Grassroots organizations in the informal economy: A way to go beyond the survival in free markets?

Millions of people survive everyday occupying the streets of the cities of the world’s South. In the metropolitan areas of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, streets often represent an “extralegal zone” where a multitude of vendors, artisans, artists, preachers, shoe-shiners, delivery boys, and garbage collectors work and live. Within these zones individual qualities can emerge. But the street can also become a place for different forms of exploitation, representing a “gap of legality” where various criminal organizations impose their rule and their social order.

From different points of view, the informality may represent an enormous “reservoir” of resources used inappropriately, or it may turn into a domain largely closed to the outside, in which sections of the population excluded from the recent processes of economic globalization drag out their lives with no chance of planning a different future, reinforcing, in this dimension, their condition as noncitizens. Garbage collectors and street vendors well exemplify many of these dilemmas linked to the informal economy. These workers seem wholly marginal to society and, for this reason, “de-socialized”.

But it is precisely in order to defend themselves against the free operation of the market that these informal workers seek to rebuild sociability. To survive, they sought to reconstruct social bonds, often with people in the same situation as themselves. An ethnographic fieldwork, conducted at Porto Alegre (Brazil), showed that some grassroots organizations, promoted by street vendors and garbage collectors, have been able to redefine its initial objectives (linked to the need to cope with an emergence situation) and shift its action to gaining important improvements for its members.