Precarising Formality: Understanding Current Labour Developments in Chile
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than forty years ago, the Chilean economy led the way in a process of flexibilising and privatising a wide range of areas: finance, pensions, education, work and so on. In 1990, with the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chile continued to pursue neo-liberal economic policies and maintained the liberal conception of collective labour rights (imposed in 1979). By 2017, labour informality in Chile was among the lowest in South America. Taking these two factors into account (labour regulation that benefited business spending cuts and only “moderate” informality), this article explores the following questions: What are the features of current forms of labour formality in a paradigmatic neo-liberal context like Chile’s, and what space does informality occupy? Is labour formality far removed from the kind of vulnerability usually associated with informality? How have formality and informality related to each other in Chile in recent years? We address these questions with mixed methods: a literature review, development of a conceptual proposal, processing of statistical data and case studies. We conclude that a particular kind of labour formality currently prevails in Chile, which we call precarising formality. This concept disputes the traditional idea of labour formality, both because labour regulations lack substance and because they are ineffective, which is, of course, politically produced. We consider it precarising based on an analysis of multiple dimensions of precarity in contexts of theoretical labour formality. The article also describes forms of struggle and resistance by workers’ organisations that protest against capitalist action from within this new configuration of labour. KEYWORDS: formality; informality; labour precarity; Chile
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".