"Precarization" as a native category: explorations around municipal public work in Jujuy, northwestern Argentina

Abstract

This work is part of an ongoing ethnographic research started in 2016 in the province of Jujuy. Part of thinking "precarization" in municipal employment in Jujuy and the ways in which the Union of Municipal Employees and Workers (SEOM) problematizes and resists this situation in the framework of the particularities of the economic structure of the province and the experiences of organization and of connection and demand to the State. Thus, in the face of the emergence of subjects - "the precarious / as" - that stress the traditional figures of public employment and account for the multiple ways of linking to the State-municipalities, the article proposes to delineate a displacement from "the precarization "thought of as unrecognized employment until it is considered as a native category that problematizes work in the province. I will try to show how "precarization" can not be thought apart from the importance that public employment has acquired in the province as a means of subsistence, and the different ways in which it is disputed and creates work. To do this, I consider the multiple temporalities of "precarization" and the different strategies around work, which account for dissimilar experiences, forms of attachment and demands different from the State, mixed with family and militancy relations that are articulated in the space of the guild.