{"id":118660,"date":"2013-05-22T16:56:37","date_gmt":"2013-05-22T19:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=118660"},"modified":"2017-03-08T14:55:36","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T17:55:36","slug":"trash-and-utopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/trash-and-utopia\/","title":{"rendered":"Trash and utopia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cardboard

Walmir Monteiro\/sambaphoto<\/span>Cardboard recycler on the streets of Belo HorizonteWalmir Monteiro\/sambaphoto<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In January 2008, the unemployment rate in Brazil was 8%. The situation was not as tragic as in January 2003, when unemployment soared above 11%. However, many workers were still seeking alternative income in the informal labor market. It was precisely at that time that a group of researchers, led by M\u00e1rcia de Paula Leite of the Graduate Program in Education and Social Sciences at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), undertook a study to identify and understand the different methods of productive insertion that are established in times of crisis, and in the cooperative movement in particular, which at the time was already bolstered by official policy.<\/p>\n

Over the next five years, the scenario changed, and the unemployment rate dropped to a level close to 5%; as a result, researchers witnessed the restructuring of this market. With FAPESP support, Leite coordinates the thematic project entitled Labor\u2019s crisis and new experiences in employment and income generation:\u00a0 the different faces of associative labor and gender<\/i>. She says that \u201cjobs that are not secure still exist, but the cooperative and association movements have taken on different features that challenge the ideas of some schools of thought on solidarity economics.\u201d<\/p>\n

The concept of solidarity economics has its origin in the economic and employment crisis of the 1960s and identifies methods for organization of work that are unlike the market standards, including the association movement. The concept earned official policy status with the Brazilian federal government in 2003 and is considered an initiative that promotes social inclusion. The program page on the Ministry of Labor and Employment web site explains that \u201csolidarity economics is a different way of producing, selling, buying and trading what is needed to live: without exploiting others, without trying to take advantage, and without destroying the environment.\u201d It involves \u201ceconomic and social entities organized as cooperatives, associations, trading clubs, self-managed companies, and collaborative networks to name a few, that produce goods, provide services, solidarity financing, exchanges, fair trade, and solidarity consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n

The research study that Leite coordinated, with lead researchers Jacob Carlos Lima from the Federal University of S\u00e3o Carlos (UFSCar), and \u00c2ngela Maria Carneiro Ara\u00fajo from the University of Campinas (Unicamp), began with a comprehensive survey of several sources of the \u201cdifferent production\u201d methods in the state of S\u00e3o Paulo, which identified a total of 107 cooperatives: food (3), crafts (21), sewing and apparel-making (11), rehabilitated factories (13), and principally, recycling (59). Leite says, \u201cWe visited all the cooperatives and associations of S\u00e3o Paulo with a team of grant recipients to administer the questionnaire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"In

Epit\u00e1cio Pessoa\/Ag\u00eancia Estado\/AE<\/span>In the past: Unemployed workers show their work cards a decade ago beside peddlers in the city of S\u00e3o PauloEpit\u00e1cio Pessoa\/Ag\u00eancia Estado\/AE<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The analysis of the information showed that the food, crafts and sewing cooperatives were literally informal and unorganized, and that the labor force focused more on marketing than production. There was little contribution to raising income or bettering the living conditions of the members. The rehabilitated factories were more \u201cstructured\u201d experiments, with closer ties to the union, since they included workers who had migrated from the formal market with no prospects of return. However, an increasingly uncommon phenomenon in a developing economy was revealed among the self-managed companies, Leite stressed.<\/p>\n

The most representative experience, and the one that drew the most attention from the researchers, was and continues to be the recycling cooperatives, which brought together \u201cextremely excluded\u201d urban workers who were unemployed and idle and who were former illiterate trash collectors or domestics with no way to enter the formal labor market. \u201cThis type of insertion may in fact help lift them out of social poverty and give them social citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, these cooperatives are different because of their organization. They are linked to the National Recyclables Movement [Movimento Nacional de Catadores de Recicl\u00e1veis (MNCR)], which according to the researcher, was successful in regulating the occupation and enacting the National Solid Waste Policy in August 2010. \u201cThese, the others, have high growth potential since they also represent a significant percentage of the population, roughly 16.2 million people, whose per capita income is less than R$70,\u201d Leite says, based on data from the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea), collected in June 2012.<\/p>\n

Because of its features, the recycling cooperative is the type of undertaking that comes closest to the precepts of solidarity economics in that it has an element of worker \u201cresistance\u201d to the status of exclusion, unemployment, or subordination to salaried labor. However, it is an extremely \u201cfragile\u201d venture according to Leite, and major difficulties must be overcome to achieve conditions of economic sustainability and replication. The first of these conditions is the gap that remains between the principles of solidarity and the practice of self-management that solidarity economics supports. As Leite says, they are \u201cdifficult to achieve under current political conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, the market has already understood that recycling adds value to products by turning trash and scrap into raw materials at a very low cost. \u201cThe trash is separated in the shed, and then it is separated, bagged, or bundled, and sold for a few cents to intermediaries who sell it to the recyclers. Few cooperatives have presses or storage space,\u201d as she describes. Public policies that allow the collection cooperatives to add value to their products have to be implemented.\u201d The Solid Waste Act, enacted in 2011, for example, encourages local governments to negotiate solid waste treatment with collection cooperatives, but until now, few have adopted this policy.<\/p>\n

\"\"Eduardo Cesar<\/span>Leite acknowledges that in some ways the cooperative movement supports social and political inclusion for individuals who until now have been living in absolute poverty. She notes that while visiting recycling associations, the members of the cooperatives said that organized labor has brought them out of silence. She emphasized that \u201cthis is, without a doubt, a process of liberation and empowerment that promotes solidarity economics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cInclusion\u201d and \u201cempowerment\u201d mean collective action by individuals that raises social awareness of social rights, and this seems to be the strength of solidarity economics initiatives. Adriane Vieira Ferrarini, a researcher with the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at Unisinos in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, has studied this issue and wonders whether these initiatives, if analyzed solely from an income perspective, may seem inefficient. \u201cThey have a significant impact on social inclusion since they assume that there is a collective and democratic model of managing the undertaking and self-management, which in many cases may represent a gain greater than income.\u201d Among the many cases that were surveyed, she cites the example of a group of women entrepreneurs from Rio Grande do Sul who organized and mobilized against domestic violence, a political leadership role in their communities, and went back to school.<\/p>\n

In Rio Grande do Sul, where the cooperative movement is strong, most of the experiments with solidarity economics take place in rural environments or, on a smaller scale, through self-managed companies. \u201cIt is more difficult to strengthen these initiatives in the urban environment due to the characteristics of urban poverty.\u201d Therefore, Vieira Ferrarini believes that significant social gains are most likely to occur only in the medium and long term, since this is a process of inclusion for people who are experiencing \u201ca historical process of deterioration\u201d and a recent initiative in the case of Brazil. \u201cAnyone who designs economic solidarity ventures as islands of prosperity in a context of insecurity runs the risk of having their hopes dashed,\u201d she warns. \u201cOne major achievement is that the movement succeeded in placing a series of public initiatives on the political agenda, especially in the last decade. Today, for example, there are resources for small entrepreneurs and programs to train these entrepreneurs.\u201d She stresses that solidarity economics is not a panacea for poverty, and that it \u201cwould even be pretentious to think so!\u201d Yet, it is one of the \u201calternatives to poverty\u201d and goes further in that it proposes a development plan focused on sustainability, social and economic justice, and participative democracy, she adds.<\/p>\n

According to the coordinator\u2019s assessment of the thematic project that received FAPESP support, the low impact the solidarity cooperative movement has on income reinforces the culture of salaried employment, especially when employment indicators are rising. \u201cIn Brazil, regulated citizenship, in terms of formal labor, impacts the formation of worker identity and his or her future prospects in the labor market.\u201d Thus, the idea of self-management or collective ownership of the means of production does not emerge as an opportunity to be conquered. \u201cThe establishment of a new culture of labor through associations assumes that a political will is expressed in public policies for effective changes in the priorities and directions of economic development that places priority on labor over capital.\u201d<\/p>\n

Project<\/strong>
\nLabor\u2019s crisis and new experiences in employment and income generation: the different faces of associative labor and gender issues (n\u00ba 2006\/61142-3<\/a>); Grant Mechanism<\/b> Thematic Project; Coordinator<\/b> M\u00e1rcia de Paula Leite (Unicamp); Investment<\/b>: R$419,219.25 (FAPESP).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How the phenomenon of productive insertion works in times of crisis","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[225],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-118660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","tag-economy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118660"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=118660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}