize themselves into unions, federations, networks, assemblies, and diverse communities in order to carry out, share, sustain, and expand their activities; generate better conditions for exchange and consumption (whether within the capitalist market or by promoting other markets); and pressure and influence the State and public policies in their function of socioeconomic redistribution. They seek and contest, through various means, the legitimization of work-life forms that represent alternatives to the employment crisis and the colonization and commodification of life (Quijano, 2007; Pérez, Cutuli, and Garazi, 2018).

Among other organizations and experiences, federations of the popular economy, networks of alternative and solidarity economy markets in different areas and sectors, and care cooperatives have had a complex interaction with both populist and neoliberal governments. However, all of them, whether through resistance or more general proposals for transformation, challenge the ways in which the hegemonic economic organization structures our societies into profound hierarchies, subordinations, and inequalities in Latin America (Muñoz, 2019; 2018; Gracia, 2015).

In Latin America, the tension between the potential of emancipatory practices and existing relations of subordination has been reignited by the rightward shift of numerous governments and the emergence of social movements with demands related to informal labor. Hintze (2010) argues that potentiality is that which “is possible and even incipiently present, while also referring to the power and force required for its construction” (p. 16). However, as Gracia (2015) points out, while these experiences open spaces for collective experimentation with social innovation practices, potential cannot be dissociated from the strategies and processes of articulation that presuppose power relations and the construction of national, regional, and international hegemony. In the same sense, Álvarez Fernández, (2018) points out that rather than as preconditions, many of the characteristics of these economies should be thought of as bets and processes that account for the capacity of workers to build these work environments and develop their own strategies and alliances.

In these processes, the production of subjectivity acquires fundamental importance, as work involves cognitive and affective competencies (Veronese, 2009). It is a space of material and symbolic production (Reygadas, 2002) inscribed within a specific sociohistorical context (Gracia, 2014) that encompasses different perspectives on life. It is a heterogeneous, diverse space where political experiences and collective work intersect, along with processes of struggle and spatial production that challenge the separation between the political, the social, and the economic, between production and reproduction, and between the modern-capitalist and the communal. These experiences reterritorialize by resisting processes that intensify the dispossession of common goods through practices of social invention that involve not only the territorial characteristics of a locality or region, but also the unconsidered possibilities present in different situations (Gibson and Graham, 2011). 

Many of the collective experiences linked to these processes in Latin America and the Caribbean began by addressing unemployment as a secondary social problem, later implementing actions aimed at meeting basic needs in the face of severe limitations in the labor market. In response to these demands, policies and proposals emerged that created opportunities for the formation of a range of organizations that shifted from denouncing the exclusion of workers from the wage-earning society to proposing their inclusion by recognizing them as workers who demanded an expansion of their status (Muñoz, 2018; 2019). Therefore, addressing the articulation between the strategies of these workers and collectives and public policies was also vital for the institutionalization of a functioning circuit for the popular economy. The channels were diverse: through monetary, legal, or symbolic incentives for the formation of collective enterprises and cooperatives, as well as through income transfers to the households of these workers and the creation of organizations and institutions that broadened the discourse on the “social and solidarity economy” as an alternative for social inclusion. This enabled the transformation of demands, putting pressure on the distribution of rights and expanding their scope. Beyond policies, movements, collectives, and management spaces emerged, as well as spaces for analyzing and discussing experiences and concepts.

The problematization of labor status and its associated rights opens this category to questions that broaden its scope. Latin American sociology of work has been questioning the interpretation of the world of work centered on the image of the wage-earning relationship characteristic of the factory model of the Fordist-Keynesian era (Bialakowsky and Hermo, 2015; de la Garza Toledo, 2017; Denning, 2011), which narrows the field of study and renders invisible other realities and solutions in terms of public policies and interventions by different agents.

Formal, private-sector wage employment remains relevant but does not represent the entire working population. Latin American critical theory has highlighted that in our region, the expansion of market capitalism and its forms of wage labor never became widespread (Quijano, 1998; 2003). For decades, feminist movements have argued that inequalities stem from the invisibility of women's work in the home and in public and community spaces (Rodríguez Enríquez et al., 2018; Fraser, 2015; Pérez et al., 2018; Vosne-Martins and Arias, 2015).

The world of informal workers encompasses a wide range of issues. Some key aspects of the discussion are linked to the processes of individual and collective subjectivation and the collective organizations they develop, the relationships they establish with the capitalist economy and the State, and with public policies that would alleviate poverty and social exclusion, as well as with the territorial processes they lead, many of which focus on defending the commons and biocultural heritage. In terms of definitions, it is easy to distinguish them in opposition to “formal wage earners” since the latter are socially “integrated” through their participation in the primary distribution—wages—and secondary distribution—guaranteed access to rights and protections due to their status recognized by the State—of income. However, when seeking definitions from within the informal sector itself, the issue becomes more complex. Although they do not exchange their labor power for a wage, their main factor of reproduction is their own self-exploitation (Maldovan et al 2017; Muñoz, 2019) and they have often managed to identify themselves as a collective.

Therefore, in light of the economic changes of recent decades, it is necessary to broaden the concept of work, visualizing forms of organization, identification and proposals for alternatives in different territorial areas (rural, urban, local), based on the intersection of gender, age or generation and ethnicity, among other markers, observing a new functioning of the global economy that has transformed the centrality of wage labor, although also the distance with European wage-earning societies (Altvater, 2014; Nun, 2010; Quijano, 2003).

In Latin America and around the world, debates surrounding the role of the state and the capacity of public policies to address the new structure of social risks have spurred a series of responses. Family wages, universal basic income, job guarantee proposals, and policies associated with the social and solidarity economy have been some examples. In the context of the leftward shift at the beginning of the 21st century, Latin American and Caribbean countries primarily developed policies associated with the social and solidarity economy or popular solidarity economy (Coraggio, 2016; Hintze, 2010). However, the scope of these policies failed to counteract the precariousness, primary sector dependence, and financialization of the Latin American economy. The recent conservative and/or right-wing shift of several governments and movements in the region is based on these failures, but it does not diminish the importance of the movements born from the recognition of pro-worker policies as fundamental to sustaining and expanding transformative alternatives (Muñoz, 2018). The conception of public policies cannot be dissociated from individual and collective subjectivities, social organizations, and the coexistence of social and political transformations generated from below through a diversity of situations, contexts, and processes of identification.

The surge in interest in alternative economics is based on this potential. Popular, social, and solidarity economics, as well as decolonial and feminist economics, seek socioeconomic and political alternatives to the forms of exclusion and oppression inherent in financial and primary-sector capitalism, but also to the limitations of neo-developmentalist economics. Some experiences argue that social transformation occurs primarily through the formation of collective, cooperative, and self-managed work, both market-based and non-market-based, with or without public support, and above all, based on values ​​of solidarity, cooperation, and reciprocity. Other perspectives emphasize the capacity to generate social policies, create protections, and guarantee labor rights. Some branches of feminist economics stress the need for women workers to organize and demand recognition from the state and society at large.

In some proposals for the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), the central focus is "solidarity-based economic entrepreneurship," which emphasizes the combination of entrepreneurial and solidarity-based approaches, where cooperation functions as a vector of economic rationalization (Gaiger, 2008). Others center on collective self-management and ownership of the means of production in experiences that embody values ​​of solidarity that clash with capitalist profit-driven logic and offer seeds for future transformations (Singer, 2007). Meanwhile, most authors who favor the Popular Economy (PE) do not place as much emphasis on self-management or solidarity-based values, but rather on transformative strategies for the primary and secondary redistribution of income and the development of rights (use of public space and the right to the city). The relationships of exclusion and/or subordination to the market economy would overdetermine experiences, and only the political capacity of the State could transform the barriers to market entry and limit the devaluation of labor and products in the informal economy, as well as the ways in which surplus is appropriated (Arango et al., 2017; Pérsico et al., 2017; Giraldo, 2017). In this sector, workers would not be oriented towards exchanges of products outside the market, nor would they be characterized by arising from specific interpersonal relationships, but rather by not having an employer, by low productivity, and by not carrying out a process of accumulation (Narodowski, 2013). In short, these are productive units with low capital and generally limited productivity, characterized by self-exploitation of labor, organized for social reproduction, with a limited surplus, and often centrally driven with State funding. Under this definition fall formally constituted associative forms, informal collective work production units—generally of domestic origin—that are not registered, but also self-employed, non-collectivized workers, and user and consumer groups. Beyond the differences, what is evident in all cases is that these workers are in conditions of exclusion, invisibility, and subordination, but that at the same time they are part of the process of wealth and labor production. In this sense, the social organizations that attempt to represent this universe of workers are oriented toward seeking their recognition, conceiving new labor rights, new public-state institutions, and new ways of thinking about the production and distribution of wealth.

In this Working Group, we will discuss the various approaches that work with the aforementioned universe of study (popular, social and solidarity economy, community-based, and feminist economy), not with the aim of harmonization or synthesis, but rather by inviting attention to the tensions in order to enrich the debates and proposals regarding problematic aspects of the processes described. Initially, we will prioritize:

Studies associated with the production of subjectivity and forms of collective organization in tension with “glocal” socio-economic processes. 

Proposals for local, subnational, national and regional public policies and dynamics of economic transformation

Processes associated with the defense of territories, common goods and biocultural heritage.

From these axes we will contrast, compare and exchange experiences, learnings, challenges and dilemmas that have arisen in different territories and countries from plural perspectives in disciplinary, experiential, gender and generational terms