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Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine
Labor Movement
Kate Hardy
University of London
Abstract
Sex workers in Argentina and beyond are making their histories visible through political
action, often in the face of extreme and violent repression. Alongside two first waves of
sex worker organizing, a third appears to be emerging from countries in the Global
South, which has largely been neglected in academic commentaries. One such
organization is Asociacio
´n de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina (AMMAR), the
female sex workers’ association of Argentina. This essay draws on questionnaire data,
participant observation, and in-depth interviews with union and nonunion sex workers
and members of the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA), the umbrella
federation of which they are a part, across ten cities in Argentina. It traces the
relationship between AMMAR and the CTA to examine how the two organizations
have worked together to organize workers in an infamously exploitative, precarious,
and vulnerable labor sector to achieve social and political change. The essay
contributes to debates about the regeneration of the trade union movement and
challenges the reigning wisdom that sex workers and trade unions are unlikely partners.
On February 17, 1922, five prostitutes
1
in La Catalina brothel in San Julia
´n,
Argentina, chased soldiers involved in a recent massacre from their working
premises, hitting them with brooms and shouting, “murderers, criminals, we
will not sleep with you.”
2
It was the last act of resistance in a rebellion that
became known as the Patagonia Rebelde, during which a province-wide
protest in support of arrested workers from the Sociedad Obrera (Worker’s
Society) turned into a strike for better wages and working conditions. The rebel-
lion lasted two years and was brutally crushed by the Argentinean army. Fifteen
hundred workers and strikers died from the summary executions imposed by
General Varela under the direction of President Hipo
´lito Yrigoyen.
3
In contrast
to the spontaneous uprising of the women in the Rebelde Patagonia, in the
mid-1990s, sex worker resistance emerged in Argentina in a more organized
form. Meeting in bars and cafe
´s in Buenos Aires, women working on the
streets began to discuss the ways in which they could resist police harassment
and abuse. The group was to become Asociacio
´n de Mujeres Meretrices de la
Argentina (AMMAR), the female sex workers’ association of Argentina,
which has continued the long history of sex workers’ political resistance,
seventy years after San Julia
´n.
This essay draws on questionnaire data, participant observation, and
in-depth interviews with union and nonunion sex workers and members of
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 77, Spring 2010, pp. 89– 108
#International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2010
doi:10.1017/S0147547909990263
the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA) (Argentine Workers’ Center),
the umbrella union federation of which they are a part, across ten cities in
Argentina. In doing so, it traces the relationship between AMMAR and the
CTA to examine how they have successfully organized workers in an infamously
exploitative, precarious, and vulnerable labor sector. It asks what these experi-
ences can contribute to debates about the regeneration of the trade union move-
ment and new forms of unionism.
4
I begin by broadly outlining the current impasse in the labor movement,
particularly in relation to informal workers. Second, I examine approaches to
sex worker organizing and argue that although analyses have been pessimistic
about the first two waves of organizing, a third wave is emerging, which is
experiencing considerable success. Third, I consider the CTA, exploring its
emergence and its parameters of membership eligibility. I examine the relation-
ship between AMMAR and the CTA, explaining how the CTA was able to
create space for sex workers and exploring their practices of cooperation. I con-
clude by showing how AMMAR has contributed to the CTA, by clarifying
understandings of work and class and transforming attitudes toward other
social identities, including gender and sexuality.
Labor Organizing at the Impasse
That trade unions are in crisis and that they must renew and revitalize to over-
come this impasse is now a widely rehearsed dictum among labor theorists and
practitioners alike.
5
It is perhaps surprising, then, that despite the yearning for
trade union renewal, little attention has been paid to extant examples of organiz-
ing among informal, contingent, and precarious workers, who now represent a
majority of the world’s workers.
6
There is both unpreparedness and resistance
in responding to the existential challenge that the “new majority” of workers
present to orthodox trade unionism.
7
Many unions appear trapped in a
“factory paradigm” stymied by an insistence on parameters for eligibility that
no longer reflect the realities of contemporary work and employment.
8
Industrial unionism, or the “factory paradigm,” no longer seems appropriate
for many low-paid service sectors, migrants, ethnic minorities, women, part-time
workers, and particularly informal workers, who increasingly constitute a larger
proportion of the workforce in the changed structures of work and employment.
9
Some unions in Europe and North America, such as the Textile, Clothing
and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA), Unite in Canada, Federazione
Italiana Lavoratori Tessili Abbigliamento Cuoio Calzature (FILTEA-CGIL)
in Italy, and Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging (FNV) in the Netherlands,
have taken up the mantle and are organizing informal workers. Most,
however, have been slow to respond and have limited organizing to home
workers. In contrast, there is a strong cohort of unions in the Global South
that are engaging with the struggles of “atypical” workers, particularly female
informal workers.
10
In particular, the Self-Employed Women’s Association
(SEWA) in India and Self-Employed Women’s Union (SEWU) in South
90 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
Africa have organized large numbers of street vendors and home workers with
considerable success.
11
However, even in contexts in which these organizations
have made considerable headway in improving conditions for informal workers,
and despite the shared issues and challenges, they have generally not connected
with or supported the organization of sex workers. Even when a decision was
made in 1994 by SEWU to organize commercial sex workers, it was later aban-
doned, seemingly due to strong Christian values among SEWU’s leadership and
staff.
12
Sex Worker Organizing: The First and Second Waves
During the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, sex
workers organized and protested their maltreatment across the world, from
India and Costa Rica to Guatemala and Puerto Rico.
13
However, the establish-
ment of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) in San Francisco in 1973 and
a strike of French prostitutes in 1975, which saw the establishment of the French
Collective of Prostitutes, signaled the beginning of the first significant wave of
sex worker organizing. By the 1980s, these largely national prostitutes’ move-
ments had spilled over borders, establishing international relationships with
other movements and meeting internationally at events such as the First and
Second Whores’ Congresses in 1985 and 1986 in Amsterdam and Brussels.
14
A second wave of organization emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
spurred on in part by the conceptualization of prostitution as sex work.
15
It was
constituted first by health organizations responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis and
secondly by the formal trade unionization of sex workers, creating connections
with the existing labor movement. In 1988, in Ecuador, the Association of
Autonomous Female Workers called a sex workers’ strike to protest against con-
ditions, and organizations emerged to lobby for sex workers’ rights in Malaysia,
Thailand, South Africa, and Uruguay, among others. One of the most striking suc-
cesses is the Durbar Mahila Samanayay Committee (DMSC) or “Sonagachi
Project,” which represents between 40,000 and 60,000 female sex workers in
West Bengal, India. Between 1992 and 1998 condom use rocketed from just
three percent to over ninety percent, due to the project’s awareness raising.
A self-regulatory board regulates the entry of young girls into the profession,
ensuring that minors and individuals subject to coercion are not working in the
area. It has trained women in self-defense, offered microcredit and microenter-
prise schemes, and fought for workers’ rights and decriminalization.
16
Similarly,
in Pune City, a collective established in 1998 now has five hundred members
and a collective kitchen and has increased condom usage to ninety-five percent.
17
Most significantly, a number of organizations have adopted a trade union
approach, affiliating to broader trade union confederations. In the United
Kingdom, the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) developed from a
small grassroots group to become a branch of the United Kingdom’s General
Workers’ Union (GMB),
18
in the Netherlands De Rode Draad (Red Thread)
affiliated to the Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging (Dutch Union
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 91
Federation) (FNV), while in Australia and the US, sex workers’ organizations
affiliated with the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union
(LHMWU) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU), respectively.
19
The numbers of organizations, collectives, and trade unions have increased
exponentially, and the sex workers’ rights community is now made up of a
wide range of groups, including trade unions, collectives, pressure groups,
service providers, health care organizations, and support groups (see Figure 1).
20
The first wave of sex worker organizations has been categorized as part of
“deviance liberation” movements alongside other movements, such as those for
gay rights and abortion, which emerged in the 1970s.
21
It is argued that in con-
trast to the other movements, these prostitutes’ collectives were unable to
mobilize material and human resources and were undermined by a poverty of
moral, material, and human capital.
22
Others argue that, beyond resources,
the success or failure of sex workers’ movements should be understood more
broadly, in terms of the balance of interests between other actors involved in
the regulation of sex work, including local government, the police, and commu-
nity groups.
23
They similarly conclude that the organizations of both waves have
had little influence in the United States and the United Kingdom and only
slightly more in New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Australia, but that all
cases represent little more than liberal reform. Indeed, the general consensus
about sex workers’ organizations has generally been pessimistic, calling their
outcomes “uncertain or disappointing,” disqualifying them from trade union
status and labeling them instead as pressure groups. It is claimed that the coher-
ence of the movement is illusory, that the movements have lacked mass bases,
depending instead on lone organizers and charismatic leaders, and that they
have failed to establish alliances with other labor or social movements.
24
For sex workers, organizing in trade unions has often proven to be particu-
larly problematic. Labor movement responses have ranged from indifference to
hostility, despite the institutionalization of the right to organize in national and
international treaties.
25
In some cases, unions have directly rejected sex workers’
right to unionize. At the Trade Union Congress (TUC) Women’s Conference in
the United Kingdom in 2009, delegates voted against Motion 39, which called
for the decriminalization of the sex industry and supported the trade unioniza-
tion of sex workers. Instead a motion was passed in favor of the criminalization
of the purchase of sex. This prioritization of the criminalization of clients over
solidarity with women in the sex industry is emblematic of current attitudes
toward sex workers in the labor movement in the UK and beyond. Numerous
additional problems also remain, such as violence and harassment from
family, police, and management when sex workers try to organize collectively.
26
To the Third Wave?
Alongside these first two waves of sex workers’ organizing, a third wave appears
to be emerging, in particular from countries of the Global South, most signifi-
cantly in India and Argentina. The Karnataka Sex Workers Union, established
92 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
in 2006, has specifically constituted itself as a trade union, affiliating with the
New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), which has also been organizing other infor-
mal workers. It has assisted women in enrolling on the electoral register,
struggled against the criminalization of clients, produced research, lobbied the
government about violence against sex workers, and built links and alliances
with other progressive organizations besides the NTUI.
27
Figure 1. Global Sex Workers’ Organization.
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 93
In Argentina, AMMAR too has asserted itself explicitly as a trade union,
allying with and becoming part of the trade union umbrella confederation
Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA). Their initial demand was simply
not to be rearrested and detained within twenty-four hours of release from a
police station. Since 1994, their demands have expanded to include an end to
abuse against sex workers, the repeal of the Codigos de Faltas and Codigos
Contravencionales (provincial codes that enable abuse), for violence against
sex workers to be taken seriously, and for access to healthcare and other
welfare benefits. Like other sex worker organizations, their central demand is
for recognition of sex work as work. The members of AMMAR identify their
oppression as emerging from three sources: as women in patriarchal society,
as members of the working class in an unjust and unequal capitalist world,
and as sex workers in a hypocritical society with a double standard.
The women locate themselves firmly within the working class, stating that
“we recognize ourselves as part of the working class because our work feeds our
families” and by identifying as “women who without opportunities, nevertheless
choose to ... do this work.”
28
This emphasis on choice within limitations goes
some way in bridging the polarized sex work/prostitution debate, introducing
a more structural analysis of sex work that still allows for sex workers’
agency. The assertion of parity with other workers is practical as well as
ideological. It enables demands for equal application of the law and access to
benefits enjoyed by other workers, such as pensions and social benefits, docu-
mentation, housing, and healthcare. Such a class identity has been extremely
important for linking their particular struggle to a broader political project
and for making the women feel legitimate in their demands, as they recognize
that their problems are also shared by miners, cleaners, nurses, and all other
workers.
29
In 2007 AMMAR was legally recognized as a not-for-profit organization,
gaining the status of Personerı
´a Juridica. They are currently struggling to
convert Juridica status into Personerı
´a Gremial, which would recognize sex
work as work and would bestow rights on AMMAR to distribute pensions,
healthcare, and other benefits in line with other unions in Argentina. The
union counts between two thousand and four thousand affiliates across ten pro-
vincial branches and is in contact with an estimated thirty thousand sex workers
a year. The women it represents are over eighteen and work on the street inde-
pendently and of their own free choice. Although “free choice” is complex in
conditions of structural constraint, it is used as a category to distinguish them
from those working due to force, coercion, trafficking, threats, or deceit. As
well as seeking legal reform, AMMAR has enabled access to healthcare
through accords with hospitals and the Sandra Cabrera Health Centre in La
Plata, the first clinic specifically designed for sex workers.
The successes of AMMAR and other organizations, such as those in India,
suggest the beginnings of a third wave of sex worker organizing, which requires
a reassessment of previous pessimistic conclusions. In light of this, the next
section considers some of the ways in which, through an alliance with the
94 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
CTA, AMMAR has achieved social and political change for sex workers in
Argentina. It begins with a discussion of the genesis of the CTA and the devel-
opment of the relationship between the two organizations and then considers
some of the ways in which they have collaborated and developed mutual
support and solidarity.
The Emergence of the CTA
On December 17, 1991, in the midst of intense neoliberal economic restructur-
ing, a group of union leaders, organizations, and representatives met in Burzaco,
Buenos Aires. Deregulation, privatization, and liberalization of the Argentine
economy had resulted in a twenty-three percent drop in GDP per capita
between 1981 and 1989, and by 1995 unemployment hit twenty percent in
metropolitan Buenos Aires. Across the country fifty percent of the population
was living in extreme poverty, and forty-five percent of the working popula-
tion was unemployed or underemployed.
30
Piquetes (pickets) sprung up across
the country as piqueteros (unemployed workers whose survival had been deci-
mated by the juggernaut of crisis) blockaded main arteries and highways,
demanding welfare, jobs, and governmental support. In 1997 alone, seventy-seven
roadblocks brought the country to a standstill. Alongside the unemployed, some
of the worst affected were state employees. Enraged by nonpayment, reductions
in wages, and unemployment due to privatization and retrenchment, state
employees joined the piqueteros on the blockades. Standing together on the
picket lines, the two groups began to identify similarities between their struggles
and to recognize the impotence of the corporatist trade union system in helping
them with the changed situation they found themselves in.
31
When the teachers, public employees, unemployed workers, independent
potters, metallurgical workers, and mechanics met in Burazco, they agreed
that the new configuration of power between state, capital, and labor had fos-
tered a culture of survival that exposed the limits of the current structure of
the labor movement and represented a fundamental challenge to it.
32
Condemning the active manipulation of the economy for the benefit of the econ-
omically dominant and the complicity of the existing trade union movement,
they proposed an alternative political project that would be able to account
for the changed circumstances faced by the working class.
33
A year later, in
1992, with public sector workers from Asociacio
´n de Trabajadores del Estado
(ATE, or the Association of State Workers) and teachers from La
Confederacio
´n de Trabajadores de la Educacio
´n de la Repu
´blica Argentina
(CTERA, or the Argentinean Confederation of Education Workers) at the
helm, a number of unions disaffiliated from the historic union federation
Confederacio
´n General de Trabajo (GCT, or General Confederation of
Labor), which had been institutionalized under Pero
´n in the 1940s. The CTA
was born. Its objective was to create “a space for the reorganization of forces
for one hundred percent of the working class,” in contrast to the previous
system in which “seventy-five percent remain outside.”
34
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 95
To move beyond “the power of the pen,”
35
to organize workers who did not
have the ability to sign collective agreements and therefore represent one
hundred percent of the working class, the CTA had to rethink the entrenched
structure of union politics in Argentina and the prevailing understandings
about the nature of work. Firstly, the CTA began with the assertion that
workers were workers regardless of their current working status, particularly
whether they were in employment or not. A second feature related to their
relationship to exploitation. If an individual lived only from his or her labor
and not from the exploitation of others, the individual was considered a
worker. A worker was “someone that lives from their work, someone who
lives off their work, simply from their work.”
36
Such a conceptualization
enabled the inclusion of traditionally unionized sectors as well as piquetero
organizations such as Unio
´n de Trabajadores Desocupados (UTD, or
Unemployed Workers Union), pensioners’ organizations including the Centro
de Jubilados de La Matanza (Retirees Center of La Matanza) and Jubilados
del Banco Provincia (Retirees of the Provincial Bank), and organizations com-
mitted to broader issues of social justice, including Federacio
´n de Tierra,
Vivienda y Ha
´bitat (FTV, or Federation of Land, Housing, and Environment)
and Movimiento Nacional de los Chicos del Pueblo (Children’s National
Movement). (See Figure 2.)
Becoming Working-Class Subjects: AMMAR and the CTA
Despite the cessation of systematic state terror after 1983 with the fall of the
military junta, repression against sex workers continued at full pace. As well
as subjecting sex workers to routine bribes and assault, police used local provin-
cial codes to arbitrarily detain women for up to thirty days. In 1994, Elena
Reynaga––now AMMAR general secretary––and a number of other women
working on the corners of Constitucio
´n, Buenos Aires, began to meet. Their
meetings attracted attention, and repression against them intensified. Even
when they met in their homes, the police would arrive, arrest them, take them
away, and detain them in inhumane and dirty cells. Two anthropologists who
had been researching sex work in the city were struck by the intensity of the
repression and put the women in contact with a member of the public employees
union, ATE. ATE had a branch in Constitucio
´n, and the members offered the
space to women as a place to meet. Yet the police continued to target them.
Now, however, they had a degree of protection, and when the police threatened
to take away the chairs, the computers, and the contents of the office, the ATE
general secretary was intransigent: “over my dead body will they take anything
from here, this is yours now, they can’t come in here.”
37
In March 1995, following negotiations with ATE and members of the CTA,
the women were given a small office in the cellar of the CTA building. It con-
tained only some worn chairs and a barely functioning telephone. For two
years they stayed there on their own, with little attention from others in the
Central and often facing discrimination and exclusion when the women did
96 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
interact with other members of the CTA. Eventually, two men began coming
downstairs, drinking mate
´and talking to them.
38
During the course of their con-
versations, Victor de Gennero and Nestor Piccone began to provide the women
with some political education, asking them about their demands and their
Figure 2. Organizations of the CTA.
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 97
reasons for organizing. Reynaga says she was so ignorant, she did not even know
the meaning of the word “demands.” They had so little awareness of what it
meant to be in a workers’ federation, “it was like we came out of the sky.”
39
When Reynaga and her colleagues arrived at the CTA they did not arrive,
therefore, with a political program, but instead developed their political identity
through interaction with CTA compan˜eros and attendance at meetings. By
patient listening, they began to get involved. In La Plata, Martinez attended
for two years without saying a word. “I would listen and not say anything,”
she said, “until one day when I opened my mouth ... and now they can’t stop
me.”
40
Through such interactions, not only has AMMAR developed a critique
of conditions in the sex industry, but its members have also framed this within
a broader analysis of exploitation, gender discrimination, and class oppression,
linking their work and struggle to all forms of exploitation, spanning spaces from
the maquiladora and the bordello to the street. The answer to exploitation, they
argue, is not to seek to abolish industries (including the sex industry), but to give
the exploited the tools to organize themselves and to create conditions in which
all workers are free of economic and physical coercion. In light of this, AMMAR
states that it primary objective is:
That one day there are no more women that exercise this work for necessity.
41
However, as we are not owners of the truth we leave open the discussion as to
whether––in the future that we dream of––there will be women that all the
same want to do this work.
42
AMMAR thus abandons any ideological debate about the moral basis of sex
work and engages instead with a much broader and exigent political project
to change the distribution of resources and power, with the hope of enabling
workers to make real decisions over their lives and labor.
The political education CTA offered therefore went beyond simply provid-
ing the women with an understanding of class and class identity. The CTA also
explained theories and experiences of organizing and retold the history of
working class organization and labor struggle. Beyond this, the women also
learned about collectivism and comradeship: “they taught us so much about
what it means to be a collective, what it is to work in a group, the importance
of compan˜ erismo.”
43
Cooperation and Compan˜ erismo in the CTA
In 2001, AMMAR became an official member of the CTA, but internal wide-
spread support was not instantaneous, and the organization was not welcomed
with open arms by all members of the federation. Discrimination against sex
workers was the order of the day inside the CTA as well as outside, and its
inclusion tested the limits of openness.
44
Many of the federation members
thought that De Gennaro was “mad” and complained, asking, “What’s he
doing bringing prostitutes to the CTA? What the hell have they got to do
98 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
with it?”
45
Even members of CTA who were inclined to support AMMAR
experienced a tension between their ideological solidarity and a practical
desire to distance themselves from sex workers. In 2002, the Second National
AMMAR March took place in Mar del Plata, a seaside town in Buenos Aires
province. Thirty-two sex workers had been murdered over three years in the
city. All of the cases remained unresolved and had received little attention
from the state or media. AMMAR organized a march to demand freedom
from violence for sex workers and an end to impunity for the murderers.
Members of AMMAR were accompanied on the march by Asociacio
´nde
Trabajadores del Campo (ATC, or the Association of Rural Workers), Unio
´n
de Trabajadores de la Educacio
´n (UTE, or the Union of Education Workers),
and the youth movement of the CTA from La Plata and Buenos Aires.
Maghy Panno, a member of ATE, accompanied the march, but as she did so,
she realized that she harbored a number of reservations. Choosing a chaleco
(union bib) from a pile to wear during the march, she found herself insistent
on wearing the ATE vest. She wore it as it represented her place in the union
she belonged to, but it also occurred to her that although she wanted to accom-
pany the women, “it was like I needed to identify myself as not a sex worker.”
46
This conflict was not confined only to female members, seeking to avoid the
contagion of whore stigma, but was also expressed by a number of men.
47
Fabio
Basteiro, secretary general of the aeronautical union, was one of the first CTA
members to accompany the women on marches. Yet, when demonstrating in
front of the Police Department, he stayed at a distance. Although he supported
their struggle, “you were with the whores and travestis ... and even though I
went with them, I was not at the front. One couldn’t be seen to be there.”
48
However, it was not solely a sense of shame or embarrassment that blocked
CTA activists’ cooperation with AMMAR, but also a sense of uncertainty
about the new politics that it brought with it. Basteiro said he wasn’t “totally
convinced” by the argument that sex worker struggle could be included along-
side that of public employees, aeronautical workers, and others within the poli-
tics of the CTA. Similarly, Carlos Sanchez, an administrative assistant for
AMMAR, said that he too questioned the appropriateness due to prior ideo-
logical conceptions of work, but through debate and seeing the “concrete
facts of their everyday lives” he began to understand that “yes, it is work.”
49
AMMAR recognized these resistances and anxieties and turned to con-
sciousness raising inside the union, providing talks and organizing workshops
to inform members of the reasons for their struggle and to prove that they
had not “come to steal their husbands or compan˜eros.”
50
As they engaged
with the activists and spoke about their experiences, with the support of some
of the more committed members, such as De Gennero and Piccone, the
women won over more members of the CTA.
After this investment of time and labor, a decade later, in 2007, local organ-
izations of the CTA joined with AMMAR on December 1, International Sex
Workers’ Day, to celebrate the struggle to end violence against sex workers.
In Co
´rdoba, AMMAR and CTA members distributed information while
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 99
musicians and bands provided the soundtrack. Meanwhile, in La Plata, CTA
Youth, community organizations, and pensioners distributed condoms, leaflets,
and information during a street party.
In 1977, when the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo cracked open the public
space that had been shut down by the junta, the importance of public space
became institutionalized in Argentina’s contentious political repertoire. The
emergence of piquetes, the upspring of neighborhood asambleas, and the
ongoing protests, demonstrations, and street art of the Madres, the HIJOS
(Hijos por la Identidad, la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio, or Children
for Identity, Justice, Against Forgetting and Silence), and other anarchist, fem-
inist, and labor movements have further entrenched public protest as a principal
method in contention and resistance. Therefore, public events in particular
benefit from support from CTA, providing solidarity for women for whom
public protest is a complex engagement. The stigma of sex work means that
many women are unable to join protests with AMMAR, even when wearing
masks to conceal their identities. The CTA therefore has helped by providing
“feet on the ground” and enabling the women to occupy public space in a strik-
ing and meaningful way, even with a small number of people. As well as regular
presence outside police stations and provincial legislatures, nine thousand
people marched to demand justice for Sandra Cabrera, the AMMAR activist
assassinated in 2004.
51
AMMAR and the CTA have also collaborated using
other protest methods to create spectacles and attract attention. Perhaps most
effectively, AMMAR and the actors’ union organized a paraguazo (umbrella
protest), using brightly colored, artistically painted umbrellas. Although only
fifty people attended, the aesthetic tactics and novelty caught the eye of the
media: “Imagine that! The actors’ association with the sex workers, now that
was really something.”
52
AMMAR is now firmly integrated into nine branches of the CTA in cities
across Argentina. In the provinces of Entre Rı
´os, Co
´rdoba, Rio Negro, Jujuy,
Salta, Mendoza, Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and the Metropolitan city of Buenos
Aires, AMMAR has been provided with offices and social and political contacts
through integration with the local branch of the CTA. The availability of space
inside CTA buildings has enabled the establishment of a primary school which is
attended by both sex workers and their children, provided a safe place for HIV
testing and holding workshops, and offered a consistent place for women to
meet. As well as offering to provide protection, the provision of physical
space also enabled the creation of social and political networks. Such connec-
tions have been imperative in AMMAR’s achieving a number of significant vic-
tories, most importantly in terms of legal struggle. Since initially organizing
against police corruption and abuse, the repeal of articles in local provincial
codes has been at the center of AMMAR’s campaigns and objectives. In La
Plata, AMMAR has allied with the Movimiento Anti Discriminacio
´ndeLa
Matanza (MAL, or the Anti-Discrimination Movement of La Matanza),
whose members recognize the broader issues relating to the provincial codes
that are also largely used against transgender women, youth, the homeless,
100 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
and unemployed workers making their living on the street. In Mendoza, Rio
Negro, and Co
´rdoba, the official CTA representatives and other organizations
within the CTA have similarly supported campaigns to repeal the articles,
albeit generally with limited success.
The repeal of Article 45 of Provincial Law 3815 of the Codigo
Contravencionales, which penalized prostitution in Entre Rı
´os, has, however,
been AMMAR’s greatest victory to date. In 2003, CTERA union members,
lawyers in the CTA, and AMMAR began to lobby the provincial legislature
to repeal the provincial code in Entre Rı
´os. They faced strong resistance.
Evangelical pastors claimed that the repeal would sanctify sin, and the police
arrested over twenty women over one weekend in May, acting on the spurious
claim that residents in the working vicinity had called them to restore order.
When the women contacted members of the legislature to discuss the intensify-
ing repression and the effect of the codes on their well-being, the legislators
refused. When CTA members contacted them to speak about the law,
however, they agreed to meet. Without their support, Claudia Carranza,
branch secretary of AMMAR-Entre Rı
´os, believes they would have been
unable to achieve the repeal. The CTA opened doors for the women because
“for the officials, the CTA is a better word. It’s workers.”
53
When the law was finally passed in the legislature, the executive vetoed it––
though this was later overturned––and sectors of the police said their depart-
ments would refuse to respect it. Yet women now work in the city of Parana
´
and in the province of Entre Rı
´os without harassment by the state and free
from blackmail, bribes, and police assault. Many travel forty minutes on buses
from the nearby Santa Fe
´to work in Parana
´, due to the relative safety and
improved conditions that it provides. During a similarly successful campaign
to overturn the Edictos Policiales (Police Edicts) in Buenos Aires in 1996,
AMMAR formed a group called Neighbors for Peaceful Coexistence with a
number of organizations that were part of or linked to the CTA, including the
Madres de Plaza de Mayo––Linea Fundadora. As well as lobbying senators
and government officials, the group developed a strategy of direct action, mobi-
lizing group members to call police stations when women were detained.
54
In
1998 the Neighbors won the repeal of the Edictos Policiales, since which no
woman in Buenos Aires has been detained for practicing sex work. Similar
tactics to those used in the capital are now replicated across the country. On a
daily basis, CTA members are alerted when a woman is arrested, and the
police station detaining the woman soon receives phone calls from CTA repre-
sentatives ranging from concerned members to general secretaries, such as
Oscar Mengarelli in Co
´rdoba. The tactic worked, Mengarelli said, because
“when they see that there is an organization behind them, they treat them dif-
ferently, they let them go.”
55
When AMMAR activists were continually targeted for detention in Jujuy
in 2008, the branch secretary was accompanied by Anabella Yananci,
CTA-Jujuy Secretary of Human Rights, to a meeting with a number of judges
to support AMMAR’s complaint against the police.
56
Yet beyond the provincial
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 101
scale, CTA national board members have also used their positions to lend
support. In 2005, a number of women working on the streets were murdered
in Co
´rdoba, including Andrea Machado, who disappeared while working. The
state responded with apathy and indifference, and the murderers have never
been brought to justice. Alongside local CTA officials, high-profile members
of the national board traveled by bus to attend a march calling for justice for
those killed and to demonstrate their solidarity with sex workers. Three years
later, on April 12, 2008, Carlos Garcia was convicted of the murder of
Andrea Rosa Machado. The case was a landmark. No one before had been con-
victed for the murder of a sex worker in Argentina. During the trial, Hugo
Yasky, general secretary of CTA, traveled ten hours from Buenos Aires to
Co
´rdoba to attend the sentencing alongside the secretaries of AMMAR. His
presence was intended to “leave no one ... in any doubt. They are our com-
rades, we support them, we love them, and we will defend them to the
death[.]”
57
Although not a wealthy organization, CTA has provided a series of
resources of which the women have been able to take advantage, including
offices, schools, education, computers, and social events. In Buenos Aires,
AMMAR has pooled resources with CTERA, the Movimiento Territorial de
Liberacio
´n (MTL), and CTA youth to develop a microenterprise, making
school uniforms for workers seeking to find work, change occupation, or sup-
plement their income. In addition to material resources, they have also shared
a variety of different knowledge and skills. CTA activists assist with technical
knowledge, building websites and designing AMMAR leaflets, and have pro-
vided media training to counteract some of the journalistic practices that
make the women vulnerable to misrepresentation. Journalists in the CTA
have offered the women advice on managing the media, teaching them selec-
tion, negotiation, and presentation techniques. All these skills proved extremely
important, Reynaga said, “because one minute of television is worth a march of
five thousand people.”
58
In addition to educating the women in dealing with the media, members of
the CTA have also enabled access to it. In the initial moments of AMMAR’s
entry to the CTA, Nestor Piccone would insolently slip news items about the
organization into the internal CTA newsletter, without the consent of the
central committee and often to its chagrin.
59
Unions such as El Cı
´rculo
Sindical de la Prensa y la Comunicacio
´ndeCo
´rdoba (CISPREN, or the
Co
´rdoban Press and Communication Union Circle) have similarly helped
place stories about AMMAR into local and national newspapers and gain atten-
tion and respect for the women. AMMAR is now capable of gaining publicity of
its own accord, most strikingly demonstrated by the photograph of Elena
Reynaga talking at the International AIDS conference in Mexico, on the
front page of Cları
´n, one of the most important Argentine daily newspapers,
in August 2008.
Membership in the CTA has thus been invaluable to AMMAR not only in
terms of the provision of material and political space, but also in relation to
102 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
institutional support, respect, and recognition. It has gained them access to
powerful individuals and spaces, including legislatures, bishops, and local and
national senators. This not only enables them to translate complex legal
systems and to explain the idiosyncrasies of particular processes and conven-
tions, but also lends institutional weight. However, a number of problems
remain. AMMAR branches continue to depend on sympathetic figures at the
provincial scale. In the conservative city of Santiago del Estero, despite
having been allocated an office within the CTA, AMMAR activists were
asked to leave by members of the local organization who were unwilling to
cooperate with the women. Moreover, some argue more broadly that the
CTA has been weakened by the defection of the FTV from the CTA executive
and by disagreements within the leadership over support for the Peronist
Kirchner governments.
60
Further, the CTA remains limited in its ability to
provide full union services to members. At the time of writing, the CTA is
still engaged in a struggle for union status, and the CGT remains the only con-
federation with Gremial status, which is not simply of symbolic importance, but
continues to deny it the right to distribute welfare and benefits payments.
Reciprocity: AMMAR’s Contribution
AMMAR has persuaded the CTA of the appropriateness of their inclusion not
only through dialogue but also with concrete political commitment. AMMAR
branch secretaries have taken on responsibilities as elected members of the
CTA, often providing provincial gender and equality secretaries, and Reynaga
is the minutes secretary of the national board. At the trial of Menendez, a
brutal general of the military junta, members of AMMAR-Co
´rdoba stood
shoulder to shoulder with the general secretary of the CTA, members of CTA
Youth, and the provincial board, as they demanded justice for the disappeared.
AMMAR has led educational campaigns within the CTA on HIV/AIDS and has
trained members of the CTA to be “health multipliers,” who inform and educate
others about sexual health, reciprocating the educative process and embedding
sexual health as an important health issue for all workers. In Salta, activists from
AMMAR have cooperated with the Federacion de Tierra y Vivienda (FTV, or
Federation of Land and Housing) and Movimiento Territorial de Liberacion
(MTL, or Territorial Movement for Freedom) to build cooperative housing.
As a result, although in the early days support for the women depended on
strong and supportive individuals in the organization, AMMAR’s acts of soli-
darity have won them a broader base of respect among the compan˜ eros of the
CTA and entrenched their status as political allies and compan˜ eras.
Perhaps most importantly, the inclusion of AMMAR has also produced
new forms of solidarity in the CTA. Although CTA’s broad definition of
workers was necessary to enable AMMAR’s entry, its presence has clarified
and fortified this conceptualization. Some CTA activists stated that it helped
them open their minds and leave behind the dogmatism of what constituted a
job, while others stated that it had helped them regain an enriched sense of
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 103
solidarity.
61
Many members also said the incorporation of these workers had
played an important definitive role in reinforcing their understanding of how
to organize, drawing more clearly the conception around which the organization
is based and clarifying its political position in relation to labor and class identity.
Even activists with long histories of left wing activism and in progressive organ-
izations told me, “I have a conception of class ...and I tell you, they have helped
me to rediscover this question of class, who is part of the class.”
The inclusion of sex workers has also transformed some elements of union
culture. CTA members testified that AMMAR had reinforced the organization’s
sense of openness and belonging and challenged many of its machista attitudes.
Megarelli expressed how his intolerance about homosexuality and gender iden-
tity had been challenged through the arrival of sex workers and that he now
recognized a broader range of people “with whom you can walk together
toward this dream of transforming society.”
62
By challenging exclusionary
homophobic and sexist attitudes in the union, the inclusion of sex workers
opened up space for individuals and groups that had previously been excluded
or may have felt uncomfortable, as well as for other workers with atypical
relations or those whose labor is not generally recognized as work. Alejandra
Angriman, CTA gender secretary, reflected that the experience of AMMAR
had given them a greater sense of strategy. Using the example of the carto-
n˜ eros,
63
whom the CTA are just beginning to organize, she reasserted the
right to organize as the foundational principle of the CTA. Beyond that, she
said, “If you start to argue if it’s work, or it’s not work, then you start to compli-
cate it.”
64
Conclusion: Lessons from Argentina
AMMAR has decriminalized sex work in the province of Entre Rı
´os, estab-
lished police accords in Buenos Aires, and developed a number of services
for sex workers. The discourse of sex work is increasingly displacing that of pros-
titution in the mass media and political culture, and AMMAR activists have
seats on provincial HIV/AIDS programs and a voice in national policy
making. Thus, the tendency of commentators to find or predict failure in sex
worker organizing seems premature. Such analysis has excluded the most suc-
cessful examples of organizing in the Global South and is based on approaches
that tend to ignore the actual structures and labor process of sex work, often
reflecting ambivalence about including sex workers in labor struggles and organ-
izations. Most of all, such analyses have often relied on outdated, static models
of industrial unionism that are now frequently inappropriate not only for sex
workers, but for a large proportion of workers.
65
The provision of material and symbolic space within the CTA has been
essential for these achievements, by sharing resources, institutionalizing
AMMAR, and engendering connections with other actors and organizations
around issues of social, economic, and political justice. Perhaps most impor-
tantly, it has supported their recognition as workers, provided legitimation,
104 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
and enabled access to spaces they were unable to enter alone. It was the broad
definition of work and workers advocated by CTA that enabled CTA to inte-
grate AMMAR into the confederation. In defining and embracing women in
the sex industry as workers, the CTA prioritized their right to organize and
engage in immediate concrete struggles above squeamishness, embarrassment,
and abstract and arduous debates about the status of sex work.
66
This relationship reflects a growing trend in the Global South, but it
remains one that unions and labor movements in the Global North have been
slower and more reticent to take up. The CTA has challenged the ossified the-
ories and practices of eligibility for union membership that have persisted in
many contemporary labor movements and that continue to preclude revitaliza-
tion and growth. It has moved beyond a fixation on formal contracts, fixed work-
places, and direct relationships with employers as indicators not only of
eligibility for the labor movement but also of organizability. As work becomes
increasingly precarious, informal, casual, contingent, and “non-standard,”
there is an increased urgency for recognizing new successful and imaginative
strategies of organizing and collective action to reach such workers, such as
those exhibited by AMMAR and the CTA. Yet achieving this partnership
between AMMAR and the CTA has required a significant degree of openness
and flexibility, not only within the organizational structure, but also in the minds
of other unionists, as well as considerable efforts by sex workers to educate the
labor movement and raise awareness about their struggle.
This essay begins to chart a hidden history of organizing in the sex industry
that has largely been absent from working-class women’s histories. Sex workers
in Argentina and beyond are making their histories visible through political
action, often in the face of extreme and violent repression. It is unions’ role
as representatives of the working class to develop organizations, structures,
and approaches that can include, integrate, and foster solidarity with sex
workers, but as labor theorists and historians, it our job to revive these histories
from the margins and inscribe them firmly into the narratives of working-class
activism.
NOTES
1. I use the word “prostitute” here so as not to use anachronistic terms.
2. Osvaldo Bayer, Poetas y Putas (Buenos Aires, 2008), 10.
3. Bayer, Poetas y Putas, 10.
4. To frame these debates, see Leah F. Vosko, “Representing Informal Economy Workers:
Emerging Global Strategies and Their Lessons for North American Unions,” in Sex of Class:
Women Transforming American Labor, ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble (Ithaca, 2007), 272 – 292;
Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities on the Edge of the Dream (Ithaca, 2006).
5. For recent contributions to this literature, see Bob Carter, “Trade Union Organizing and
Renewal: A Response to de Turberville,” Work, Employment and Society 20 (2006): 415–426;
Andy Cumbers, “Genuine Renewal or Pyrrhic Victory? The Scale Politics of Trade Union
Recognition in the UK,” Antipode 37 (2005): 116–138; Jane Wills “Community Unionism
and Trade Union Renewal in the UK: Moving Beyond the Fragments at Last?” Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers 26 (2002): 465– 483; Graham Taylor and Andrew
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 105
Mathers, “Social Partner or Social Movement? European Integration and Trade Union
Renewal in Europe,” Labor Studies Journal 27 (2002): 93 – 108.
6. For exceptions, see Elizabeth Hill, “Women in the Indian Informal Economy: Collective
Strategies for Work Life Improvement and Development,” Work, Employment and Society 15
(2001): 443–464; Jonathan Gershuny, “La economia informal: su papel en la sociedad postin-
dustrial,” in Solidaridad y produccion informal de recursos, ed. Rene R Millan (Mexico City,
1994), 107–128; Sylvia Chant and Carolyn Pedwell, Women, Gender and the Informal
Economy: An Assessment of ILO Research and Suggested Ways Forward (Geneva, 2008);
Aditi Kapoor, “The SEWA Way: Shaping Another Future for Informal Labour,” Futures 39
(2007): 554–568.
7. Vosko, “Representing Informal Economy Workers”; Dan Gallin, “Organizing in the
Informal Economy,” in Unprotected Labour: What Role for Unions in the Informal
Economy?, ed. International Labor Organisation (Geneva, 2002), 127; Dan Gallin,
“Propositions on Trade Unions and Informal Employment in Times of Globalisation,”
Antipode 33 (2001): 531–549; Lourdes Beneria, “Shifting the Risk: New Employment
Patterns, Informalization, and Women’s Work,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and
Society 15 (2001): 27–53; Helen Safa, “Economic Restructuring and gender subordination,”
Latin American Perspectives 22 (1995): 32– 50; Marilyn Carr and Martha Alter Chen,
“Globalization and the Informal Economy: How Global Trade and Investment Impact on
the Working Poor,” WIEGO (2001), www.wiego.org/papers/carrchenglobalization.pdf,
accessed July 17, 2009; Martha Alter Chen, Renana Jhabvala, and Frances Lund,
“Supporting Workers in the Informal Economy: A Policy Framework Paper for ILO Task
Force on the Informal Economy,” WIEGO (2002), http://www.wiego.org/papers/policypaper.
pdf, accessed July 17, 2009.
8. Such ossification ignores long and historical debates over the parameters of what con-
stitutes work and who constitutes a worker. See Dorothy Sue Cobble and Leah Vosco,
“Historical Perspectives on Representing Nonstandard Workers,” in Nonstandard Work: The
Nature and Challenges of Changing Employment Arrangements, eds. Francoise Carre
´,
Marianne A. Ferber, Lonnie Golden, and Stephen A. Herzenberg (Ithaca, 2000).
9. The term “factory paradigm” is from Dorothy Sue Cobble, “More Intimate Unions” in
Intimate Labors, eds. Eileen Boris and Rachel Parrenas (Stanford, forthcoming); Jane Wills,
“The Geography of Union Organising in Low-Paid Service Industries in the UK: Lessons
from the T&G’s Campaign to Unionise the Dorchester Hotel, London,” Antipode 37 (2005):
139–159; Cumbers, “Genuine Renewal or Pyrrhic Victory?” Gallin, “Organizing in the
Informal Economy.”
10. Swasti Mitter and Sheila Rowbotham, Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of
Economic Organization Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First (London and
New York, 1994).
11. Annie Devenish and Caroline Skinner, “Organising Workers in the Informal
Economy: The Experience of the Self Employed Women’s Union, 1994 – 2004” (2004), http://
www.gdrc.org/icm/wind/wind-women-is.html, accessed July 18, 2009.
12. Devenish and Skinner, “Organising Workers in the Informal Economy.”
13. Pamela J. Downe, “Laughing When it Hurts: Humour and Violence in the Lives
of Costa Rican Prostitutes,” Women’s Studies International Forum 22 (1999): 63– 78;
Jo Doezema and Kamala Kempadoo, eds. Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and
Redefinition (New York, 1998).
14. Gail Pheterson, “Introduction” in A Vindication of the Rights of Whores, ed. Gail
Pheterson (Seattle, 1992).
15. The term “sex work” was coined by Carol Leigh, a sex worker activist, in 1978 but
gained broader usage through the 1980s and 1990s. Its emphasis on work seeks to dislodge
the negative connotations and stigma attached to “prostitution” and assert parity with other
forms of labor. See also Mellissa Hope Ditmore, Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work
(Greenwood, 2006), 502.
16. Melissa Hope Ditmore, “In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize,” in The Affective Turn:
Theorising the Social, eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham, 2007); “The
Sonagachi Project: A Global Model for Community Development,” Horizons Report (2002),
http://www.comminit.com/en/node/116130/36, accessed June 14, 2009.
17. P.R. Khandagale, T.N. Sevekari, M. D’Souza, S. Pawar S, and I.S. Gilada, “Abstract No.
E12010,” International Conference on AIDS July 11–16 (Bangkok, 2004), 15.
106 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
18. GMB is Britain’s General Union. These initials were adopted as the official title in
1989. For the historically minded, the G derives from General, the M from Municipal, and
the B from Boilermakers, but GMB is not an abbreviation for these titles.
http://www.gmb.org.uk/Templates/Internal.asp?NodeID¼90332&int1stParentNodeID¼89645&
int2ndParentNodeID¼89647, accessed July 22, 2009.
19. Valerie Jenness, Making it Work: The Prostitutes’ Rights Movement in Perspective
(New York, 1998), 13. In the 1990s a flurry of material was produced concerning sex worker
organizing, much of it emerging from the organizations and representatives themselves. The
collection of pieces on global sex workers’ organizations in Kempadoo and Doezema’s excellent
“Global Sex Worker” include articles from organizations in Ecuador, Japan, the United States,
South Africa, Mexico, India, and Suriname, providing an important platform for the voices of
sex worker organizations.
20. Alongside trade unions, a number of other collectives and outreach organizations exist.
Some of these focus more on service provision and welfare, although some also offer empow-
erment programs. Other organizations not included: a wide variety of Sex Worker Outreach
Projects (SWOP) across the United States; in Australia, Global Alliance Against Trafficking
in Women; EUROPAP – a network across Europe; Anti-Trafficking Centre (ATC), Belgrade.
21. Jenness, Making It Work; Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution (Melbourne, 1997).
22. Ron Weitzer, “Prostitutes’ Rights in the United States: The Failure of a Movement,”
Sociological Quarterly 32 (1991): 23– 41.
23. Jackie West, “Prostitution: Collectives and the Politics of Regulation,” Gender, Work
and Organization 7 (2001): 106– 118.
24. Weitzer, “Prostitutes’ Rights”; Gregor Gall, Sex Worker Union Organizing: An
International Study (Basingstoke, 2006); Gregor Gall, “Sex Worker Unionisation: An
Exploratory Study of Emerging Colletive Organisation,” Industrial Relations Journal 38
(2007): 70–88; Phil Hubbard, Sex and the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West
(Aldershot, 1998); Kempadoo and Doezema, “Global Sex Worker.”
25. Many authors have asserted the difficulties faced by sex workers in their interactions
with trade unions, though none are clearly detailed. See for example Jo Bindman,
“Redefining Prostitution as Sex Work on the International Agenda” (1997), http://www.
walnet.org/csis/papers/redefining.html, accessed May 11, 2009.
26. Pheterson, A Vindication of the Rights of Whores,7.
27. The Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union have recently begun blogging about their experi-
ences and campaigns. The information can be found at http://www.blogger.com/profile/
10868366661389533397, accessed May 10, 2009.
28. AMMAR, “Lo que hacemos,” http://www.ammar.org.ar/loquehacemos.htm, accessed
March 10, 2008.
29. Elena Reynaga, interview by author, Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 19, 2008.
30. Sylvia Chant and Nikki Craske, Gender in Latin America (London, 2003); Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiago, Chile, 1990), cited in Mitter and
Rowbotham, Dignity and Daily Bread; Marcela Cerrutti, “Economic Reform, Structural
Adjustment and Female Labor Force Participation in Buenos Aires, Argentina,” World
Development 28 (2000): 879– 891; Paul Chatterton, “Making Autonomous Geographies:
Argentina’s Popular Uprising and the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados
(Unemployed Workers Movement),” Geoforum 36 (2005): 545– 561; Joseph Stiglitz,
Globalization and its Discontents (London, 2005).
31. David Lier and Kristian Stokke note a similar precarization of state workers in South
Africa, where community unionism has also flourished to account for such conditions, in
“Maximum working class unity? Challenges to local social movement unionism in Cape
Town,” Antipode 38 (2006): 802– 24.
32. Adriana Marshal and Laura Perelman, “Why ‘union revitalization’ is not an issue in
Argentina? Labour institutions and the effectiveness of traditional trade union recruitment strat-
egies,” paper presented at the twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the International Working
Party on Labour Market Segmentation, Porto, September 8–10, 2008); Victoria Murillo,
“Union Politics, Market-Orientated Reforms, and the Reshaping of Argentine Corporatism,”
in Douglas A. Chalmers, Carlos M. Vilas, Katherine Roberts Hite, Scott B. Martin, Kerianne
Piester, and Monique Segarra, The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America (Oxford, 1997).
33. Central de Trabajadores Argentinos, “Debate para la organizacion de los trabaja-
dores,” http://www.cta.org.ar/institucional/historia.shtml, accessed June 10, 2009.
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement 107
34. Osmar Zapata, interview by author, Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 18, 2008.
35. Fabio Basteiro, interview by author, Buenos Aires, Argentina, January 14, 2009.
36. Zapata, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
37. Reynaga, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
38. Mate
´is an herbal tea-like drink made from yerba mate
´leaves, infused with hot water,
and drunk through a metal tube known as a bombilla. It is used across all social settings, pro-
fessional and informal. The cebador prepares the mate
´in a special cup and passes it, one by one,
to the occupants of the room, who each pass the cup back to the cebador when they have fin-
ished. Communal use of the bombilla between members of the group indicates that significant
meaning is attached to sharing mate
´in terms of respect and belonging. Many of the women
expressed particular attachment to drinking mate
´with other groups, as many had had experi-
ences of mate
´being withdrawn from them when they were identified as sex workers.
39. Reynaga, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
40. Susana Martinez, interview by author, La Plata, Argentina, April 24, 2008.
41. AMMAR, http://www.ammar.org.ar/sindicato.htm, accessed November 10, 2008.
42. AMMAR, http://www.ammar.org.ar/sindicato.htm, accessed June 9, 2009.
43. Martinez, interview by author, La Plata, 2008.
44. Reynaga, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
45. Zapata, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
46. Maghy Panno, interview by author, La Plata, Argentina, July 18, 2008.
47. Gayle Pheterson argues in The Prostitution Prism (Amsterdam, 1996), 30, that “whore
stigma” discredits not only women who sell sex, but any women who transgress normalized fem-
inine behavior, particularly concerning chastity and passivity. In this context, it also appears to
dissuade women from association with sex workers for fear of attracting the label.
48. Basteiro, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2009.
49. Carlos Sanchez, interview by author, Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 3, 2008.
50. Reynaga, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
51. Kate Hardy, “Sex Workers Unite,” Developments 43 (2008), http://www.developments.
org.uk/downloads/Developments_Issue43.pdf, accessed February 2, 2008.
52. Reynaga, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
53. Claudia Carranza, interview by author, Parana
´, Argentina, March 1, 2007.
54. Reynaga, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
55. Oscar Mengerelli, interview by author, Co
´rdoba, Argentina, April 10, 2008.
56. AMMAR, AMMAR Boletin, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
57. Mengerelli, interview by author, Co
´rdoba, 2008.
58. Reynaga, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
59. Carlos Sanchez, interview by author, Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 3, 2008.
60. Sebastian Etchemendy and Ruth Berins Collier, “Down but Not Out: Union
Resurgence and Segmented Neocorporatism in Argentina (2003–2007),” Politics and Society
35 (2007): 363–401.
61. Sanchez, interview by author, Buenos Aires, 2008.
62. Mengerelli, interview by author, Co
´rdoba, 2008.
63. Carton˜ eros collect cardboard (carton) and other recyclable material from discarded
rubbish piles and sell it to recyclers for a small fee. It is estimated that there are around
thirty thousand carton˜ eros in Buenos Aires alone, who turned to the practice following the
high levels of unemployment throughout the 1990s and the economic crisis of 2001. Almost
half are estimated to be children. See Nicole Hill, “Backstory: Lives Recycled in Argentina,”
CS Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0125/p20s01-woam.html, accessed July 10, 2009.
64. Alejandra Angriman, interview by author, Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 14, 2008.
65. Dan Gallin, “Propositions on Trade Unions and Informal Employment” 533. Dorothy
Sue Cobble, Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership (New York, 1993); Vosko,
“Representing Informal Economy Workers.”
66. Such as those currently occurring in the British trade union movement.
108 ILWCH, 77, Spring 2010
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