D Coletto

The Informal Economy and Employment in Brazil

The Informal Economy Dilemmas: Old and New Views Catadores and Catadoras (the Garbage Collectors) Ambulantes and Camelos (the Street Vendors) Sacoleiras and Sacoleiros (Door-to-door Saleswomen and Commercial Agents) Informality, Regulation, and Development

La flessibilità numerica nei settori privato e pubblico fra strategia e contingenza

L’articolo confronta le modalita di utilizzo dei principali contratti di lavoro flessibile (a termine, di somministrazione e di collaborazione) in due casi concreti appartenenti al settore privato ed al settore pubblico, al fine di indagare le diverse logiche di ricorso al lavoro non-standard in contesti differenti. La prima parte del saggio presenta una breve rassegna dei principali tentativi di definizione dei diversi tipi di flessibilita del lavoro ed illustra il dibattito sugli effetti della flessibilita del lavoro sull’adattabilita delle organizzazioni e sulle condizioni di vita e di lavoro di lavoratrici e lavoratori. Nella seconda parte del saggio sono descritte due esperienze concrete: per quanto riguarda il settore privato, si tratta di Abb Italia, un’impresa di grandi dimensioni che opera nel settore elettro-meccanico; per il settore pubblico, viene presentato il caso di un ente locale, la Provincia di Milano. Le conclusioni riprendono alcuni degli aspetti piu rilevanti di questi casi e, piu in generale, sottolineano i risultati dell’analisi complessiva dei dati e delle informazioni raccolte nel corso della ricerca empirica.

Vivere nell’economia informale : il caso dei "cercatori di rifiuti" di Porto Alegre, Brasile

The present paper points out some relevant aspects concerning a specific example of informal economy, i.e. the sorted waste collection service carried out by the informal garbage collectors at Porto Alegre, Brazil. In recent years, the recycling of solid waste run by poor and socially excluded people has become one of the most «evident» forms of the informal economy in the streets of the South of the worlds cities. At the same time, this phenomenon has become more popular in several international newspapers. Particular attention has been paid to the potential causes creating this practice of informality, characterised by extremely poor working conditions; whereas not sufficient attention has been paid to the knowledge about the processes by which the garbage collectors phenomenon is socially reproduced in the different urban contexts. Using the methods of qualitative social research (ethnography in particular), I observed the schemes of action that contribute to create the garbage collectors phenomenon in Porto Alegre, trying to understand features and processes that help to maintain a certain social order. In particular, the focus was on the constitution of «grass-roots» organisations, their features and their relations with both subjects operating in the formal part of economy and the local public authorities.

L'economia informale ed i suoi confini con il settore formale nei paesi del Sud del mondo

The present paper outsets some of the most meaningful theoretical and empirical frameworks on the issue of informal economy that have been mainly developed in the Southern world countries. Such approaches represent, on one hand, attempts of interpreting informal economy basically assuming the dichotomy of formal/informal sector though the dichotomy itself disguised difficulties in its practical application and, on the other hand, attempts of interpreting and explaining micro-foundations of informal economic relationships, focussing particularly on the concrete situations where social actors act, on the effects of the interactions among them, and on the continuous mixing of formal and informal factors in the actions’ structures. Thus, informality emerges in its entire complexity and encourages the use of inductive logics and interpretations that belong to various disciplines. The interdisciplinary approach, on one hand, improved our understanding of particular informal activities embedded in specific contexts, but, on the other hand, it seems to complicate the search for an unitary definition of informal economy.