Jochen Becker
"Every ground floor is converted into a workshop."
On the cooperatives "Coopa-Roca" in Rio de Janeiro and "Nuevo Rumbo" in Buenos Aires *

Within the frame of a lecture and workshop weekend in Berlin, it was our intention to introduce two communal and cooperative labour organizations and their practices to each other: the producers from a cooperative for fabricated materials for the fashion industry from a favela in Rio de Janeiro and the speaker of a cooperative from a suburb of Buenos Aires that collects and reprocesses waste. Which concepts of solidarity are inscribed in the projects, and where do they draw the border to precariousness? People involved in the first cooperative seem to manoeuvre within a kind of permanently unguaranteed 'Benetton' economy and are either employed or not, depending on the orders position, while the protagonists of the latter are working on the stabilization of labour and social structures that are becoming newly formalized. At least that's what we thought.

Nuevo Rumbo - Cooperativa de Producción y Servicios
We arranged to meet Pepe Córdoba from "Nuevo Rumbo - Cooperativa de Producción y Servicios" at the Placa del Mayo. We are sitting on a park bench next to a European-style middle-class lady who is listening to our conversation in a half-interested way. Pepe has just come from a town councillor whom he called on for a loan to purchase a recycling machine. Once the group of cartoñeros can finally themselves recycle the material they collect and offer it as raw material at greater spreads, they would no longer be fobbed off with extra change.

Pepe is a "waste collector" - like many who have fallen out of the system of a "normal" working life. The economic crisis - i.e. the neoliberal experiment under Menem and his successors - drove entire families to the streets in the dark of the night to collect cardboard, bottles, plastic and other trash. The newly precarised middle classes therefore uphold the memory of secure times and can help the cooperatives with the legal and organizational knowledge they acquired in their former jobs.

The landlady of our room, who works as a university lecturer and earns some extra money by letting rooms, doesn't speak well of the cartoñeros. She says they even unscrewed and stole the small brass button of the doorbell. She sees to it that we always lock the door: This is simply the panic of the middle classes on the decline. Neighbours, on the other hand, place their meticulously pre-sorted trash in front of the door.
Pepe tells us that he used to be a small entrepreneur. He has now followed the example of his father and become a waste collector, out of necessity. Since he doesn't want the next generation to experience this again, he has joined together with like-minded people to form a cooperative. He is determined to have his daughter study and thus break this chain of generations.

Pepe speaks in a rousing manner and pauses in a professional way for Alejandra to interpret. He travels across the country and even to neighbouring nations to give an account of "Nuevo Rumbo". At times he speaks about projects such as night kindergartens to prevent child labour; he is in favour of guaranteed income instead of the murderously declining purchase prices, or calls for pension and health care schemes: How can the spreading precarisation be halted and joint forms of guaranteed labour developed? Even if he seems to adhere more to the principle of hope than to reality, the fact that he is familiar with better living conditions is evident: Argentina has not treaded the path of the "Latin Americanization" to the extent that Brazil, for instance, has, where people seem to have come to terms with the crisis a long time ago.

Brazil, for instance, has, where people seem to have come to terms with the crisis a long time ago.
The middle-class woman left during the course of our conversation, and now an elderly woman has resolutely taken a seat on the corner of the bench, as if it were naturally her workplace. She routinely starts filling maize into plastic bags which a man brought her and with a loud voice offers the bags for sale. Passers-by purchase the bags she fills to earn her income to feed the doves swarming the Placa del Mayo.

The White Train
Probably around 150,000 cartoñeros come to the city each evening taking different routes. The Argentine-Spanish documentary film "El tren blance" (The White Train) by Nahuel Garcìa, Sheila Perez Giménez and Ramiro Garcìa gives an account of the White Train departing to Buenos Aires in the early evening hours. Over a longer period of time, the three young documentary filmmakers accompanied the travelling cartoñeros with their digital camcorders at the height of the crisis in 2001, before the old government was toppled. The montage depicting a chronological, "virtual" day, from the departure of the special train in the suburbs at 6 p.m., the roaming through the metropolis at night, up to the return at 11.30 p.m., gives many of the cartoñeros a chance to speak. It shows what a hard time they have squeezing back into the railway carriage with their carts which are meanwhile filled to the brim.

The White Train was deployed by a private railway company after the other passengers started to complain and the number of collectors with their carts had risen to 500. Now all benches have been removed and most of the carriage windows are also missing. The company charges approximately 2.50 euros every two weeks for the trip; the weekly earnings of a cartoñero amount to not even eight euros. The passengers are not allowed to use the station toilets; protests against the conditions in the ramshackle train without seats remain unheard. Despite all this, the cartoñeros succeeded in financing a further train to transport food to a city located 1,500 kilometres north of Buenos Aires where children were dying of malnutrition. The film shows neither the everyday life apart from collecting nor the procedure of handing over what they have collected.

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