Making Trash into Treasure: Struggles for Autonomy on a Brazilian Garbage Dump

Abstract

In recent years, the expansion of types of work that fall outside the category of formal waged employment challenge many of our anthropological conceptions of labor, class politics and contemporary capitalism. This paper addresses the need to rethink the meaning of work in the context of neoliberal capitalism by exploring the formation of new worker subjectivities and practices among catadores: informal workers who collect and sell recyclable materials on a garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Based on ethnographic research conducted among catadores from June through August of 2005 and in January 2007, this paper provides an analysis of the labor conditions, social relations, and forms of political organizing that have emerged on the garbage dump and which differ in significant ways from those found in situations of formal wage labor. Ultimately, this paper argues that while neoliberal capitalism has led to increased unemployment and underemployment among vulnerable populations in cities worldwide, the practices of those struggling to earn a living in urban informal economies are creating new spaces for alternative economic practices, social relations, and class politics today.

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure

“…This is particularly apparent in those places where neoliberal forms of government are being deployed to remold scavengers and their acts of recovery and renewal according to ideals of 'modern' sanitation and environmental protection (see Hill, 2001;Millar, 2007). Industrial-scale waste technologies like landfill and incineration, in particular, involve rationalized forms of waste labor and reduced conceptions of person-thing relations, opposing them to scavenging in theory if not always in practice.…”

“…People still come from all over Southeast Asia to scavenge at Manila's largest dump, attracted by the prospect of earning three or more dollars per day, even though hundreds were buried alive in 2000 when it collapsed during a monsoon (Mydans, 2006). Similar accounts come from the Baixada-Santista region of Brazil, where Tupi-Guarani travel many miles to scavenge where 'the garbage is fat' with quality goods (Ferreira, 2002: 146), or from Rio de Janeiro where catadores frequent the city's dump to assume alternative life styles away from public judgment, the drug trade and formal employment (Millar, 2007).…”

Ambivalent Precarity: Career Trajectories and Temporalities in Highly Skilled Sports Labor Migration from West Africa to Northern Europe

“…Anthropological studies in the global South have also described ambivalences that are related to precarious work in informal settings. Here, particularly in terms of precarious self‐employed jobs, disfranchisement, uncertainty, and risk may go along with a certain degree of autonomy, flexibility, and collegiality (Millar ). In this respect, exploitive work conditions may promote a space with less apparent authoritative restrictions in terms of fees, taxes, or locations of a business.…”

Informal and Illicit Entrepreneurs: Fighting for a Place in the Neoliberal Economic Order

“…Her ethnography of the “ catadores ” restores economic agency to those who may otherwise be described as “outside the system” or unemployed. Millar stresses the need to create alternate conceptions of “class” and “work” to account for such actors who do not, in fact, reside outside the formal economy, but rather, are integral actors in the production and reproduction of the global economy as they turn “trash into treasure” (Millar 2008). The catadores , often marginalized from the formal-sector, illustrate how informal work is not necessarily detrimental to political and social organization, but in fact, can help generate it.…”