In this century, rural areas continue to be characterized by extreme poverty and stark inequalities based on class, ethnicity, race, gender, and generations. A thorough study of the multiple causes of this situation is central to the concerns and contemporary agenda of the social sciences and international organizations (ECLAC, FAO, and IICA 2021).

The economic and health crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated shortages and obstacles to accessing goods and services, prompting analysts to develop research appropriate to the different rural areas of Latin America, which makes visible the particular circumstances faced by its population.

Inequalities are multiplying and taking on new forms as a result of the accelerated development of capitalism in agriculture, driven by the global restructuring of agricultural commodity production. This is expressed, among other phenomena, in changes in the world of work, forms of employment, and the structure of labor markets, which reinforce and consolidate the dynamics of inequality present in rural societies (Kay, 2020). A new global and corporate agri-food regime is emerging, characterized by a new and more unjust international division of labor, changes in institutional frameworks, and a profound reconfiguration of power relations (McMichael, 2015; Friedman, 2005; Niederle and Wesz, 2018). These processes are producing an increasing concentration of productive resources and common goods in the hands of large agri-food companies (Bendini, 2014; Gras and Hernández, 2021), thus shaping fragmented ruralities. This stems from the multiple ways in which these global trends are territorialized (Gras, 2019). Nation-states are displaced, producing a growing subordination of agrarian economies on a global scale, deepening food insecurity for the world's population (McMichael, 2004; Barbosa Cavalcanti, 2015), concomitantly with a strong overexploitation of natural resources and labor (Gudynas, 2017; Svampa, 2019).

Even before the pandemic, one of the consequences of the transformations that have taken place is the increasing wage-labor of large sectors of small family producers, peasants, and landless rural populations, who swell the ranks of the rural poor across the continent (Reinecke and Faiguenbaum, 2016). This situation is exacerbated by new forms of labor intermediation, which generally lead to greater mobility of the working population, further intensifying the conditions of their overexploitation (Lara and Sánchez, 2015). These mobility patterns are strongly shaped by class, ethnicity, and gender (D'Aubeterre, 2019; Sampedro, 2022). There are also profound changes in rural households, which modify their ways of life, employment and survival strategies, causing, among other processes of de-agrarianization, the increase in non-agricultural employment and the growing territorial mobility of the population in search of job opportunities (C. de Grammont, 2021; Quaranta, 2016; Contreras, 2017).

In this regard, one topic that has garnered attention is the study of remittances, analyzed as an alternative to rural development processes. However, the complexity of the mobility strategies employed by rural populations today, particularly women and young people, has been insufficiently studied. These mobility patterns integrate agricultural and non-agricultural markets, rural and urban destinations, and national, intraregional, and long-distance international migration. This issue is especially prevalent in Andean countries, Mexico, and Central America, where the return to rural areas of migrants who had settled in the United States or Spain is also occurring, generating significant changes in some rural communities.

Studies conducted within the framework of previous GTs show how the combination of wage employment with the remarkable advance of technology and innovations only produced a small percentage of skilled jobs, but failed to improve working conditions or the remuneration of the majority of workers, among whom there are groups of extreme vulnerability based on their gender, ethnicity or race (Lara and Sánchez, 2015; de Moraes and Vasconcellos, 2020).

This new phase of development of capitalism in agriculture was based on the depredation of natural resources and the displacement of indigenous communities and peoples from their lands, and also on the exploitation of workers who created the wealth accumulated by large transnational agricultural companies (Riella and Mascheroni, 2015, Salas, 2022).

This led to a dramatic increase in the precariousness of rural work (Kay, 2016) and resulted in workers remaining politically and socially invisible to the rest of their fellow citizens (Riella and Mascheroni, 2015). The weak institutional framework in the region offers no social guarantees to workers and becomes a significant factor in the increasingly asymmetrical and unfair nature of labor relations (Lara and Sánchez, 2015; Marinakis, 2014).

As ECLAC (2020) has warned, the COVID-19 pandemic has not only revealed the severity of the repercussions of the economic and health crisis in deeply unequal societies, but also that the weakness of social protection systems and the effects of unemployment will disproportionately affect the working class, generating new asymmetries and reshaping existing inequalities. In this regard, recent studies focus on the importance of analyzing the determining relationships between employment and the unequal provision of care for dependent populations in rural areas. These care arrangements have multiple consequences for women's lives, as they promote more precarious and unstable employment that limits their autonomy (Artacker et al., 2020; Nobre, 2021).

In the rural world, to understand the existing inequalities, it is crucial to consider the condition of ethnicity, race, gender and/or generation, since the social origin of the population often acts as a mediator of the vectors of inequality present, such as access to land, work, infrastructure, connectivity or services (ECLAC, 2018; FAO, 2018).

The research conducted by GT allowed for discussion of how rural labor markets in our continent constitute a main driver of the reproduction of social vulnerabilities and a space of fragilities, injustice and discrimination, in which differences of class, gender, race and ethnicity deepen and multiply, affecting all our societies.

This context presents urgent challenges for academic research and collective action, making it necessary to delve deeper into the complexity of contemporary rural society and recent social changes in these areas. The proposed working group aims to reflect, from diverse perspectives and territories, on:

a. the vulnerability profiles and the chain of social inequalities presented by agricultural workers and their families;

b. the forms that the transformation processes of rural employment markets in Latin America take, with emphasis on heterogeneity in work, mobility and precariousness in working conditions;

c. the interfaces of agricultural work and the social organization of care as one of the main sources of inequality;

d. the conflicts and responses that have arisen from public policies and the collective action of rural social organizations.

Rural studies in Latin America have a long history of concern and interest regarding agricultural labor and social inequalities in that environment. A key academic forum for these debates is the Latin American Association of Rural Sociology (ALASRU), to which the vast majority of the Working Group members belong.

In the 1990s, the implementation of neoliberal principles in agriculture deepened poverty and precarious working conditions in the agricultural sector, highlighting that social inequalities in Latin America are linked to a lack of opportunities in rural areas, infrastructure and social service deficits, limited connectivity, and, in particular, the connection to the labor market. The intense migration of rural populations to cities failed to alleviate these trends and generated new inequalities in rural society, partly due to the selective nature of these migration patterns. To understand these processes, a series of studies focus on the specific characteristics of work in rural areas, highlighting, among other phenomena, the predominance of temporary employment and day labor, the importance of labor intermediation, piece-rate or productivity-based remuneration systems associated with low income levels, the difficulties for union organization and collective action, the incorporation of women into wage labor, the demands for quality and their effects on employment, the pluriactivity and multi-occupation of rural families, and labor mobility, migrations and displacements (Bonanno and Barbosa, 2011; Sánchez and Lara, 2015; Sánchez, 2019; Villulla, 2020; Neiman and Alberti, 2021; Neiman, 2022, Mott et al, 2022).

With the beginning of the 21st century, interest in delving deeper into these topics has been renewed, based on a new phase of capitalist penetration in agriculture, which, within the framework of the generalized processes unleashed by globalization, causes substantial transformations in the organization of production, agricultural work, and the working life of the rural population in general (Kay, 2009; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2012).

The characteristics of the rural labor market largely explain the poverty experienced by the population living and working in these areas (Soto and Klein, 2012), which is associated with multiple weaknesses in the design and implementation of public policies related to the labor market, such as labor legislation, unionization, and discrimination based on gender or ethnicity. Overcoming these labor disadvantages through policies designed and implemented to address their specific needs is a path with high potential for reducing the high levels of rural poverty (Klein, 2012).

In contrast, in recent decades several regions have experienced a significant shift in the sources of income for rural households, related to government transfers, which become "non-labor income," directed especially to poor households. Few studies account for the effects these transfers have on labor market dynamics, as they effectively subsidize the labor force reproduction process for the households that receive them (Quaranta, 2021).

In parallel, within this context, academic production is emerging around the importance of non-agricultural work in rural areas as an emerging element of contemporary rurality. The growth in the proportion of non-agricultural employment and income among rural residents is a phenomenon that expresses global processes of social change, while also reflecting a broad heterogeneity resulting from existing differences in rurality (C. de Garammont, 2017; Camarero, 2017).

This line of research seeks to understand the dynamics of rural work within the framework of the new forms that the social division of labor is taking as a result of the increasing integration of rural and urban areas. Under these social conditions, the labor market integration of the population and households increasingly combines agricultural and non-agricultural work, as well as forms of self-employment and wage labor. Depending on the prevailing territorial conditions, these integrations can reflect both employment opportunities to improve families' capital accumulation and diversification strategies aimed at ensuring family survival (Riella and Mascheroni, 2018).

These reflections, related to the studies of the "new rurality" in our continent, are linked to the debates on the processes of defamiliarization, de-peasantization and de-agrarianization present in the literature produced in Anglo-Saxon and European contexts referring to experiences of both the capitalism of advanced capitalist countries and countries of Africa, Asia and Oceania (Camarero and Oliva, 2016).

The intertwining of agrarian transformations and rural change processes redefines emerging inequalities in rural areas and poses new challenges for academics, governments, and members of social movements. Our Working Group aims to continue and deepen its lines of research on the social and labor vulnerabilities of the rural world by addressing the inequalities that operate through prevailing labor market conditions, according to the prevailing characteristics of these territories, such as scenarios marked by re-primarization, de-familyization, or de-agrarianization.

The hypothesis guiding our research is that agricultural and rural work reproduces, reconfigures, and reinforces existing inequalities in the social order. Therefore, it is important to study and shed light on current labor market processes to understand contemporary rural life and the inequalities it generates. Understanding these phenomena and how they interconnect allows us to identify mechanisms for intervening in these territories with public policies and collective actions that promote more equitable and inclusive rural development.

The processes described unfold at different paces and with varying foundations in each country, generating specific consequences and reconfigurations beyond their common features, which are linked to globalization and the transnationalization of markets. Therefore, it is vital to study how global trends operate at the local level in each country and specific context to account for the diverse social, economic-productive, institutional, political, and conflictual matrices present in these territories.

To address these problems, as mentioned in the previous section, we propose working along four thematic axes. The first is linked to agricultural work and labor markets; the second to the interfaces between agricultural work and the social organization of care; the third to rural households, vulnerabilities, and inequality; and finally, the fourth to public policies and collective action. These four axes propose an intersectional perspective that allows us to account for how different inequalities of class, gender, territory, ethnicity, and generation intertwine.

Thus, the aim is to contribute to the analysis of emerging rural inequalities, largely based on rural and agricultural labor markets, emphasizing a comparative perspective that addresses the specific territorial characteristics present throughout Latin America. The accumulated experience of collaborative work and research among the members of the Working Group guarantees a substantial contribution to finding more effective ways to combat poverty in rural areas.