Artistic activism as a new trade union tool of young precarious workers in Argentina

From the social sciences of the labor, it is a consensus to point out that the advance of work precariousness generates a challenge for the traditional trade union organizations, because of the segmentation it generates in the working class, in relation to their conditions and job demands, and for the difficulty in representing those workers who are working in unregistered and informal conditions. In this context, this paper aims to reflect on the new forms of collective action that young precarious workers establish in response to these limitations of traditional trade unionism to channel their struggles. Our hypothesis is that in the absence of access to traditional trade union representation and its formal mechanisms of negotiation and struggle, the precarious workers turn to alternative repertoires of action to give visibility to their struggles and install their demands in the political ground. One of these repertoires is artistic activism, which consists in the use of images, songs and performances as a channel for denouncing and protesting about their labor problems. It is on this unconventional trade union repertoire where we focus our reflection in this paper, which gain a great place in the recent mobilizations of young precarious people in Argentina. In qualitative methodological terms, we conducted a qualitative and comparative case study on three Argentinian organizations of young precarious workers who resorted to artistic activism in their protests, during the period 2005-2015, seeking to understand its emergence as a new trade union repertoire.