A year of cuts in public spending and social benefits, imposed after the election in November 2023 of president Javier Milei’s right-wing populist government, has left Argentina’s most vulnerable communities feeling abandoned by the state.
Around 45% of the country’s population works in the informal sector, which means they are blocked from social security benefits. In the textile sector, around 70% of workers are active in the informal economy. They often operate by themselves or along with other family members from their homes putting themselves at risk.
Accidents have been common occurrences, with six Bolivian workers dying in a fire at a sewing workshop on Calle Luis Viale in Buenos Aires in 2006. Another fire at an unauthorised textile workshop in Buenos Aires’s Flores neighbourhood resulted in the deaths of two Bolivian children in 2015.
A 2022 report by Protex found that 70% of the textile workers in Buenos Aires identified as non-nationals, with 17% of all workers in the sector lacking identification documents. And documented or not, these workers are vulnerable to forced labour – found by a 2024 ILO report in Argentina’s garment sector, particularly in informal and clandestine workshops.
In spite of these challenges, some textile workers are determined to keep fighting for their future by forming co-ops. Union support is crucial to these efforts, they say, with the Union of Popular Economy Workers (Utep) attempting to formalise workers.
“One of the first fights has been not having representation and being alone,” says Sonia Gonzalez, a seamstress living in Buenos Aires, with 18 years of experience in the industry, four of them in the co-op. “Once organised, we were able to have some big wins within the popular economy sector.”
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Jaqueline Serrano Rocha has been working in the industry for 27 years. She joined a co-op eight years ago after meeting people from the trade union in her neighbourhood. “They told us how to organise to have our one place rather than work from home,” she recalls. She explains that having a workplace is better than working from home, which puts workers and their families at risk from electrical faults. Through the union’s co-operative federation, her co-op was able to apply for a state loan to buy machinery.
“Thanks to being organised as co-ops we could have our own federation, supported by Utep, and be represented and defended,” adds Gonzalez. “We could not have succeeded obtaining these rights, which are now being lost, without them.”
Another benefit of joining the union was being able to attend training sessions to learn more abut how to run their businesses. Serrano Rocha says it offered an opportunity to learn about working and thinking collectively while visiting a new city – a luxury most workers could not otherwise afford.
The recent challenges have led many co-ops to merge or rent spaces together to cut costs. But some co-ops are losing members, including Serrano Rocha’s co-op, which lost 10 members, with just 15 remaining. Some went back to operating from home, others turned to jobs in the construction sector or went back to selling on the streets.
She hopes all textile co-ops can come together to operate from a single location, which would help reduce costs.
Childcare is another concern for many workers in the industry, an aspect the co-ops took into account. “We created free nurseries to look after the children – and the schedule is adjusted according to our needs,” says Gonzales. “We open at 7am and close at 6pm – and so the nursery is open to fit these hours, and the children are looked after by qualified childcare workers.
“These big things are only possible with empathy and being able to see the needs of our colleagues.”
The majority of workers in the sector are migrants from countries like Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay or Peru, who are excluded from the formal economy.
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Gonzalez, who is originally from Bolivia, says these people feel abandoned by the state. “People have been completely abandoned, from being in a collective and working together now they are all thinking about how to support themselves. They work whatever they can, do whatever jobs they can because that’s how they can survive. And that will be a problem because they will get paid even less.”
Serrano Rocha thinks that only by working together will these workers be able to achieve change. “This crisis is a hit to all, the idea is to continue advancing. The federation hasn’t abandoned us, the co-ops,” she says. “They are looking for work, they are bidding for work. Even though production and prices are lower, they are still better in the co-ops, and we hope to keep fighting and advancing.
“The collective fight is what will help us progress. Many workers are now asleep but will wake up soon and when they do they will have an impact. As members and colleagues, we have to keep going, no matter with how many remaining, we’ll keep going, we’re all a federation and the pillar of co-ops.”
Their joint message, says Gonzales, is a call for unity and resistance.
“We know we live though very difficult times,” she adds, “but we understand that resisting is the best that can happen to us. Everything that has been achieved through the trade union throughout history has been through resistance and unity.”
To raise awareness about their work, in 2021 Utep’s federation of textile co-ops launched Carpincho, a joint brand for its 80 member co-ops: “The idea was to promote the brand, so people know who makes the products,” says Jonathan Barrios, who leads the textile branch of Utep. The garments, which include office wear and accessories, are sold via a digital platform. In this way, prices are accessible and workers are paid fair wages, adds Gonzales.
Serrano Rocha says the initiative also aims to raise awareness of the importance of paying workers fair wages.
“We worked with big brands that barely paid – so we prove that with this marque, it was made by people working in the popular economy, it’s not exploited and it’s dignified work, paid a fair salary,” she adds.
Another initiative aiming to promote the products made by popular economy workers is EcoPop a digital platform.
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“The public thinks that people who work in the informal economy are lazy people who get social benefits. It is not the case, we all work. EcoPop was created to raise awareness of all the work the different sector of the popular economy does,” says Gonzales.
Meanwhile, times could get tougher: the co-ops now fear competition from abroad, with the government announcing its intention to reduce import taxes to 7.5%.
Utep is trying to address some of the formidable challenges. For 25 years, it has been helping them form co-ops, formalising and organising in what it calls the popular economy – made up of workers traditionally excluded from the formal economy. Its role is to listen to the workers, support them, and help make their voices heard. Members include waste pickers, construction workers, textile workers, artisans, small-scale farmers, community workers, street vendors, people struggling with addictions and some ex-offenders.
It represents 500,000 individual members, a small fraction of the country’s estimated six million informal economy workers.
“We have been fighting since 2001 for their work to be recognised by the state and society in general,” says Agustina Mayansky, representative of the Movement of Excluded Workers (MTE), which forms part of Utep.
She adds that the right to work was one of the main issues that led to the union being set up: “It was not just about working conditions, or improving these, but the fact the right to work is not guaranteed, because some of these workers are arrested if they sell on the street or if the litter they collect is private, so defending their right to work was a key issue.”
As a trade union rep, Mayansky often intervenes when police tries to arrest street vendors, which on one occasion, led to her own arrest.
“They wanted it to be known that they were workers first, they were not unemployed, they were workers without rights,” she says. “So the issue was not about obtaining work in the formal economy but ensuring their work in the informal economy is recognised.”
By organising they were able to obtain some small wins. Waste pickers managed to get uniforms from their municipalities while textile workers were able to negotiate with local authorities to prevent business closures.
A bigger win was obtained in 2016 when a new social emergency law created a social complementary salary for all popular economy actors. This meant that 50% of workers’ salaries were paid by the state, recognising that the work they perform cannot guarantee a living income. They also had to formally register as popular economy workers.
Utep’s recognition as a trade union enabled its members to access social security and health services as well. Another success was having pension contributions (a ‘social monotribute’) paid for by the state, in recognition of the economic vulnerability of these workers. This contribution stopped under Milei’s reforms and means popular economy workers can no longer access healthcare or have contributions to a pension pot.
“We had 10 years of development and organising of the popular economy. All that has now stopped and things are going backwards,” says Mayansky. “The co-ops were tools through which excluded workers were engaging with the state and institutions.”
While registered co-ops continue to enjoy some tax breaks, high inflation rates, coupled with the removal of some social benefits and subsidies put the existence of many textile co-ops at risk.
“In just one year, the impact of the Milei government has been tremendous,” adds Barios. Cuts in public spending have led to a budget surplus for the first time since 2014. Yet these measures, coupled with reductions in subsidies for food, energy and public transport have led to an increase of eight percentage points to Argentina’s poverty rate, now at 53%.
“The lack of the pension contribution is a big loss,” Barrios explains. “The monotribute helped to formalise the sector – now they are informal again.”
Faced with all these challenges and a federal government likely to continue implementing austerity measures, Utep will be shifting its focus to provinces. Members will be asked to vote to approve a new regional structure at Utep’s congress in March.
“The objective,” says Mayansky, “is to consolidate and strengthen the structure to be able to face the attack from the government because beyond the characteristics and political leaning of this government, there is a direct and organised persecution towards popular economy workers.”
