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Ensayo: salud ocupacional y precariedad en recicladores/clasificadores de…
Ensayo: salud ocupacional y precariedad en recicladores/clasificadores de Colombia y Uruguay
Informal
Occupational hazards
Stigma
The formal waste management community also does not support scaling up by waste pickers, who are viewed as competitors for jobs and recyclable resources
Municipal workers shun waste pickers as informal workers because they skirt the rules, taxes and other costs. Thus they are denied access to the waste stream and to social services
Health
high susceptibility to injuries "e.g. being caught in processing equipment; being run over by trucks; fires; explosions; being injured by glass, contaminated needles, medical waste and also death (Cruvinel et al, 2019)
develop respiratory diseases, infectious diseases
mental health problems
Uruguay:
clasificadores weaved between dumping tricks and compacting machines, relying only on tacit communication and patience from drivers to avoid injury
no health and safety standards, and wore neither high visibility uniforms nor, for the most part, gloves, when rifling through potentially contaminated materials
Colombia:
"over 1/3 of waste pickers self-report their health as fair or poor and an important proportion of those rating their health as poor (over 30%) do not have health insurance"
poverty and ill health were found to be highly associated in waste picking communities
poor has less access to health service and are disproportionately more prone to live under stressful circumstance, violence and crime
“Amongst trash pickers in Medellin, the second most populated city in Colombia, 32% reported having respiratory infections, 10% intestinal disease, 47% chronic conditions (mental and physical) and 37% no access to health insurance” (Martinez, 2020:134)
“Even though some trash picker may have access to subsidized health insurance, time constraints [sic] and social stigma may prevent them to receive health care” (ibid)
Insecure job and income
“The monthly income of 56.8% of the recyclers is based on a minimum wage in Colombian pesos, and is affiliated in the subsidized health regime” (Bustamante, 2018: 430)
“Ballesteros et al. (2008) identified the biological risk factors to which informal recyclers are exposed the city of Medellin, and found factors related to the contact of decomposing material (96.6%), contaminated material (96.6%), animals (62.5%) and arthropods (79.5%)” (ibid: 433)
“Measures to protect them from biological risk factors are used in less than 52% of waste pickers; in addition, only 13.6% of these are vaccinated, which increase the probability of getting sick in this population” (ibid.)
“In the study, 37.4% of the participating recyclers have had accidents, of which a significant part are of work origin, which is related to the obtained by Flores in Paraguay, where the incidence of occupational accidents in collectors was 37.5%” (ibid: 440)
“Indicators were established that show the degree of exploitation to which waste pickers are subjected. For example, 43.8 percent of waste pickers work six days a week and 71.6 percent work more than eight hours a day” (Parra, 2020)
“The average monthly income at the time was COP 120,000 (approximately USD 63)” (Parra, 2020)
Formal
Expected sustainable job and income
fixed working hours, workplace discipline, access to social security, and regulated economic activity make the plants a paradigmatic example of labour formalisation programme
Social protection (reduce occupational health hazards, stigma)
Less contact with hazardous waste
Counterargument:
Formalisation automatically implies the transition from precarity to security. Reinforcing binaries that have been constructed between formal sector priviledge and informal sector poverty
Instead formalisation produces neoliberal reliance of workers on the state - taking formerly autonomous clasificadores and making the dependent on a paternalistic state
Inclusion faces significant hurdles in ensuring sustainable livelihoods for recicladores
Many clasificadores left the Aries Ley de Envases plant and returned to informal economic activity (they were not happy with the formalistion of the labour) (O'Hare, 2019:54)
Planta Aries case study: closing of landfill Usina 5 and COFECA
Fernandez (2012: 2) avoids using a formal/informal heuristic to separate Uruguayan waste-pickers from official waste management actors, opting instead for 'institutional' and 'spontaneous'
Even municipal waste management is not entirely formal because Intendencia (local govt) cannot guarantee that all collected waste stays in the formal sector
Teorias de precariedad
(1) La precariedad es un concepto ampliamente utilizado
Butler (2009: 25) define la precariedad como la instituciones socioeconomicos y politicos que distribuye desigualmenta las condiciones de vida
(2) Los cuerpos precarios
Conclusions