From the informal street vendor to the micro entrepreneur: the disenchantment of the wage condition?

Abstract

This project aims to analyze the transformations in popular ways of trade in São Paulo, having in mind the recent formalization policies of street vendors activities and the translation of these activities from the streets to the galleries. We intent to investigate the effects of these objective transformations on the worker's perspective about their occupation, establishing relations between these experiences and the national work market situation, reflecting about a possible "disenchantment of the wage condition", in face of the changes in the social position of the formal employment in the last decades. To do so, we shall do an ethnographic observation about the work in the trade galleries in Brás neighborhood, trying to retrace the social trajectories of the agents, comparing the perceptions of the old "street vendors" with the "new micro entrepreneur" of the popular trade. From the field research, we will try to reflect upon not just the transformations in São Paulo's popular trade, but also about the more general changes in the world of work, that includes the dissemination of the neoliberal logic and the entrepreneur speech. (AU)