A empresarização do comércio popular em São Paulo: trabalho, empreendedorismo e formalização excludente

Abstract

This thesis describes and analyses the recent transformations in the informal commerce in São Paulo, especially with regard to the changes in the work for the agents involved. Given that the term “informal commerce” evokes a myriad of work situations and various processes of circulation, I indicate here the specific segment of this universe with which I developed research: they are traders in enclosed spaces, especially in the so-called "Feirinha da Madrugada" and in the new arcades and low-cost shopping centers in Brás region. Based on the ethnographic observation of the daily work of a group of traders, interviews and the monitoring of news about popular commerce in the last years, I tried to analyse the meanings and effects of the new regulation strategies of this market. I discuss these transformations mobilizing the idea of "enterprisation" of the informal commerce, framing in this notion the strategies of rearrangement of these commercial activities under the business logic, which have transformed the spaces, the forms of regulation and even the conduct, the perceptions and expectations of the subjects. The enterprisation of these markets has also made the engagement of other workers' profiles more plausible. Many of them left formal jobs, in a context of objective and symbolic precariousness of the wage relation. I argue that these informal trade reordering strategies have been promoted through a double narrative, responding to both the interests of economic exploitation and the discourse against certain illegalities and formalizing these activities via entrepreneurial logic. However, having seen the exclusionary effects of this formalization, there has been a kind of labour gentrification in these markets.