The purpose of this new Working Group is to strengthen lines of research being developed by various researchers in Latin America on issues related to the world of work. We are particularly interested in focusing on the meanings that workers in Latin America and the Caribbean attribute to the work they do. We understand that these meanings, values, and searches for meaning are shaped by subjective/symbolic and objective/structural conditions. In this sense, our ethnographic approach allows us unique and privileged access to reality, enabling us to work at the level of everyday life and, from there, to examine the underlying structural conditions.

The need to consolidate a Working Group of this kind stems from a process of accumulating debates, discussions, and exchanges that we have been generating for over a decade regarding the situation of the working class and its diverse problems in the contemporary world. In this sense, various congresses such as the MERCOSUR Anthropology Meetings (RAM), the Congresses of the Latin American Anthropology Association (ALA), the Congresses of the Brazilian Anthropology Association (ABA), the Argentine Congress of Social Anthropology (CAAS), the spaces of the Latin American Association for Labor Studies (ALAST), the Colombian Congress of Anthropology (CCA), and the meetings of the Argentine Association of Specialists in Labor Studies have all contributed to this process. (ASET) have been fertile ground for clarifying the need to consolidate a network of researchers concerned with the centrality of workers in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is from this need for collaboration among diverse researchers, both established and emerging, in Latin America that initiatives are being developed to institutionally consolidate spaces for research, dissemination, and collaboration among colleagues and with Latin American workers' organizations: in 2011, the Núcleo de Antropologia do Trabalho, Estudos Biográficos e de Trajetórias (NuAT) was created at the Museu Nacional-UFRJ. In 2017, the Revista Latinoamericana de Antropología del Trabajo (Latin American Journal of Labor Anthropology), an international journal jointly managed by CEIL-CONICET in Argentina and CIESAS-CONACYT in Mexico, was founded. In 2018, the Programa de Estudios Latinoamericanos en Antropología del Trabajo (Latin American Studies Program in Labor Anthropology) was created at CIECS-CONICET and UNC in Argentina. During 2019, the Master's Program in Latin American Labor Studies was established at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. This program aims to strengthen multidisciplinary training in issues centered on work and workers. In 2020, CLACSO supported and strengthened this network by publishing the Latin American Treatise on the Anthropology of Work, coordinated by Hernán Palermo and Lorena Capogrossi. This "Treatise" is a compilation of over two thousand pages and more than fifty authors from across Latin America and the Caribbean. Also crucial to the consolidation of the network proposed here was the Diploma in Social Studies of Work (2021 and 2022 cohorts). This diploma program is part of CLACSO's Network of Postgraduate Programs in Social Sciences and is coordinated and taught by members of this Working Group. CLACSO has been a crucial pillar for the network of researchers contained in this proposal, providing all kinds of digital support to countless activities and proposals.

Regarding other CLACSO Working Groups, there have been valuable contributions to the debates surrounding the world of work, which undoubtedly represent essential and important references today. In particular, we refer to the historic Working Group coordinated by both Julio Neffa of CEIL-CONICET (Argentina) and Enrique de la Garza Toledo of UAM (Mexico). However, this proposed Working Group aims to expand upon and deepen certain lines of work with their own specific characteristics, such as:

1. Strengthen case studies, which will allow us to address the power relations that manifest themselves in social and cultural processes, as well as focus on the subjects and show them as they are: real, flesh-and-blood workers.

2. To propose an approach that incorporates tensions related to class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, the generational dimension, mobility, etc. In this context, case studies—made possible through fieldwork—allow us to showcase the diversity of material, symbolic, and practical situations, representations, self-perceptions, historical processes, etc.

3. To suggest analytical approaches that allow us to move beyond old and new rigid and immovable categories and notions within the field of study of the world of work.

4. Investigate the lives of workers, both within and outside the workplace. If we consider that life and work are intertwined, we need to recognize that, in many cases, these boundaries become blurred, making it difficult to establish a precise limit between work and leisure or enjoyment.

5. To build an interdisciplinary perspective that, from our approach, is fundamental to unraveling the complex processes in which we, the workers, find ourselves under pressure, and thus to understand the ideological and cultural configurations of our contemporary societies.

6. To consolidate, as an analytical challenge, an approach to labor studies from and with the Global South. This theoretical, methodological, and political challenge, not without its difficulties, means constructing research that enables an understanding of the complex and diverse map of the world of work in Latin America, marked by multiple inequalities, tensions, and violence.

The political situation in Latin America, unlike in previous years, reveals a profound setback in terms of labor rights, manifesting itself in different ways in each country of the region. The deepening of neoliberal policies led to the reconfiguration of the world of work starting in the 90s, presenting Latin American scholars with new challenges stemming from these transformations. In recent years, the degradation of working conditions and the violation of rights have worsened with the arrival in the region of the global phenomenon known as the "platform economy." Its expansion is fueled by a deepening economic crisis in various Latin American countries, which increases the recruitment of workers who are supposedly "independent" but who are subjected to precarious working conditions and risks associated with types of work that are still unregulated in many of our countries.

In this sense, CLACSO's support and encouragement are fundamental to fostering a space of this kind. This space aims to address how to study the categories of thought and behavior specific to workers in contemporary capitalism, related to their labor practices. To achieve this, it is vital to move beyond characterizing these individuals through an abstract theory that reduces them to anonymous abstractions, and instead present them as they truly are: workers who reinterpret—or do not reinterpret—the organization of production according to their own interests, and who challenge—or do not challenge—the processes of capitalist labor organization.

In recent decades, the workplaces and living conditions of the working class have been profoundly affected by a restructuring of the capitalist accumulation regime. Through various political, economic, and cultural processes, this restructuring substantially transformed the capital-labor relationship, clearly to the detriment of the latter. This took on specific expressions and particularities in each country and region of Latin America and the Caribbean, a diversity that is of particular interest to us because of the possibility of identifying common denominators of violence, subordination, and exploitation, but also of resistance and struggle. We believe that the last few decades were shaped by the economic and cultural policies implemented during the various civic-military dictatorships of the 1970s or by the "democracies" characterized by processes of strong state repression intertwined with paramilitary forces. These policies were the prerequisite for the implementation and imposition of neoliberal approaches that had profound consequences in the region and are expressed in a clear rollback of rights historically acquired by the working class. Except for some periods - longer or shorter - of accumulation of rights in governments called "popular" or "national and popular", today we see in Latin America and the Caribbean a pronounced and notable regressive process for workers.

At the same time, the phenomenon of digital technologies is spreading in the world of work, transforming work processes, labor relations and the workers themselves.

Neoliberal policies expose workers to new—and not so new—forms of job insecurity. However, we must also highlight the constant struggles, protests, public and underground resistance, and the diverse organizational strategies that extend beyond the traditional Latin American labor movement.

In this context, case studies, informed by an ethnographic perspective, have the potential to raise new questions, challenge old answers, and identify recurring forms that exploitative relationships take in the world of work. Working at the level of everyday life allows us to contribute empirical elements to historicize, reposition, and problematize contemporary categories such as precarity, flexibility, uncertainty, etc., which have been used interchangeably by the social sciences of work in recent years. As Sergio Leite Lopes (2011) argues, the dynamics of the capitalist organization of work, its historical and spatially situated movements, account for processes of precarity and instability that have long affected large segments of workers. Furthermore, it is essential to establish new categories of analysis that allow us to formulate creative questions to understand the changing dynamics in the workplace, and above all, the diverse strategies of resistance/survival employed by workers (Menezes, 2002; Santos Júnior, 2018), analyzing the disadvantageous power dynamics in which they are embedded. We propose that, methodologically, it is crucial to consider the meanings that concrete situations in the lives of workers acquire by combining and challenging theory with fieldwork.

In this sense, we are reviving the line of research initiated in the 1960s at CIESAS-Mexico by Victoria Novelo and José Luis Sariego Rodríguez. From an anthropological perspective, they began studying workers as both objects and subjects of research at the level of everyday life, focusing on the meanings of work. These seminal studies explore—using the category of "workers' culture"—the real-life situations of workers, including work, family, social, and union contexts, worldviews, values, symbols, and practices, as well as their expectations for the future. These investigations had an essential element for our approach: an interdisciplinary approach (Leite Lopes, 2013; Novelo, 1999; Sariego Rodríguez, 1988; Torres Mejía, 1991). This cornerstone of ethnographic studies would later spread throughout Latin America. In this regard, José Sergio Leite Lopes (2011) analyzes how control within sugar mills in northeastern Brazil extends beyond the workplace and becomes embedded in all aspects of workers' lives. Focusing on how sugar workers construct meanings about their own work, he reveals the forms that the process of domination takes both within and outside the workplace. This author—a key reference for us—provides analytical tools to understand that workers' social representations and practices must be understood holistically. In this sense, employer interests have the potential to overflow the factory floor, permeating all aspects of workers' daily lives. Along the same lines, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro reminds us that ideological aspects, such as nationalism or the idea of ​​national redemption, are central to understanding workers' representations in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this sense, the author analyzes the construction of Brazil's capital, Brasília (Lins Ribeiro, 2006). Along the same lines, and deepening the analysis of how workers' representations are permeated by corporate perspectives, June Nash (2015) makes crucial contributions by addressing the formation of corporate hegemony at the local level where large companies are located. The North American anthropologist incorporates the working class as a creative, active subject, participating in the consolidation of corporate interests. Furthermore, in Argentina, various studies have highlighted key aspects of working-class life, such as health/illness and life/death, situating them within the arenas of dispute in the capital-labor relationship (Wallace, 1998).

More recently, some ethnographic research seeks to access the everyday meanings of work through biographical accounts, autobiographical narratives, or the memoirs and stories of workers, in order to address the symbolic and political significance expressed by the act of speaking about their work (Cioccari and Della Torre, 2013). An essential characteristic of what is known as life history is precisely the possibility of presenting the actors from their own perspectives. In this sense, Cornelia Eckert (2012) worked with coal miners in France. Using the concepts of memory and work, she arrived at a profound understanding of the workers' lived experiences in relation to the past, analyzing traumatic experiences within the context of privatization processes.

In recent years, discussions on gender and work have gained increasing prominence in Latin American anthropology and the social sciences of work in general. With a decidedly interdisciplinary spirit, these debates have become more complex by conceiving of gender as a relational dimension that intersects with ethnicity, race, nationality, and social class (Norma Fuller, 1997; Viveros Vigoya, 2001; Areli, 2010; Magliano, 2015; Monroy, 2017; Capogrossi, 2019). These intersectional approaches, which stem from the political thought of "other" feminisms (Black, Indigenous, Chicana, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms), allow us to advance our understanding of how femininities and masculinities are configured.