The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, …

This article explores the relationship between precarity as a labor condition and precarity as an ontological experience in the lives of urban poor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The focus is on a garbage dump on the outskirts of the city where thousands of Rio’s poor, known as catadores, reclaim recyclables for a living. Attending to cyclic moments in which these workers leave the dump for other…