Clasificadores, Circulation, and the Challenge of Mobile Labor Organization
Patrick O’Hare
This chapter focuses on the importance of circulation to the organizing of Uruguayan waste pickers and informal-sector labor more generally. Research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009–2010 and 2014–2015 with the Uruguayan waste pickers’ trade union, the Unión de Clasificadores de Residuos Urbanos Sólidos (UCRUS). Clasificadores is the name given in Uruguay to these workers who are dedicated to recovering recyclable materials (principally cardboard, paper, plastics, and metal). They work either in the streets (with bicycles, carts, or horses and carts); at the municipal landfill; or in cooperatives and at municipal plants. There are estimated to be between three and nine thousand clasificadores in Montevideo alone, and the group is widely considered to be the most exploited link in the national recycling chain.1 Their low incomes, lack of social security, and exposure to environmental risk are seen as subsidizing the profits of the formal recycling sector (Elizalde et al. 2012). Given these circumstances, I set out to explore the distinguishing features of the trade union’s organization within the Uruguayan informal recycling sector. In the absence of key traditional union tactics such as striking, how did the UCRUS attempt to pressure or leverage its antagonists? How did it attempt to organize such a dispersed sector, and which of its constituency’s issues did it have to mediate?
The intensified circulation of persons, commodities, and ideas has been recognized as a key characteristic of the globalization of capital and the information revolution (Castells 2000, 502). It is my purpose here to look at the centrality of circulation from below, among those reacting to deindustrialization, fluctuating commodities markets, and workforce dispersal. As Lee and LiPuma (2001) note, a focus on circulation is hardly new within anthropology. British social anthropology was arguably born with Malinowski’s 1922 study of Trobriand Islanders and the circulation of shell bracelets and necklaces in the Kula ring trade network; Levi-Strauss (1969) applied linguistic models to the circulation and exchange of precapitalist societies; and Appadurai (1986) and Kopytoff (1986) turned to the question of value in the social life, circulation, and biographies of things and commodities. If anthropology’s history is bound up with the study of circulation, the discipline also played an important role in the theorization of the informal sector; indeed, it was anthropologist Keith Hart (1971) who coined the term in his doctoral study of male labor activity in Accra. Researching the organization of workers in the informal sector is increasingly relevant as the ratio of informal to formal workers continues to grow, challenging previous assumptions that informal-sector workers will eventually be incorporated into the formal sector (Gallin 2001).
Rather than aiming at a theorization of the materiality of circulation or its effects as a performative metaphor, as in recent anthropological approaches (Lee and LiPuma 2001; Carsten 2013), this chapter sticks close to ethnographic description, since its purpose is to engage not so much in disciplinary analytics as in researching and indeed aiding the organization of informal-sector workers (Atzeni 2014). In an important way, circulation for clasificadores and their union involves fighting for the right to circulate in the city, and their case thus connects with a renewed interest in various “rights to the city” (Lefebvre 1968; Harvey 2008, 2012). Beyond circulation, this chapter speaks to other challenges for unions attempting to organize in the informal sector, such as the lack of an immediate employer; the representation of informal and formal workers in the same trade sector; and demands that may be related to rights and “spatial” issues rather than pay claims. Rather than constituting an example of a fight to receive a service (such as electricity, water, and so on), the clasificadores’ struggle includes the demand to be able to provide one in the face of state attempts at regulation, formalization, and dispossession.
The first section of the chapter offers a brief history of the UCRUS, highlighting how the regional circulation of recycling activists shaped its program and ideas, and how circulation and blockage played a key role in its two most important events. I then turn to circulation as a demand that is also enacted performatively as a tactic. The following section looks at efforts to restrict the circulation of recycling workers who navigate by horse and cart (carreros) in the city by sedentarizing them into recycling plants, and the ways in which the UCRUS had to mediate the circulation of waste materials between different groups of clasificadores. Finally, the chapter turns to the demands placed on UCRUS activists to circulate throughout the city, comparing this “mobile unionism” with the “sedentary unionism” of the trade union congress Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores—Convención Nacional de Trabajadores (PIT-CNT). The conclusion attempts to draw together these different examples of circulation and suggests the relevance of the case of the UCRUS to research on the “unconventional” labor movement and the struggles of the global poor and working classes.
According to the PIT-CNT delegate who coordinated with clasificadores, the UCRUS was a “very peculiar” union. It did not deal with a direct employer but rather made its claims to public bodies, the Intendencia (municipal government) in particular. Clasificadores were not municipal employees, however, and thus lacked a range of tactics available to public workers, not least the withdrawal of their labor. Aside from this, the clasificador labor force was precarious, dispersed, and fluctuating, with many clasificadores coming in and out of the activity as they obtained short-term odd jobs. The clasificador was, for the delegate, something of an abstract entity, with its shifting population comparable to those of seasonal industries like fishing or farm work. Yet despite the peculiarities of the sector, the UCRUS boasted being the only recyclers’ organization anywhere in the world to be affiliated to a national trade-union federation.
The history of the collective organizing of Uruguayan clasificadores can mostly be divided into two interrelated areas: the formation of cooperatives and the development of the trade union. With regard to the cooperative movement, one early example of this was the Redota cooperative in the working-class La Teja area of Montevideo in the 1990s, which failed to gain support from the PIT-CNT. In the 1970s, clasificadores focusing on the paper trade had been subject to severe police repression in the Ciudad Vieja (the city’s old town). Not only were their carts burned and horses confiscated but they were also evicted from central urban spaces where they were either living or collecting their materials. An indication of some form of organization among these workers was that they sent a delegation to the Intendencia to protest the importance of their activity to the economy, as the newspaper El Día reported on September 17, 1974. In the late 1990s, a clasificador of the older generation who had once been victimized by the dictatorship attempted to organize clasificadores into a union, with limited success. Another key predecessor of the formation of UCRUS was the Organización San Vicente, a territory-based advocacy group linked to the radical priest Padre Cacho that helped make clasificadores visible and still fights for improvements in their treatment, sanitation, and living conditions.2 There have been other moments of intense repression reported in the press, but organized resistance or opposition from clasificadores is usually not documented there, though it may well have occurred.
As for the UCRUS, its story is intertwined with that of a figure whom I will call El Abuelo (“The Grandfather”), its longtime advisor and cofounder. A former fisherman and political militant, he had begun working with a group of carreros, promoting their cooperation so that they might achieve better prices selling their materials collectively. They held their foundational assembly in April 2002 and were able to send a delegation to May Day for the first time that year. The union was strengthened when the incipient group was contacted by clasificadores at the Felipe Cardoso landfill toward the end of 2002. The landfill had long attracted the largest concentration of clasificadores in the city, and these often had to defend themselves against the violence of police stationed there. In 2002, they were prohibited from accessing waste materials, and a group of clasificadores decided to chain themselves across the road from the entrance. El Abuelo and others arrived and suggested that they cross to the gate itself to prevent the entry of municipal trucks. This confluence at the dump of clasificadores from the landfill with El Abuelo and the carreros with whom he had been working is the most important foundational myth of the UCRUS. El Abuelo described it this way: “We didn’t say, ‘Cross [the street],’ we told them, ‘Let’s cross.’ Because it’s predictable that the police won’t like it. And that we’ll have problems. Let’s cross and take whatever the risks are. But we understand that it’s the only way. Two hours later, word came from the Palacio [Palacio Legislativo, the city legislature]: ‘We’ll negotiate.’ So, [it was] a triumph … as you can imagine, an exceptional triumph.”
In a vulgar application of the literature on the metabolism of the city (Wolman 1965; Newman 1999; Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006), blocking access to the dump effectively meant shutting off the city-subject’s only toilet, refusing to let it relieve itself.3 Negotiations were successful and clasificadores were granted access to an internal road that lay in between two dumps. There, thirty trucks specially selected for the quality of their material would be dumped and shared by around 150 clasificadores, an improvement on the previous arrangement. This marked, in the words of El Abuelo, the founding (or refounding) of the UCRUS, and it was an event to which he referred back to frequently, if not excessively. (Uruguayans are said to be particularly nostalgic, and one militant spoke of El Abuelo’s thinking back constantly to this event as “maracanando”—obsessively reminiscing as the nation did over its victory in the 1950 World Cup at Maracanâ Stadium, Brazil). After a period of several years, the workers at the landfill were moved to an improved site. In their first steps toward cooperativization, they adopted the provisional name Cooperativa El Abuelo in honor of the man who helped them win that crucial first struggle and consistently accompanied them through later, more complex processes.
The UCRUS, meanwhile, began to hold regular meetings, first in the Chemical Workers’ Union and then in a community center in front of a worker-recovered factory. It developed links with a series of institutions, such as the University of the Republic’s large outreach program, and gained entry to the PIT-CNT as a member “with voice but without vote,” since they never reached the requirement of three hundred registered and paid members. This was an important symbolic and material step for the union.4 The union gained legal status and cemented the positions of president, secretary, and treasurer, who were almost always clasificadores. The union also attracted a diverse group of sympathetic técnicos (technical advisers) or asesores (advisers) ranging from students and professionals to far-left political activists.
The example of the Brazilian equivalent, the catadores movement, was important for the Uruguayans. In 2003, a delegation of over thirty Uruguayan clasificadores traveled to Caxias do Sul for the founding conference of the Red Lacre (the Red Latinoamericana de Recicladores, or Latin American Recyclers’ Network). It was then, and in the second conference of 2005, that both clasificadores and the activists who traveled with them were able to observe the impressive infrastructure that the catador cooperative movement in Brazil had managed to establish. This consisted of large recycling plants with technologies that would transport, wash, and press materials, as well as the democratic and organizational infrastructure of collective decision making in formal cooperatives. For the clasificadores in Uruguay, this seemed light years away from the individualistic working practices and precarious working conditions of the landfill. The UCRUS took inspiration from its Brazilian counterpart, which presented itself not as a union but as a movement: the Movimiento Nacional do Catadores de Residuos (MNCR). Both UCRUS and the técnicos, some of whom would later join the department that works with clasificadores within the Uruguayan Ministry of Social Development (MIDES), adopted key aspects of the MNCR’s program. This included preclassification by citizens and the establishment of recycling plants managed by catadores/clasificadores in a cooperative fashion. Such activity represents the crucial circulation of ideas and experiences throughout the sector at a regional level.
To synthesize its history during the following years, the UCRUS attempted to represent carreros as well as a growing number who started to form cooperatives, following a model promoted by the MIDES and inspired by neighboring countries (Brazil and Argentina). However, a peculiar dynamic arose wherein a majority of clasificadores continued working individually or in family units with horses and carts while those who opted for cooperatives were joined by political militants, principally from anarchist and Trotskyist traditions, some of whom were former industrial workers with experience in trade union organizing. Similar dynamics have been observed in other contexts, such as that of former Bolivian mine workers in the Cocalero movement or in neighborhood organizations in cities such as El Alto (Lazar 2008). In Uruguay the anarchists, many of them Italian immigrant tradesmen, played an important role in the development of trade unionism; the first Uruguayan trade union federation, the Federación Obrera Regional Uruguaya (FORU, 1905–1923), was explicitly anarchist in orientation (Gonzalez Sierra 1989; Errandonea and Costabile 1968). Anarchist activists within the UCRUS continued a national tradition of labor organizing that favored direct action over negotiation, with these political-militants-turned-clasificadores becoming some of the union’s most active members. For analytical purposes, then, we can identity three groups that together composed the UCRUS: clasificadores, activists-turned-clasificadores, and asesores.
While prospective cooperativists were courted by the MIDES and other técnicos, and given training sessions and limited infrastructural support, carreros experienced what union officials described as an alternation between repression and permissiveness from the municipal authorities and the police. The activity of clasificadores collecting recyclable public waste in the streets had been legalized when Tabaré Vázquez, currently serving a second term as Uruguay’s president, was first elected as mayor of Montevideo in 1990, standing for the center-left party Frente Amplio. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the Intendencia had carried out surveys of clasificadores and begun to regulate their activity, distributing cards and registration plates to clasificadores that allowed them to circulate in the city (while simultaneously prohibiting the activity of those without them). Yet certain arteries of the city were closed to them, such as the principal city-center thoroughfare Avenida 18 de Julio and the coastal road called the rambla. Being banned from these streets was not hugely disadvantageous for clasificadores, and it was generally accepted that it was necessary for traffic purposes (the rambla in particular was high-speed and narrow). The denial of access to entire neighborhoods, however—so-called exclusion zones—was different, as was the case with the affluent central neighborhood of Pocitos. As a pilot scheme, the Intendencia set up a system of domestic waste classification with corresponding bins in these areas; the recyclables were picked up by municipal workers and taken to clasificador cooperatives. This was in effect a trial run of what would later come to the Ciudad Vieja.
Alongside restrictions on circulation, it was often the municipal confiscation of horses and carts that most challenged the clasificadores’ livelihoods and brought them onto the streets. The confiscation was justified with reference to supposed traffic infringements or mistreatment of horses, but clasificadores claimed that the process was unjust and arbitrary. It was a period of severe repression in 2008, during Ricardo Ehrlich (Frente Amplio)’s reign as mayor, that led to the march that became the other UCRUS event El Abuelo constantly celebrated: “The famous 13th of February, 2008, arrived. Faced with the indiscriminate confiscation [of horses and carts], a demonstration took place which was so important that during the negotiations the repression didn’t stop immediately but loosened and loosened—the repressive impetus was extinguished and [the clasificadores] could continue working in the streets, within certain limits…. The march of February 13 was a very significant march since it drove home the rights of the clasificadores and [the idea] that they had a legitimate function.”
In this brief history, it is possible to highlight several key characteristics that carried into my period of research and have come to characterize the particular configuration of the UCRUS. First, the union still is, as it has been from the beginning, tasked with representing several groups of clasificadores: those in cooperatives, those at the landfill, and those working in family units with horses and carts. Second, the UCRUS remains composed of clasificadores, activists-turned-clasificadores, and asesores, many of whom have experience in other trade unions. Circulation also continues to play a key role in the union’s configuration. First, it is the regional circulation of recycling workers between Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina that provides the inspiration and content for the UCRUS’s program. Second, the right to circulate in the city on horse and cart, without harassment or the confiscation of animals or vehicles, is the key demand of the carreros whom the union represents. At the same time, the principal demand of clasificadores at the landfill is for the reliable circulation of valuable waste material. Circulation of persons and valuable waste material is thus a key demand of the union—but in the following section I look at how circulation and blockage can function as important tactics as well.
When I arrived back in Montevideo at the end of 2013 to conduct doctoral research, clasificadores were on the march again. Or perhaps, on the trot. I met them in front of Uruguay’s Palacio Legislativo, where they had mobilized mostly with horse and cart, traveling from different points throughout the city. The march was a family affair, including young children, adolescents, parents, and grandparents. But the mood was angry. They were protesting a decree proposed by a Frente Amplio councilor in the Junta Departamental (Regional Council), which would prohibit carreros from entering the Ciudad Vieja to collect waste. There were already several central areas of the city in which the clasificadores could not circulate with horse and cart, and a recent decree penalized businesses who gave their waste to informal-sector carreros and not to formally registered trucks.
The Ciudad Vieja prohibition was justified with reference to the narrow, historic streets and the longtime complaint that the clasificadores were an eyesore and left rubbish in the streets after rummaging through containers. The Ciudad Vieja generated valuable waste—in particular its scores of office blocks, which disposed of prized white paper. The problem was that the proposed regulation didn’t distinguish between clasificadores who had regular pickups from offices and businesses and those who might pass through on foot to search bins in the hope of finding food or paper or something else of value. Thus, many clasificadores found their quite lucrative routes and longtime relations with clients in jeopardy. Unlike other cases where property speculation and neoliberal governance combine to evict the poor from urban living spaces, here clasificadores were threatened with being evicted from labor circuits and dispossessed of valuable surplus material, whose management and sale would then be transferred to formal-sector businesses.
From the Palacio Legislativo the clasificadores marched to the Junta Departamental. They cut through the main arteries of the city, blocking traffic, until they reached the narrow streets of the Ciudad Vieja where the council is situated. The horses and carts bore diverse and colorful political slogans. On the cart of the interim UCRUS president was scrawled a simple quote from Uruguay’s founding father, José Artigas: “The cause of the people does not admit the slightest delay.” Flags of Uruguay and the tricolor of Artigas (also used by the Frente Amplio) abounded. On a bicycle and cart one man had written: “We’re fighting for our jobs.” Another sign read: “My struggle for bread and work continues.” On one cart, alongside drawings of horses, was written: “The nation was built on horseback.”
Most protesters moved on horse and cart, while others trotted along on horseback. The carts ranged from the simple and workmanlike to the elaborate and ceremonial, with the impressive, adorned brass reins that clasificadores use for special occasions. The younger men were dressed in a popular sports style known as plancha; most wore Nike baseball caps. Some combined this with the long hair popular in shantytowns. Some were dark-skinned, but it was mostly due to their aesthetic that they stood out as members of the poor and working classes of Montevideo. The march represented the periphery come to visit the center of the city while its suited businessmen looked on, aghast or bemused. Some speeches were made from horseback. One long-haired and bearded activist shouted that clasificadores and their horses had “the same right to circulate in the city as anyone else in their cars.”
While some clasificadores stayed looking after the horses, others streamed inside the Junta Departamental building. There was little security or police presence, and the young men in particular seemed hyped up and excited, knocking things over and pushing into offices. Some councilors rushed for cover, and when the leader of the Frente Amplio in the council, Pablo González, came out to speak to the demonstrators, he was quickly surrounded. A clearly frazzled González, shouting to be heard, told demonstrators that the doors of the council were open but only for those who came to “dialogue with order and respect.” Two leaders from the UCRUS put forward their demands to González, but other clasificadores complained that they didn’t want “the same representatives as always.” Another complained that the UCRUS “wanted to send them to recycling plants.” One young activist was extremely agitated, encouraging others to “smash it all up!” Another angry young man outside shouted, “I want to work!”
The UCRUS leaders decided that they should march to the Intendencia, the imposing building that houses the executive branch of the municipal council, situated on central Montevideo’s main thoroughfare, Avenida 18 de Julio. One protester, Juan, invited me onto a cart with his son. As we trotted down the street he told me about his years of classifying and how he always tried to attend demonstrations by the UCRUS.
The cavalcade came to a stop outside of the Intendencia, where the clasificadores demanded a meeting with Montevideo’s mayor. In the end it was decided that the head of social policy and right-hand woman of the mayor would receive a delegation of female clasificadores. The group started to disperse, but not before something of a “dirty protest” occurred: the horses, stopped for a long time outside the Intendencia, inevitably began to relieve themselves under the eyes of the municipal authorities.
The question of circulation and the threat/opportunity of formalization have been an important part of the struggles of other informal-sector workers, street vendors in particular (Lazar 2008; Hansen, Little, and Milgram 2014). Indeed, carreros were not the only group to have their circulation throughout the city impeded by the municipal authorities in Montevideo during 2014. Street-level car window cleaners, another group whose status as workers was in doubt, faced a new threat to their circulation in the city. In a move that surprised some representatives of Frente Amplio, the minister of the interior and the chief of police had moved jointly to prohibit the activity, referencing the obscure Article 543 of the Municipal Code, which establishes when a pedestrian can circulate on the road. Traffic-light jugglers were also included in this enforcement (or repression), with the justification that many used such traffic-light activity as a cover for robbery. During my fieldwork period, the UCRUS tried to make common cause with these and other informal-sector workers (street vendors in particular) who were under pressure to formalize their activity, launching an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to establish an Informal Workers’ Federation.
Yet if the question of circulation was key to the struggles of other informal-sector workers, it was principally clasificadores who enacted circulation as a method of protest. Blocking the entry of waste to the municipal landfill had been a successful tactic in 2002, but it had rarely been used by the union or landfill clasificadores since then—although it was often threatened. Since the successful march of 2008, however, horse-and-cart cavalcades became the tactic most associated with the UCRUS, which sometimes organized them several times a year. They were moments when territorially divided clasificadores who worked alone or in small family groups could come together in defense of their common interests.
Marches would often depart from several meeting points, coalesce at the Palacio Legislativo, and then make their way along Avenida 18 de Julio to the Intendencia. On an ordinary working day, the clasificador on horse and cart would be alone, awkwardly making their way through a sea of cars that would speed past, often with complaint. Members of the public might harass the clasificador about the condition of their horse or the fact that the animal should be working at all (or even coming into the city). They would run the risk of an inspector or a policeman confiscating the animal and the cart. And were there to be a traffic accident, carreros could rest assured that the blame would be attributed to them, whatever the circumstances, as amplified newspaper headlines made clear every time such an accident occurred. Some members of the public were of course friendly to the clasificadores, and they had their regular clients who would greet them. But as Pablo, a former carrero, told me, “There’s always someone who will shit on your day.”
On march day, however, clasificadores had safety in numbers among colleagues, family, and friends. The street belonged to them, and their right to circulate on it was uncontested. The cries of clasificadores as they drove their animals down the normally prohibited Avenida 18 de Julio were joyful. Should any motorist attempt to drive through the midst of their march or abuse them, the united clasificadores could easily confront the aggressor. This was a moment where the “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) of clasificadores could be realized and their numbers complemented by the spectacle of horse-drawn transport. The tactic they used to demand the right to circulate was thus itself a rebellious circulation. Marches are of course a common, if not predominant, protest tactic all over the world. Yet whereas a clear space exists between the tactics and the demands in a march for better working conditions, for higher wages, or against cutbacks, in the case of the “march of the carts” the two coalesce. The tactic is the demand: an unimpeded circulation through the city, free from harassment.
During the course of my 2013–2014 fieldwork, the UCRUS decided to complement marches with another form of protest—that of the roadblock—belatedly adopting the method associated with the piquetero movement of unemployed workers in post-crisis Argentina (Epstein 2003, 2009; Svampa 2003, 2004). This was another variation on the theme of circulation, in which the workers did not enact their own circulation but rather obstructed that of the general public by blocking the road with horses and carts. The UCRUS had attempted this tactic in winter 2013 and had then decided to carry out three roadblocks on different days in different parts of the city, to build up momentum for their marcha de carros on September 2014. They had to discuss and deal with many difficult questions regarding how strictly a blockage to circulation could be enforced. How could an ambulance be let through? Should an especially irate driver be waved on in order to avoid violence? Should the clasificadores only block intermittently, letting the traffic advance in bursts?
The success of this tactic was variable in 2014, with one roadblock attended by few clasificadores and much media; another by many clasificadores but no media; and a third only by myself and another research student! Regardless of outcome, however, the roadblocks had the effect of imposing upon the public the circulation difficulties that carreros experienced on a daily basis.
The clasificador with horse and cart traveling through the city maps neatly on to the Deleuzian idea of an assemblage. The philosopher used a similar example, that of the knight, to illustrate the concept, wherein the stirrup binds together a “man-animal symbiosis, a new assemblage of war” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987). In the Uruguayan case, the components of the assemblage were bound together in the word carrito (little cart), commonly used to refer both to the clasificadores and their mode of transport (as in “the carrito problem”). The common complaint from the public and institutions focused on the circulation of the horse and cart in the city, either because it disrupted transport or because the city was supposedly not the natural environment of the horse. Uruguay’s vocal humane society, the Protectora de Animales, was a principal adversary of the UCRUS, especially since the union accused the organization of stealing clasificadores’ horses, which were then difficult to trace.5 Yet the assemblage nature of the carritos meant that there was always a slight ambiguity over whether the objection was against the circulation of animals in the city or of the poor. There is no doubt that some saw the circulation of poor people in dirty clothes, riding horses and rummaging in bins, as an eyesore for tourists and an affront to Montevideo’s modernity. A plan to convert some carreros into horse-and-cart tourist guides for the Ciudad Vieja had not been well received by the UCRUS. A more ambitious plan, however, was to relocate carreros to municipal recycling plants, with 128 jobs made available in four plants built during 2014.
The moving of carreros to plants, whether cooperative or municipal, is as much one of sedentarization as it is of collectivization. Mobility and autonomy are important values and practices for carreros, as is not having a boss and setting one’s own hours. Although difficult economic circumstances might have driven them into the activity, many of the carreros I interviewed preferred the independence of classifying to the security of the cleaning jobs that were usually the alternative, where they would work long hours for low pay. At least on the horse and cart they were their own masters, had control over their working day, and were sure to bring home not only some money but some requeche as well.6
In Montevideo, one of the advantages of living in irregular housing settlements was the possibility of animal husbandry. So it was all the more galling for clasificadores that some animal rights activists had come to believe that clasificadores would have to hand in their horses on being accepted for a job at a municipal recycling plant.7 Yet while the Intendencia suggested that the recycling plants were for carreros, many of those who entered the recycling plants were cooperativists whose cooperatives had been disbanded. Most carreros had resisted entering a cooperative or a municipal plant and being placed under a roof with twenty other vulnerable subjects earning the minimum wage. They preferred the liberty, solitude, and possibility that, despite repression, were offered by the street.
That is not to say that there were not advantages to either working in a recycling cooperative or in a formal recycling plant. Instead, it is to say that many carreros defended their activity with reference to much more than their weekly earnings. It was, as some of them told me, a way of life. Indeed, not all those who attended UCRUS demonstrations on horse and cart worked as carreros at that moment in time. They might instead own a horse and cart and come from the same milieu as clasificadores and attend marches to defend their shared way of life. Such a life was also being undermined by the steady relocation of asentamiento dwellers into formal housing, often through housing cooperatives (most recently through former president Pepe Mujica’s popular housing scheme “Plan Juntos”). Many of these new dwellings were apartments, and even when they were houses, animal husbandry was often prohibited. Even if clasificadores could keep their horses in asentamientos, though, things nevertheless became more difficult if they could not use them as part of their livelihood. As much as they enjoyed using their horses for leisure, carreros were poor and often had many mouths to feed at home. If the horse could be used as a means of transport and a breadwinner, its possession was a lot easier to justify in precarious circumstances.
Some UCRUS militants described the carrero as a modern descendant of the gaucho, the mythical nomadic horseman who roamed Argentina and Uruguay until the land was fenced off and enclosed into private ranches (Ras 1996). The gaucho found a modern descendant in the countryside as well: rural workers, complete with traditional attire and a stronger tradition of horsemanship. During one march, the UCRUS was lent the support of a few horsemen by a rural organization, and they became celebrities of the march. The rural horsemen and the clasificadores of the urban periphery came together every year at El Rusbel, the annual rodeo and horse show that took place at Parque Roosevelt, just outside of Montevideo. In many ways the carreros could trace just as great a cultural and political heritage to the oppressed and marginalized gaucho, who was often treated as a criminal. Like the gaucho, many carreros were also being forced into, and resisting, sedentarization or elimination. It was partly for this reason that in demonstrations the clasificadores clothed themselves in symbols of the nation, to a much greater degree than I witnessed in other political movements. A senior figure at the Intendencia, who was responsible for the municipal management of the recycling plants, argued confidently: “The clasificadores that are in the street today … will they be able to continue classifying materials? No, not really. Those who sign up for recycling plants will, but those who don’t, will not. Alongside the intermediaries, the profession of informal classification will disappear.”
Yet the presence of horses and carts on the streets of Montevideo was surprisingly persistent. Partly this was due to the geographic characteristics of Montevideo, where the distances between center and periphery were not so large as to make them unfeasible for horse and cart. Some thought that the long-held municipal aim of eradicating the carts was a pipe dream and spoke about how, during the dictatorship, police had burned their carts in the street but still had not defeated them. Others were more worried, however, and suggested that while the military had tried a blanket approach, current mayor Ana Olivera was being more “sneaky” by restricting circulation in different areas progressively and rechanneling the circulation of waste so that carreros could not access it. In the following section I turn to look at this circulation of waste.
In another manifestation of the importance of circulation to clasificadores and their union, the UCRUS was often called on to mediate the circulation of surplus waste material between different groups of clasificadores. It can perhaps be argued here that while traditional unions are mostly concerned with the distribution and contestation of surplus value, the UCRUS was concerned with the adjudication and circulation of “surplus material” (Gille 2010). While the UCRUS was at times invited to intervene in disputes between individual clasificadores, their routes were widely respected without need for the union, and the UCRUS was in any case too weak during 2014 to be counted upon as a useful intermediary between individuals. During my fieldwork in 2009–2010, when clasificadores from various collectives and cooperatives regularly attended union meetings, UCRUS headquarters did act as a forum for groups to raise issues concerning the circulation of surplus material. For example, the then-president of the Felipe Cardoso Cooperative (COFECA) raised the issue of another cooperative having stolen a delivery of old mattresses from the port and angrily sought redress, since these could be sold for around US$20 apiece.
During 2013–2014, however, the principal point of circulatory conflict was not between cooperatives, which were rapidly being absorbed into municipal plants. Rather it was the carreros who were losing access to routes and pickups. On the one hand, a municipal decree (Decree 34205) prohibited them from picking up commercial waste, which was some of the most valuable. This prohibition was strongly enforced in central parts of the city where there were coveted pickups, and the carreros were being replaced in this activity by formal businesses, which might be intermediaries who registered a truck or, in a few cases, clasificadores with enough capital to obtain one themselves.
This was a tricky enough issue for the UCRUS, where in some cases it was difficult to differentiate between a clasificador with a truck and a small intermediary, but another issue that emerged during the year was even more delicate. The ley de envases (packaging law), whose implementation in Montevideo brought about the construction of the recycling plants, stipulated that they could only receive domestic waste. In other regions of Uruguay, this had meant recyclable waste from new containers placed outside large supermarkets, where the public could dispose of recyclables. Yet in what might be considered an extremely cynical move, the Intendencia of Montevideo also replaced containers in the center of the city and the Ciudad Vieja, using the basic classificatory scheme of “dry” recyclables and “wet” organic waste. These new containers had small, sliding mouths that the Intendencia referred to as “antivandalism” and the UCRUS as “anti-poor.” In any case, they made it difficult for street clasificadores to access the materials inside, which were instead taken to the newly constructed recycling plants. In effect, the Intendencia was rechanneling waste materials away from a section of the poor who worked autonomously in the informal sector and toward poor but waged clasificadores working in formal-sector municipal recycling plants.
While attempting to represent clasificadores from both the street and the recycling plants, the UCRUS was not unaware of the dilemmas that these containers posed, and they criticized them for pitting “poor against poor.” One irony was that the plant clasificadores did not particularly desire the containers at all, since they brought mixed waste of little value from a public not used to separating their waste into recyclables and nonrecyclables. Yet the plants still received them, and the UCRUS attempted to organize meetings and rallies combining both those who were profiting from the adapted circulation of this waste and those who were being put at a disadvantage. Their position was to oppose the new containers but at the same time lobby the municipal government to improve the value of waste delivered to plants. UCRUS’s dilemma was having to represent informal-sector workers alongside those being incorporated into the formal sector and thereby put into competition with their former colleagues. With many national and international trade-union federations intent on campaigning for the transition of informal workers to the formal sector, the problem of dual representation is surely shared by other unions.
Thus far, I have focused on circulation and blockage as key UCRUS tactics whose aim, aside from the performative aspects, is principally to pressure the Intendencia into easing restrictions and allowing unhindered circulation and labor. I have also looked at attempts to sedentarize carreros and how the UCRUS has dealt with the contradictions of the rechanneling of waste circuits. I now turn to the importance of circulation in the everyday organizational work and effectiveness of the union.
During the course of 2014 the UCRUS’s weekly meetings at the Galpón de Corrales social center in the working-class district of Villa Española were especially poorly attended, and union officials spoke about holding assemblies in different neighborhoods or rotating meetings to different spaces in order to attract more people. (The city’s informal settlements, where most clasificadores lived, were spread out across the city.) The organization of clasificadores by canton was a long-held aim (Fernández 2007, 90), and at times in the past it had been a common practice, as a disaffected UCRUS founder and former president complained: “When I was in the UCRUS, we didn’t have meetings there [in Villa Española]. We went around the neighborhoods. Every two weeks we went to a different neighborhood. The place changed. Because … the clasificador can’t go so far. If you go to the neighborhood … you’re in their territory…. They need to come to the neighborhoods because the majority of the carreros are in our neighborhoods. And they don’t come!”
Perhaps twenty or more clasificadores attended a meeting at the Galpón during 2014, but this was almost always a single visit. They failed to return, either discouraged by the meetings or because the effort of regular attendance was simply impossible. I was also present on a few occasions when the UCRUS attempted, with mixed results, to circulate in the neighborhoods. They attempted to hold a series of neighborhood assemblies, starting in Marconi. The nature of this first assembly was indicative of the crisis into which the UCRUS had slumped, since Marconi should have been a successful place to meet. Not only was it a neighborhood with a large number of clasificadores, where Padre Cacho had worked and where the UCRUS had held its foundational meeting, it was also where the interim UCRUS president lived. Yet aside from a couple of neighborhood characters who seemed to spend most evenings in the plaza anyway, only a few clasificadores appeared, and union officials were even heckled. The poor quality of the sound equipment meant that it was difficult to make any sense of the interim president’s rambling speech.
On another occasion, we headed out to distribute leaflets for the September march in some informal settlements in the east of Montevideo. Clasificadores’ homes were usually fairly obvious, as materials were stacked up in their yards and they had horses in ramshackle stables. We also asked around the neighborhood for people who classified, whereupon we would usually be pointed in the direction of someone or other. This got a better response than the ill-fated assembly in Marconi. It was an occasion when the union officials were able to listen to the stories of the clasificadores. Had they been affected by prohibition from parts of the city? What did they think of the new recycling plants? How was the market in materials looking? It was also a chance for the union to report back on its activity, encourage clasificadores to attend union meetings, and gauge their opinion on possible actions. Clasificadores were friendly, committing themselves to organizing their neighborhoods and attending the next march. Some offered tips: Nobody seemed to be taking much notice of the marches these days; what about another tactic? The president spoke of the roadblocks and of combining a march with a camp or hunger strike, while another clasificador recommended obstructing the entrance of waste materials to Felipe Cardoso. Such encounters demonstrated the potential of the union reaching out to the neighborhoods and circulating in them, but they were the exception. In general, the UCRUS continued with poorly attended weekly meetings.
When I worked at the recycling cooperative COFECA and they were coordinating with the UCRUS on the eve of their move to the Geminis recycling plant, the morning appearances of El Abuelo were ironically a sign both of his own vitality and the frailty of the union. The eighty-five-year-old would take a bus or two and then walk from Camino Carrasco the length of Felipe Cardoso to arrive at COFECA. Several times he appeared alone, and the others complained that it was always El Abuelo who came by himself: where was the rest of the union? At another meeting, a clasificador ally turned up with another of his neighbors. He was meant to be meeting the secretariat to talk about organizing, but only El Abuelo and I were present. This longtime supporter challenged El Abuelo as to why there were not more people present after twelve years of the union’s existence, and the union stalwart struggled to answer the question.
Of course, it is not fair to accuse the other union leaders of being immobile, and the extremely leaky and noisy but colorful shell of the Galpón de Corrales hardly represented the pinnacle of union opulence or aristocracy. Instead, the union had threadbare militants during 2014 who attempted to spread themselves thin. No member of the secretariat possessed a car, or even a motorbike, so most made their way around walking, cycling, or on public transport. They were only paid a small amount for union work, which they had to combine with a range of other activities (unlike El Abuelo, who was retired). The interim president’s time became even more restricted when he accepted a well-paid temporary job as a security guard on a building site in his neighborhood. The longtime and respected secretary attempted to combine her union work with a job as a caregiver and ended up having to resign from the latter because of her commitment to union activity. She suffered from back problems, in large extent due to a life of hard work classifying on the streets. They all relied, where possible, on transport with the PIT-CNT representative, the only one of the regular UCRUS attendees who had a car. The circulation of union officials, regarded as key for successfully mobilizing their sector, was thus restrained by their own precarious economic situations and ill health.
It is perhaps useful at this point to reflect on how different this situation is from that of a traditional, workplace trade union. Militancy and trade union involvement of course depends hugely on the sector and epoch (Gall 2002). Trade unions are in most cases forced to engage in recruitment (Mason and Bain 1991; Kelly and Heery 1989), but in a regular scenario, a trade union member would approach the union with a complaint or issue. In the case of UCRUS, not only does it not have a fixed list of members who pay a subscription (the union is in principal tasked with representing every clasificador), it must also go to the clasificador in their neighborhood. It is resented if it does not—and even sometimes when it does. While other trade unions have offices and headquarters, UCRUS unionists are expected to ambulate throughout the city, conducting a mobile unionism.
Returning to the key demand of the UCRUS, that of the right to circulate freely throughout the city collecting materials, it is clear that this is also hugely different from the world of pay claims, disputes, strikes, and tribunals of the formal trade union. In this section I would like to compare the mobile unionism of the UCRUS with the sedentary unionism of the trade union federation of which they formed a part, the PIT-CNT. In referring to the PIT-CNT unionists as sedentary, I do not wish to denigrate them but merely to pick up on one of the key definitions of sedentary: “tending to spend much time seated.”8 This characteristic is defining not only of some trade union officials, who inevitably spend much time in meetings, but of millions of other jobs as well and should not carry any connotation of inaction. Rather, I wish to contrast the expectations placed on UCRUS militants with those from the formal trade-union sector, in which the UCRUS operated rather uncomfortably.
The year of 2014 was particularly sedentary for the PIT-CNT. It was an election year, and the links between the union federation and the governing Frente Amplio were becoming increasingly corporatist (see Silverman 2011). While UCRUS activists spoke of how the clasificadores had to put pressure on politicians to gain commitments during this period, sources within the PIT-CNT told them that they wouldn’t be organizing any demonstrations or marches that might challenge the government or upset the chances for a Frente Amplio victory, as a lackluster presidential campaign from former president Tabaré Vázquez faced a challenge from Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou, the youthful if vacuous son of former neoliberal president Luis Alberto Lacalle. Successive Frente Amplio governments had brought about improvements in workers’ rights and conditions, with particular victories being the institution of the eight-hour rural working day and the recent introduction of legislation that enabled neglectful businesses to be criminally charged for the death or injury of a worker. In addition, nine members of the secretariat of the PIT-CNT featured as candidates for the Frente Amplio in their national lists in 2014. The only action the union took during the election period was an electoral stoppage to declare support for a Frente Amplio government and opposition to a government of the two center-right parties, all the while declaring its “class independence.”
When the UCRUS did go to the PIT-CNT’s headquarters, as they did for a period during my fieldwork, it was either to attend meetings of the health, safety, and environment committee (under whose banner they fell) or to be heard at the federation’s executive committee. The attempts to attend the executive proved rather confusing and exacerbated some of the insecurities of the UCRUS and its relation to the federation. The UCRUS asked the committee to put out a statement supporting them on three key points. The first was that it publicly oppose plans for the incineration of waste; the second that it oppose the decree that barred carreros from collecting commercial waste; and the third that it support a plan for a levy on plastic bags, which would pay dignified salaries to clasificadores in a larger recycling plant.
UCRUS activists had received a text telling them to attend the PIT-CNT executive meeting, which would give them a response, and had duly turned up only to be kept waiting for several hours. Executive committee members occasionally came and went from the meeting upstairs, but no one in the UCRUS knew who had sent the text message, and neither did the executive committee seem to know anything about it. UCRUS militants complained about how they were being treated, until eventually we were ushered up to the large meeting room, where twenty delegates from different trade unions were gathered around a table. The secretary apologized for the confusion, explaining that they were awaiting a report from the health, safety, and environment committee before making any decisions. We were asked to return the following week, when again we had to wait several hours before we were allowed to go up to the meeting room, where UCRUS officials were asked to introduce the issues relevant to their sector. In the end, the PIT-CNT’s response was to arrange meetings with both the presidency and the Intendencia to discuss these issues, while quietly voicing support.
The way in which the UCRUS perceived their reception by the PIT-CNT and the confused manner in which the UCRUS presented their case signified not only the precariousness of the UCRUS leadership but also that of their link with the PIT-CNT, despite how proud they were of that link (by which they had been recognized, as the UCRUS secretary told me, as “workers like any other”). During the course of my fieldwork, UCRUS militants were uncomfortable with sedentary union practices, such as negotiations with the Intendencia, that were secured after the September march. During four sets of tripartite meetings between the Intendencia, UCRUS, and PIT-CNT, the union failed to make any headway on the seven-point program they took into the meetings, and there was soon talk of more demonstrations, marches, and hunger strikes.
The comparison between the UCRUS and the PIT-CNT can be set in the context of the history of Uruguayan trade unionism. In the early twentieth century, militant anarchist trade unions predominated (most within the FORU), in what Errandonea and Costabile (1968) classify as an “oppositional model” of trade unionism, where militant strike action was often the first option. In contrast, these authors chart the slow emergence of “dualist” trade unions, which might have a revolutionary or radical leadership but engage with more immediate concerns of the workers. For these, strike action was a last resort (see the dual role of unions in Darlington 2014, 113). Although there are clear differences in the sector represented (the FORU mostly represented skilled artisans with significant leverage), there are also clear continuities with the anarchist-influenced UCRUS’s preference for direct action over negotiation.9
The focus on circulation in this chapter emerged from the simple demand of carreros to be able to circulate in the city, including in the most affluent and waste-rich areas, without harassment. However, it soon became clear that circulation was important for the UCRUS in many other ways as well, from the regional circulation of recycler activists that inspired its program to the tactic of blockage and circulation through which it acted out its demands or otherwise pressured the municipal government. The UCRUS had to deal with the municipal rechanneling of waste from poor workers in the informal sector to those recently incorporated into the formal sector while simultaneously attempting to represent all clasificadores, from plant workers and cooperativists to those working at the landfill, on horse and cart, on bicycle, or on foot.
Negotiating the circulation and distribution of surplus material, instead of disputing the allocation of surplus value, is perhaps peculiar to the recycling sector, in Uruguay and beyond. Yet in struggling over the right to circulate in the city—to work as well as live in areas like Montevideo’s Ciudad Vieja that are targeted for speculation, development, tourism, or gentrification—clasificadores make common cause with the urban poor worldwide. In place of the negotiation tactics of sedentary unionism, the UCRUS has drawn on the Uruguayan anarchist tradition to advocate direct action and on national history and myth to create a comparison between their struggle and that of the dispossessed but autonomous gauchos of lore.
Like other post-dictatorship Latin American countries under center-left governments, the UCRUS had to tackle forms of repression that were insidious but not flagrantly brutal. Clasificador carts were no longer burned in the street (although they might still be confiscated), but businesses were now penalized for giving their waste to informal-sector waste workers. Rather than having to defend their ward against wholesale criminalization, the UCRUS had to navigate a complex, evolving sector where some clasificadores were given “dignified,” if low-paid, jobs in recycling plants, while the unlucky ones were simply dispossessed of their livelihoods. (And this while operating in conditions of precarious health and economic circumstance.)
During the course of the year, it became clear that the union was struggling, despite the best efforts of the small team of activists who sustained it and tried to organize the sector during a difficult year. While clasificadores and the UCRUS performed their right to circulate in periodic marches, and there were no reports of carreros surrendering their horses on going to work in plants, union informants felt that longtime efforts to sedentarize the nomadic carreros were finally making some headway. The presence of the poor circulating in the center of the city was being diminished, as has been the case in other Latin American capitals (Medina 2000, 52). As the UCRUS secretary told me, if she wasn’t able to access valuable waste in affluent Pocitos, what would she go there for? To go for a walk? From feelings of autonomy, work in family units, and relations of patronage with informal-sector intermediaries, those who found a place in a municipal plant would now have to deal with the implications of formal work, a steady minimum wage, and being considered vulnerable social subjects with “protected jobs.” And the union would have to adapt accordingly.10
Above: The green flag of the UCRUS (bottom, center left) flies among other flags and banners at the PIT-CNT’s 2014 May Day celebration. Facing page, top: Young clasificadores on the march from the Palacio Legislativo. The UCRUS secretary argued that prohibiting their activity would push young clasificadores into crime. Facing page, bottom: Clasificadores wait outside the Junta Departamental while a charged confrontation with local councilors takes place inside. (All photos for this chapter by Patrick O’Hare; map by M. D. Freedman.)
