out to greet me. Through the front window, I could see her husband turning off the TV. The silver fifty-inch Panasonic TV extended from the living room's corner to its center. It rested on a table, under which a large silver Sony sound system flashed its red and green lights. Two overstuffed tan armchairs sat close to the TV. Valentina guided me past the living area to the dining table, where teacups were set out. While Valentina prepared tea in the kitchen, I asked Pato about his work history. Pato had been a taxi driver for the past two years. Fifteen years earlier, however, he had started working at the Machasa textile factory.4 During that time, he said, he was earning well. His monthly income was 250,000 pesos (USD 410). Machasa provided the basis for this house, he explained, because it was a “time of stable work…. The company treated the workers well. There were benefits to working there, respect for the worker. Machasa was a Chilean company, but it went bankrupt.”
After eight years of employment, Pato moved to Sodimac, a manufacturer of transformers and lighting fixtures. There, he worked in a parttime trucking job, transporting goods from warehouse to stores. His starting monthly income was 60,000 pesos (USD 100). “From 250,000 to 60,000, just like that,” he told me. “It was virtually impossible to live during this time. We were paying dividends [on the house] of 25,000, then paying for school for the children, and the rest of the bills. No alcance para comer.” (It isn't enough to eat.)
Then, after six years of working for Sodimac, Pato renounced his work. The company had hired an external subcontractor to find workers, “un contratista [subcontractor] who receives his income for each worker that he brings to work, 5,000 pesos per worker, but pays the worker the minimum 115,000 pesos. Two months before I left work, the contratista came up to me and asked me to work with him, but for half the income, and it wasn't acceptable to me [no me convenía], so I left.” He told me that work is like this “everywhere now. You have to work for a contratista, who can tell you to sign a contract for two months, then two months more, afterward another month. And if you work for a while, you pass to an indefinite contract without signing anything, but when they throw you out, they pay a smaller indemnity, because all of those months when you had a definite contract do not count. The system now is like this. El mano de obra [manual labor] now is very cheap.”
Pato analyzed how labor laws generated new labor hierarchies and everyday instability. As an outcome of Pinochet's Labor Plan, as historian Peter Winn discusses, regimes of flexible labor continue to exert one of the most detrimental effects on the livelihoods of the poor (Winn 2004). Consisting of a series of decree laws designed primarily by Pinochet's labor minister, José Piñera, the Labor Plan worked in three broad directions.5 First, Decree Law 2.200 (1979) and Law 18.018 institutionalized new forms of unstable labor by giving the employer the power to terminate contracts with thirty days' notice, without justification, and to unilaterally change the nature of the work or the actual work site (Silva 2007; Winn 2004). Second, Decree Law 16.757 (1979) amplified the role and scope of subcontracting to all areas of a company's labor, allowing companies to subcontract out labor inherent to principal production, such as equipment maintenance and repair (Silva 2007, 4). Third, Decree Laws 2.758 (1979) and 3.648 (1981) severely restricted collective bargaining by allowing companies to replace striking workers after fifty-nine days and by abolishing specialized labor courts (Winn 2004).
Starting with the Aylwin administration, successive Concertación governments attempted to reform the Labor Code. As sociologist Volker Frank has pointed out, however, the Labor Code has produced “an ever increasing tendency to substitute permanent contract workers with temporary and subcontracted labor, a lowering of income for the total labor force, a decrease in fixed individual incomes for Chile's workers, and an increase in incomes tied to productivity gains, bonuses, and other ‘incentives’” (Frank 2004, 74; see also Henríquez and Riquelme 2006). For historian Gabriel Salazar, this “logic of employment,” in which “no work contract should be permanent and every worker, according to business interests, is dispensable,” has become “the third vertex of the ‘social pact’ of neoliberalism” (Salazar Vergara 2005, 88).
Indeed, by 2005, the Decree Laws' legacy in the current Labor Code produced an extremely precarious labor situation in which more than 93 percent of new work contracts lasted less than one year, and 50 percent lasted less than four months (Riesco 2005, 59). In La Pincoya, this high turnover and limited lifetime of the work contract tied into new hierarchies between local contratistas and their neighbors. These contratistas reap substantially higher incomes through subcontracting neighbors on “definite,” or time-delimited, contracts that last less than twelve months, typically two to three months, depending on the type of work. For the urban poor, the state's regulatory environment has institutionalized work as discontinuous and unpredictable.
Valentina returned to the table with bread, margarine, and cold cuts. Pato continued talking, spreading margarine on a piece of bread. After Sodimac, he decided to become a taxi driver. His family lent him money to buy a car. But, he told me, this work is even more unstable. “I don't know if this day will go well or badly for me. During the week, I can earn 20,000 to 30,000 pesos, and this is not sufficient for the house. So, I go to work on the weekends, Friday at night, Saturday at night, to equilibrate the week.” Pato returned to commenting on labor and politics. “In Chile, factories have turned into warehouses. I can say this because I lived it [lo viví]. In a factory—before—one worker painted the cup, the other made the cup, the other put the stamp on it, the other packaged it. But today, the cup arrives here made. The only thing that the worker can do is put the stamp on it that says ‘equis’ [X] country, and packages it. And they throw out the ten workers that before made the cup. The CUT [Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, the national union organization], which supposedly should protect the worker, does not want to do anything, because it does not want to criticize the government now. But, I say, if Lavín [then mayor of Santiago, and a member of the Unión Democrática Independiente party, backed by Opus Dei, an ultraconservative Catholic organization] were president, then maybe we would have a change with the CUT, because we would have to fight against something.”
Valentina yawned. The discussion of the CUT did not seem to be holding her attention. But as I turned the conversation back to the home, she became animated. “Do you make it to the end of the month?” I asked. Valentina answered, “We use the [credit] cards—Falabella, Rip-leys, Almacenes París—because you have to buy materials and clothes for the children to go to school. We can't pay with money, so we have to use cards.” She continued: “You know, I went to the municipality to do trámites [paperwork]. I spent the whole day tramitando [doing paperwork] to get the subsidies, but the asistente [social worker] there said that they would use the same information, the same paper [hoja, literally, the “sheet of paper”] that we had in 2002, and now it's 2004. Las cosas han cambiado” (Things have changed). Right now, she said, “we are passing a critical moment”.
She told me about the social worker's visit two years earlier, in 2002. She had petitioned the municipality to have the social worker assess their household for a water and electricity subsidy when Pato was out of work. “He only looked at what we have. Our TV, our stereo system, refrigerator, and he gave us a point score that was higher.” Pato latched on, with frustration in his voice: “The most grave is that I am without work now; now I have unstable work. For that, I ask for help now. They see the tele and think that we are well, but they do not understand that I beat myself up [me saque la cresta], almost going crazy, working to buy this tele, working twelve hours a day. But it was because of this, because I could do it with overtime.”
Pato and Valentina sketched out the temporal disjuncture between discontinuous work patterns and needs assessments materialized in social workers, paperwork, and point scores. This temporal disjuncture took on moral intensity with respect to specific material objects—televisions, stereos, and more recently, computers and laptops. Pointing to the TV, Valentina joined in: “But, they do not understand this achievement. That we achieved buying this tele when he was working well, overworking, more hours because we wanted to buy the tele. And, now, what do I do?
