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Manuel Rosaldo

dditionally, 24 recyclers filed tutelas, which were rejected on the grounds that the city had “no type of responsibility” to the recyclers because “no contractual or legal relation” linked the two parties. ¹⁴

CIVISOL began collaborating with the recyclers to prove a broad pattern of rights violation by linking the tutelas to the case against Law 1259 (interview, Adriana Ruiz-Restrepo, 2012). The lawyers argued that though there were legitimate environmental and health rationales for closing the Navarro Dump, the new arrangement violated the Constitutional Court’s 2003 ruling that recyclers should be included in all waste procurement processes. Moreover, Law 1259 blocked recyclers’ access to waste on the street, leaving many with no means of subsistence. The court sided with the recyclers, overturning the provisions in Law 1259 that affected their livelihoods and ordering the formalization of all of Cali’s recyclers. The court also declared the right of the recyclers to be formalized as entrepreneurs, rather than employees of large factories:

It must not be forgotten the fact that the recyclers, although informally, acted as entrepreneurs. Therefore, an appropriate alternative, rather than converting them into employees of the big recycling companies, is providing them some space to keep acting as entrepreneurs, promoting their organizational capacity and strengthening their capacities and opportunities to appropriately carry out the activity that they had developed throughout time. ¹⁵

The Court mandated the creation of an ad-hoc committee to design a socially inclusive waste management program for Cali.

he Role of the Labor Movement

If the recyclers’ key political leverage came through legal victories, what was the purpose of mobilization? That is to say, what was the division of labor between the social movement and its lawyers? One answer is that recycler organizations provided the vision and initiative behind the legal strategy. As lawyer Ruiz-Restrepo (interview, 2012) explains:

I am a legal, public policy translator of their needs and frustrations. But who had the vision of saying we need to [compete in the tendering process]? That wasn’t me. I didn’t go looking for waste pickers and saying “hey, you have a chance here.” That was [ARB leaders], Nohra [Padilla] and Silvio [Ruiz-Grisales]. So the initiative is theirs, completely. That’s the social movement. They had to detect and spot change, they had to understand their environment, that their environment changed, that the opportunities narrowed, and that in that little tiny hole—they had to get in. And they had to look for lawyers.

Ruiz-Restrepo credits ARB leaders not only for pivoting focus from social service provision to political struggle after the withdrawal of FS, but for collaborating in the creation of legal strategy. For example, ARB members found the Cali recyclers who had filed tutelas and helped Ruiz-Restrepo develop the idea of demanding rights as entrepreneurs.

A second manner by which the recycler movement likely contributed to the legal victories was by influencing judges and the broader public through displays of what Charles Tilly (1978) terms “WUNC” (worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment). As Ruiz-Restrepo (interview, 2012) explains:

These cases would have [hypothetically] been won in the abstract because they are about the reasonableness, the rationality, and the constitutionality of reform. So your rights are your rights—it doesn’t matter if you’re 1 or 300,000 people. Now, that is in theory of course. It’s not the same if you have 300,000 people in front of the court.

Indeed, organized recyclers often show up to public hearings en masse, though their largest turnouts have numbered in the thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. ¹⁶ They also draw upon other traditional “contentious collective action repertoires” such as demonstrations, media outreach, and participation in public meetings, as well as solidarity statements and protests from allied domestic and international recycler organizations ( Tilly 1978 :42). Importantly, winning the public’s trust to perform a vital sanitary service requires that the recyclers not only communicate their worthiness and commitment as protesters, but as workers and managers. To this end, they have created a different type of symbolic repertoire, ranging from everyday performances of professional identity, to collective dramatizations of work. For example, to demonstrate their commitment to public service during a sanitary crisis in December 2012, 120 ARB members volunteered to sweep streets and collect garbage in the city’s historic center for two weeks, which their NGO allies chronicled and publicized online through a mini-documentary ( WIEGO and ARB 2013 ).

The third and perhaps most exacting role of the social movement is to hold reluctant policy makers accountable for implementing the Constitutional Court’s decisions. The need for such outside political leverage is evidenced by successive municipal administrations’ (2003-2011) resistance to creating inclusive waste management policy, even after twice being found in contempt of court. According to a frustrated Ruiz-Restrepo and Barnes (2010) :

Seemingly, a case lost by the authorities in front of the Court is believed and felt by the State as nothing more than a reproach, rather than a binding legal decision. The same attitude applies with respect to judicial writs, which are interpreted as suggestions (p. 106).

ARB leaders accused municipal administrations during this period not only of flouting the court’s rulings, but of attempting to undermine the recycler movement as a whole by pitting organizations against one another and promoting the creation of “false organizations” run by government allies posing as recyclers. Adversarial relations with municipal policy makers, waste management companies, and rival recycler organizations have pushed the ARB to rely on displays of WUNC not only to make claims about the rights of recyclers, but to defend its own legitimacy as a representative of recyclers. ¹⁷

CONCLUSION

Labor scholars and organizers have long dismissed informal workers as “unorganizable,” presuming them to be too weak and fragmented to collectively challenge capital and the state. Undeterred, millions of “the world’s most vulnerable workers” have begun mobilizing for labor and human rights over the past quarter century, a period when neoliberalism is said to have crippled workers’ power ( Agarwala 2013 :5). What has enabled this unexpected development? I have explored this question through a case study of the Colombian recycler movement—a “least likely” case for successful mobilization due to the recyclers’ social and economic marginalization and the Colombian state’s violent repression of labor movements. The rise of neoliberalism and the consolidation of democracy created political opportunities and threats that galvanized the recycler movement in ways that conventional perspectives on the informal economy would not lead us to expect.