Classification struggles of informal workers: How waste pickers became proletarianized in Brazil and Indigenized in Colombia

Abstract

Why do movements of similarly situated workers arrive at different answers to fundamental questions like: Who are we? What do we want? How will we get it? And how do answers to these questions shape movement strategy and outcomes? This article explores this puzzle by comparing the Brazilian and Colombian waste picker movements—two of the world’s oldest and largest organizing efforts among informal recyclers. Despite shared origins, the movements diverged sharply in their discourses, strategies, and demands. In Brazil, waste pickers aligned with the Workers’ Party and adopted a class-based discourse, portraying themselves as exploited laborers fighting for economic inclusion. In Colombia, by contrast, the movement lacked allies in elected office and pursued a human rights strategy, framing waste pickers as a vulnerable population facing displacement by the state. Drawing on 26 months of ethnographic research, the article traces how these divergent self-classifications shaped legal frameworks, public policies, and material outcomes in each country. To explain these differences, it draws on two concepts from Bourdieu’s sociology—classification struggles and political fields—which illuminate how informal worker movements innovate, and why such innovation takes distinct forms across political contexts. The comparison shows that reimagining informal work as “decent work” is not a neutral process, but a contested terrain of meaning-making and institutional struggle. It underscores the importance of centering workers’ own definitions of dignity, autonomy, and fairness.