The Working Group (WG) "Work in Contemporary Capitalism" aims to advance the strengthening of various lines of research on work developed in and from Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the articulation and collaboration with civil society organizations and with technical and academic teams interested in the current transformations of production, work and the conditions of reproduction of the lives of workers in the region.

The consolidation of this Working Group is the result of a prolonged process of accumulating debates, discussions, and exchanges sustained over more than a decade within the framework of academic events, the formation of a Network, seminars, and joint publications. These opportunities have allowed for a deeper reflection on the situation of the working class and its heterogeneous problems in the contemporary context. The exchanges have also been enriched by the intergenerational collaboration between researchers with established careers and those in the early stages of their training. This convergence has contributed to strengthening an "interpretive community" that shares a common analytical language, which has enabled a challenge to assumptions that have become naturalized in labor studies and that do not always adequately reflect the processes of transformation in livelihoods in the Global South (Palermo and Capogrossi, 2020).

Thus, the Working Group has proposed a critical review of a set of analytical categories central to social studies of work. Concepts such as formality/informality, stability/precariousness, registered/unregistered, and center/periphery have been pillars in the theoretical construction of the field, reproducing themselves over time (Capogrossi and Izquierdo Quintana, 2021). However, new questions arise: What happens when processes historically characterized as belonging to the capitalist peripheries extend to the rest of the world-system? How can we explain the emergence of features typical of precarious work in jobs considered formal and stable? What effects does the incorporation of new technologies have on the reconfiguration of ways of working? How can we address the emergence of women in jobs considered "masculinized," and what are the impacts on gender relations? How do these transformations affect narratives about work? What does "working" mean for young people? Can we still talk about "self-employment"? Can we observe new forms of "piecework" in home-based work?

In order to answer these and other questions, and to further develop this "common language," the Working Group has sought to rethink, challenge, and recreate analytical categories, as well as reflect on the historical and social structures that have shaped the world of work in recent decades. This process reveals that certain dynamics of informalization, precarity, expropriation, and structural violence, previously associated with specific territories—such as Latin America and the Caribbean—have spread globally, reshaping the map of contemporary capitalism. Two key dimensions emerge from this transformation: one related to labor processes and the other to the role of the State.

Regarding the first point, we identified a phenomenon that could be termed "precarious formality" (Capogrossi, 2025): labor relations that, while structured around formal contracts that comply with regulatory requirements, reproduce conditions typical of informal or unregistered work. In these cases, contracts are devoid of rights and guarantees: stability erodes, historical gains are lost, wages decline, and various protections become blurred. This phenomenon encompasses multiple niches of the labor market—private security, call centers, commerce, hospitality, gastronomy, and even public health and education—and crystallizes in relationships marked by uncertainty and increasing vulnerability. As a hypothesis, it can be argued that the pandemic—by acting as a disruptive event—accelerated the expansion of this "precarious formality," maintaining the fiction of contractual stability while working conditions rapidly deteriorated.

The second dimension refers to the role of the State, central to the discussion on the future of work in Latin America and the Caribbean. While for the Latin American structuralist tradition (Prebisch, 1976) the State occupied a strategic place in promoting development and expanding labor protections, in the current context it appears as the administrator of precarity, contributing to its normalization and naturalization. As Isabell Lorey (2016) argues, precarity is no longer limited to insecure jobs or insufficient social protections: it encompasses the entirety of existence, bodies, and processes of subjectivation. Living in precarity means inhabiting contingency. Uncertainty is incorporated into bodies, and the State actively participates in its consolidation, in a scenario that reinstates the "normality of the minimum."

These changes pose new challenges for the social sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is especially true because, in recent years, the degradation of working conditions and the erosion of rights have been exacerbated by the expansion of the platform economy, whose advance is favored in contexts of global economic and social crises. This new stage of capitalism modifies the organization of production processes and labor, and fosters new ways of disciplining, controlling, and extracting value. Thus, we find ourselves facing new technologies, new management styles, new types of work, new business models, and new markets that emerge to sustain capital accumulation (Srnicek, 2018). Furthermore, these transformations are accompanied by specific discourses, specific visions of society, specific subjectivities—that is, specific “ways of being in the world” (Ribeiro, 2018). Platforms operate as catalysts for a labor market composed of supposedly “independent” workers who are, in fact, subject to intensified conditions of vulnerability and exploitation. The expansion of this business model is supported by the lack of regulation, which is in line with the role of the State that we pointed out in the previous paragraph.

In this complex regional scenario, CLACSO's support is fundamental to strengthening a space for critical reflection on these transformations in the processes of capital valorization, on the ways of organizing work, and on the categories of thought specific to those who work. This Working Group starts from the need to abandon perspectives that conceive of subjects through dehistoricized abstractions, in order to recover the real people, the workers, in their capacity to interpret, contest, or resignify the forms of production organization and their being-in-the-world. This is the starting point for understanding the complex web of contradictions, tensions, and ambivalences that characterize labor experiences in contemporary Latin America.

Since the mid-1970s, a profound reconfiguration of the capitalist accumulation regime has been observed, a process that has exhibited two main trends. On the one hand, a shift towards the informalization of the workforce on a global scale and towards increased levels of precariousness among workers. On the other, a trend towards the growing intellectualization of labor, especially in sectors with a greater technological, informational, and digital impact (Antunes, 2012). These trends are global in nature, although they manifest themselves with particularities and specificities in the different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The first trend is particularly relevant for social studies of work in the region, as it involves the expansion and generalization of various forms of informal employment, outsourced work, multiple forms of entrepreneurship, and cooperative experiences, among other expressions that Antunes conceptualizes as a new morphology of work. This morphology also entails the proliferation of mechanisms for making work invisible and the coexistence of old and new forms of work intensification (Antunes, 2012: 49). However, it is necessary to consider that the possibilities for labor market integration depend not only on human capital but also on non-economic criteria such as gender, race, ethnicity, legal status, age, and geographic location. Approaching these processes from an intersectional perspective allows us to identify the multiple inequalities that accompany these trends (Monroy, 2017; Magliano, 2015; Veloz, 2010; Viveros Vigoya, 2001; Fuller, 1997). The jobs and diverse ways in which women and men from popular sectors—both native and migrant—earn a living in contemporary societies reveal that gender hierarchies constitute a structuring element of labor power as a commodity, highlighting the impossibility of considering workers as “neutral subjects who exist independently of the power relations linked to gender, ethnicity, and race, inscribed on their bodies” (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2016: 165). The analytical incorporation of these forms of social classification complicates the study of the contemporary labor market, as they constitute indispensable conditions for the control of labor (Aquino, Varela Huerta, and Décosse, 2013). Even considering the transformations of recent decades, certain features of capitalist exploitation relations still persist that are linked to historically constituted gender roles, namely, the lack of recognition of the place that women occupy in social reproduction (Federici, 2018; Carbonella and Kasmir, 2020).

Simultaneously, the second trend reveals a scenario marked by rapid technological advancements and the increasing platformization of economies, which has profoundly transformed the dynamics of work, altering both its forms and conditions (Lins Ribeiro, 2018). This process—intensified since the 2008 crisis—has resulted in the consolidation of an industrial and economic sector centered on the use of the internet and its systems, which prioritizes the intangible aspects of work and fosters its instability. In this context, as Lins Ribeiro (2018) points out, while technologies enable the possibility of working from anywhere in the world, they also introduce new forms of control and surveillance, and people are constantly exposed to monitoring and algorithmic evaluation. Both Ribeiro (2018) and Krepki and Palermo (2020) highlight the dissolution of leisure time as one of the effects of these transformations linked to the advancement of new technologies and artificial intelligence, insofar as the boundary between work time and personal time becomes blurred. In short, what various studies indicate is that in this new stage of capitalism, the organization of production processes and forms of work are being reconfigured, while new modalities of discipline, control, and value extraction are being strengthened (Palermo and Ventrici, 2023; Zukerfeld, 2020; Lins Ribeiro, 2018). These transformations are also accompanied by discourses, social representations, and particular forms of subjectivation that constitute specific ways of "being in the world" (Ribeiro, 2018).

Alongside the two trends mentioned above, the last decade has been characterized by a resurgence of the neoliberalization process that began with the dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s and was consolidated in the 1990s. This process has a profound impact on the region and is expressed in the pronounced erosion of rights historically won by the working class and popular sectors of Latin America and the Caribbean. However, it is important to highlight the diverse struggles, protests, and public and “underground” resistance movements that are also unfolding in these territories, as well as the great heterogeneity of organizational strategies that extend beyond and/or converge with Latin American trade union traditions (Menezes, 2002; Santos Júnior, 2018).

In this context, ethnographic case studies offer enormous potential for formulating new questions, redefining approaches, challenging categories that are iterated and imported from the Global North, and proposing new interpretations of the processes of work organization and production in our Global Souths. Approaches centered on everyday life allow us to provide empirical evidence to historicize, reposition, and problematize theoretical frameworks widely used in the social sciences of work. Our methodological proposal is centered on the practices, narratives, values, experiences, and meanings of the people with whom we construct knowledge (Leite Lopes, 2011), while constantly considering that these are subject to tension, interaction, and articulation with structural constraints that permeate their life trajectories (Capogrossi, 2020).

In this vein, we revive the tradition inaugurated in the 60s and 70s at CIESAS-Mexico by Victoria Novelo and José Luis Sariego Rodríguez. From an anthropological perspective, these authors began a pioneering line of research that focused on the world of work, but with an emphasis on the dimension of daily life, on the meanings that people themselves attributed to their ways of earning a living. Thus, their studies centered—based on the category of "working-class culture"—on the real conditions of life and work, on family, social, and union dynamics, on worldviews, values, symbols, and practices, as well as the future expectations of workers in the region. The essential contributions of these researchers are also rooted in an interdisciplinary approach (Leite Lopes, 2013; Novelo, 1999; Sariego Rodríguez, 1988; Torres Mejía, 1991) that has enriched the ways of approaching the work. These foundations form the basis from which this Working Group reflects theoretically and politically.