The informal labor in popular trade: resignifying practices in the new culture of work

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the occupational trajectories of workers engaged in popular/informal ways of trading. As background, we have the capitalist transformations in the latest decades, which resulted in economical, technological and cultural changes that affected deeply the position of work as a constructor of identities and social values. It is noticed that the precariousness of the formal work relationships associated to the dissemination of the ideology of entrepreneurship has resulted in the search for alternative occupational and income strategies that weakened the frontiers between formal and informal. In this scenario, the demarcations between legal and illegal also became less evident and significant. Thus, this work discusses the insertion of agents in informal economic activities - as those exercised by street vendors -, who take unemployment or precariousness in the labor market as main reasons to exert those occupations. Taking into consideration the subjectivity of the situations, this work tries to think over the influence of an entrepreneur reasoning under the subjects conduct. From the recovery of the occupational trajectories of agents involved in different popular trade grades, it aims to understand the worker's perception about his own occupation and the values attributed to those forms of work in the contemporary world, considering that, even though traditional, these activities have been through re-configurations of its practice and meaning in front of the new economic and cultural context in which it is presented.