Migration and Trafficking of Persons for Labor Exploitation in the Textile Workshops of Buenos Aires under Neoliberalism

The Social Recognition of Slave Labor in Buenos Aires

During the 1990s, in a context characterized by labor deregulation, flexibilization, poverty, and unemployment, immigrant workers from bordering countries, especially Bolivia and Paraguay, who came to Argentina were socially recognized, in a context of growing xenophobia and racism, as a “dangerous sector” occupying “foreign jobs” and therefore as people who may be detained or deported (Betrisey, 2000). At the same time, following a line of productivist neoliberal rhetoric, immigrant workers were sometimes considered “dangerous sectors” to be converted into “necessary” additions to the national labor market through informal and low-wage employment in construction, services, retail, etc., that Argentines do not want. In addition, the “entrepreneurial character” of some immigrants in the commercial sector, prestigious for a set of values including courage, risk-taking, and innovation, became a moral and economic model for participation in the neoliberal capitalist system.

The protests of the social movements mentioned and unions such as the Seamstresses’ Union managed to change the hegemonic perception of workplaces, especially in the textile sector, where both employers and workers are immigrants (Bolivian, Paraguayan, Korean), presenting them as dominated by slave labor and emphasizing their terrible working conditions. The concept of “slave labor” they used is associated with subjection to servitude or forced labor (work exacted under the threat of some penalty) contemplated by international treaties (International Labor Organization, United Nations). In particular, “slave labor” in the textile workshops is linked with physical or sexual violence, confinement or isolation, debt servitude, withholding of wages or refusal to pay them, confiscation of identity documents, or threats of reporting to the police.

In this connection, the interest of the country’s principal media in slavery was aroused by the death in March 2006 of six persons, four of them children, in a fire in a textile workshop at 1269 Luis Viale Street in the Caballito neighborhood of the city. This event launched a media frenzy in which testimonies of those involved, politicians, and authorized specialists were circulated along with a particular way of perceiving and representing immigrants. While the term “slavery” was widely used in the journalistic accounts denouncing the precarious working conditions, it was associated with the terms “illegal” and “undocumented” and the possession of certain cultural attributes of rural Bolivians (“submissive,” “quiet,” “ignorant”) that served to explain the “disadvantages” of immigrant workers (Rivas and Cartechini, 2008).

As the journalistic and social restlessness around the forms of “slavery” in the workshops increased, representatives of some political institutions of the city of Buenos Aires and the nation such as the city’s Ministry of Production and Management of the Protection of Labor and the federal Department of Human Rights generated judicial investigations, staff resignations, the recruitment and training of new labor inspectors, and the immediate closure of other clandestine workshops. These measures seem to have had more to do with controlling a press critical of the passivity of most of the governing politicians (administration and opposition) in the face of payments of “kickbacks” by business owners to labor inspectors and police (Página/12, April 1, 2006; La Nación, April 1, 2006; Clarín, April 29, 2006) than with reversing the conflictive social relations involved.

In 2008 the Argentine government presided over by Cristina Fernández Kirchner (Justicialist Party) ratified the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, and the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea, and Air (Law 25.632). In addition, the smuggling of persons for multiple reasons, among them sexual or labor exploitation, became a crime in the Argentine Penal Code, following the main guidelines of these protocols. Section 140 of the Penal Code already provided that “those who reduce a person to servitude or other similar condition and who receive someone in such a condition and maintain it shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years.”

In turn, the Unidad Fiscal de Asistencia en Secuestros Extorsivos y Trata de Personas (Fiscal Unit for Assistance in Extortion, Kidnapping, and Trafficking of Persons—UFASE) of the Attorney General’s Office was created to initiate investigations on the trafficking of persons, particularly for sexual exploitation. Offices for the rescue of persons affected by the crime of trafficking were set up to guarantee the efficacy of the Ministry of Justice, Security, and Human Rights, including the programs for victims of the National Department of Children, Adolescents, and the Family and the Federal Police’s Division of Trafficking of Persons. ⁶

Legal Language and the Trafficking of Persons

In the framework of judicial institutions, specialized personnel (lawyers, judges, prosecutors) are charged with organizing, according to codified forms, the public face of the social problem of trafficking of persons for labor exploitation and providing solutions in terms of formal rules consistent with a doctrine perceived as independent of immediate conflicts (Bourdieu, 2001). Thus the UFASE produced the first reports of judicial investigation using journalistic documentation and legal files in cases that were not referenced as “trafficking,” allowing for the testimony of various social actors (police, social workers) as experts and the presentation of scientific data (numbers, graphics, tables) that constitute a comfortable framework for political and judicial understanding. In general terms, the interpretation of this phenomenon follows the guidelines of the international organizations and establishes a clear definition of “trafficking” as a problem of illegal migration. In this connection, without breaking from the global discourse, the first reports emphasized “border,” “irregular migration,” and “vulnerability.”

The 2008 UFASE report mentions that the provinces of Misiones, Corrientes, Salta, Jujuy, Chacho, and Formosa, adjacent to Paraguay, Bolivia, and Uruguay, are conducive to the trafficking of persons and crime of other kinds. Despite the rapprochement of migration law and the principles of human rights, recognizing the right to migrate and legitimizing the presence of the “regional or border immigrant” in terms of equal rights with nationals, border zones in this new context came to be considered, as they were during the military dictatorship and the successive democratic governments, as “hot spots” where everyday practices linked to the crossing of international bridges turned into dangerous situations and were therefore subject to control. A border control official is quoted in the report (UFASE, 2008: 24) as follows:

The officials interviewed expressed concern about the large number of undocumented persons in the region, since the province was not applying Decree 90/09 on late registration for legalization. The problem of lack of adequate controls of border crossings in the “dry” and border “mirror” cities such as La Quiaca (Argentine Republic) and Villazón (Republic of Bolivia) make it extremely difficult to control the prevention or detection of crime.

At the same time, the crime of trafficking for labor exploitation hides another crime, that of “irregular migration”: “Migration irregularity is extremely sensitive to exploitation, and even when a typical element of trafficking is not proven the crime of migration probably is, with the advantage that, in contrast to Law No. 12.331, these figures are also under federal jurisdiction” (Procuración General de la Nación, 2011: 11). In this case, the existence of an offense against the state is assumed, making all the sectors involved guilty and therefore punishable. A process of stigmatization is thus established through a widespread distrust of immigrants, a product of a scheme of state thinking whereby their presence, whether accepted or denounced, requires constant justification and the possibility of expulsion is always present. This scheme shows a naturalization of state thinking and the classification of foreigners who violate the rules of good conduct, morality, and public order (Sayad, 2010: 392).

In the framework of social representations of public actors, the immigrant embodies otherness par excellence, because he or she always represents another “culture,” has low social and economic status, and comes from a country that occupies a subordinate position on the international chessboard. On the basis of this differentiation, relating to national origin and therefore political in nature, the identification of immigrant status with the vulnerability that is imposed on most immigrants is unyielding (Procuración General de la Nación, 2011: 11):

It is pertinent in this regard, as stated by the United Nations General Assembly in its resolution on “Protection of Migrants,” to bear in mind the situation of vulnerability in which migrants frequently find themselves due to, among other things, the fact that they do not live in their states of origin and the difficulties they encounter because of differences in language, customs and culture, economic and social difficulties, and the obstacles to returning to their home states faced by undocumented migrants or those in an irregular situation.

The notion of “vulnerability” simplifies these sectors’ heterogenic social reality and reinterprets it is such a way as to reduce them to the categories of international human rights (Warren, 2007), passive victims of outside forces and relations. This homogeneous view of “immigrants” as vulnerable corresponds to a superficial and problematic view that reproduces stereotypical discourses, ignores the subjective dimension, and eliminates from the debate any reference to the conditions of capitalist production that are responsible for the emergence of these social sectors in labor contexts such as the aforementioned textile workshops.

Textile workshops are usually owned by Bolivians, Chinese, or Koreans, and family, friendship, and neighborhood ties are important for the recruitment of labor from their home countries. The employers themselves and their fellow countrymen or family members are charged with doing this recruiting. ⁷ In turn, the system is ordinarily supported by state actors who denounce the workers themselves and their advocates while paying significant bribes to border officials, police, labor inspectors, and others to facilitate their passage across the border and keeping workers under degraded working conditions. Instead of developing labor benefits in the workshop, the owner pays for the transport of those recruited from their places of origin and allows them to reside in the houses where the work is carried out, submitting their daily lives to extreme vigilance and long workdays (keeping their documents, allowing them to go out sporadically or not at all, controlling their production, and overworking them). The long hours (14 hours or longer) have serious health consequences (weakness, lung ailments, etc.). In many cases the employer is not obliged to pay his relative or acquaintance a wage, justifying this in terms of the debt owed for transport and lodging. In other cases, explicit economic contractual agreements exist whereby the pay rate may be stipulated monthly or after a certain delay (see Buechler, 2004, on a similar process in São Paulo).

Without diminishing the importance of the relations of power in which immigrants find themselves or the allegations of various agencies in the Argentine context, I shall point to the way in which some Bolivian women textile workers have initiated rebellious action to improve their living conditions and relieve their oppression.

Mónica (35 years old, mother of two), who is currently a seamstress in La Alameda, came to Buenos Aires eight years ago. She had formerly lived in La Paz with her husband, with whom she worked eight hours a day in a sewing workshop. After leaving that job to engage in peddling clothes, she was invited by her husband’s aunt, who lived in Buenos Aires and had a textile workshop in the city, to work with her. By that time she had had her first son, and she and her husband made the decision to move “without giving it much thought,” since debts and lack of money were pressing daily problems. The aunt had promised to pay for the trip to Buenos Aires, to be paid back once they were working.

After a long wait in the border city of Salvador Mazza, the recruits boarded a bus headed for Buenos Aires. On their arrival at the bus station in Retiro, Buenos Aires, the aunt was waiting for them and took them to the house that operated as the workshop—a big old house with many rooms in which beds and domestic necessities were mixed with textile machinery, clothing, etc. When they had settled in, the aunt had assigned Mónica domestic chores (cooking for the group of workers and her children, cleaning the workshop) and sewing duties on a recta (an industrial sewing machine) with her husband. After working for a month from Monday through Saturday from seven in the morning until the following dawn, neither Mónica nor her husband had received the stipulated wages. When she demanded the money from the aunt, she was assigned some “vouchers” for 10 or 20 Argentine pesos (US$2–4) carefully recorded in a notebook to be deducted from a wage that would never materialize. Mónica realized that nothing that had been promised them would be delivered. In addition, her desire to leave the place increased as a direct consequence of the effect of these living conditions on her little son: “I realized I had to leave there because of my son; he wasn’t responsible for our problems. I could see my little son beside the machine crying, and they didn’t let me see to him. She would give me a look [she made an angry face] and tell me I had to finish, we charged by the piece.” The impossibility of finding other jobs and the pressure of family ties to the relative who has “done you the favor of giving you work” kept Mónica from demanding better conditions, especially without having obtained a residence card. In most cases, workers without papers quickly learn that this limits their freedom.

Mónica took advantage of Sundays, her only day off from work, to plan for leaving the place by appealing to other relatives. One Sunday she went out with her little son for a walk in the neighborhood. They came to a large plaza and sat down to rest, and there they ran into a cousin who had worked for the aunt. When she described her situation, he offered to help her find another job and a place for her and her husband and son to live. Mónica wanted to take advantage of this opportunity and set about trying to persuade her husband to leave his aunt’s workshop. She used all kinds of arguments, pointing to the deception they had suffered and the working conditions and highlighting the fact that this was no place to raise a child and they should look for something better. Painfully conscious of their social position, she considered her husband’s agreeing to leave the aunt’s workshop a great triumph despite the fact that the labor conditions in the new workshop proved to be similar.

In general, the operation of these workshops is based on control over both women and men. Owners and their relatives or other supervisors control time, movements, and production down to the smallest detail. In the case of Mónica, the control extended beyond the workday and affected her domestic life. Despite her formal acceptance of these norms, there was a moment when she took advantage of an opportunity to change the situation: “I endured and did what I was told, but as soon as I could I left there. . . . I knew the people here [in La Alameda]; I came to the dining room, and that’s how things began.”

A similar situation, characterized by precariousness, suffering, and control, was described by Ana (47 years old, mother of four), another seamstress in La Alameda. She had arrived in Buenos Aires from Bolivia 12 years before, recruited by a contractor who earlier had recruited her 17-year-old daughter:

Someone from the village was taking people to Buenos Aires to work in the workshops, and he asked my husband and me. He said we would make lots of money in a short time, some US$3,000 . . . but I didn’t want to. My children were little. . . . I worked in sewing on the recta. We were going through tough times. My husband wasn’t working. My children would ask for things for school, and I couldn’t buy them . . . so my daughter said, “Mom, why don’t I go? I’ll try it.” I wasn’t sure. We talked about it, and I told her father, and, well, she came here.

Ana did not hear anything about her daughter’s life for many months. When the recruiter came back for more people from the village, she went to see him to rebuke him and ask about her daughter. The recruiter, to calm her, told her that her daughter was doing well and asked her if she wanted to join her in Buenos Aires:

I told him I couldn’t, that I had to take care of my small children. He asked how old my children were, and I told him one was 14 and the other 3, so he said, “Good, they can come as well.” . . . But I told him that I didn’t have any money for the tickets, and he paid for everything. They also took more people from here, all families. . . . I had debts. I was very worried, and I wasn’t getting along with my husband. We were arguing a lot.

When she arrived in Buenos Aires, they gave her a room for her and her children to sleep in and she contacted her daughter. Reflecting on the new work situation, she said,

The work was like slavery. . . . Working from sun to sun, you ate, closed your eyes, and then went back to work. You started at seven in the morning and didn’t stop until dawn. . . . So I spoke to the owner, the one who had brought my daughter, and I told him that it was OK, I had come to work, but not for this, deceiving me about my daughter. My daughter had told me what went on—that they didn’t let her go out, even bought her sanitary napkins because they didn’t let her go out anywhere. That’s not possible. . . . We didn’t get paid for a month; he told us that they were going to pay us annually. I asked him and told him, “Excuse my ignorance, but this cannot be.” . . . He wanted me to sign a paper with all the new things, and I told him no, I wouldn’t sign anything, he had lied to me. First, he had told me that my daughter would call me, and she didn’t because they wouldn’t let her, and then he had said that they were going to pay me. . . . I told him that he had said one thing there and another here, so he said: “It’s one thing in Bolivia and another here in Argentina.” When one arrives here [Buenos Aires] brothers are no longer brothers, parents are no longer parents. He got mad and told me he would speak to his wife, so I spoke with her and explained what was going on, and she said, “You don’t have to be like that. Now Fredy is very angry. Don’t say anything to him.”

This confrontation was a protest not only against the oppression of labor relations (work schedules, lack of pay, etc.) but against the destabilization of the notion of debt, the meaning of family, and the empathy that shared national origin supposedly provokes.

These values and meanings are what at first allows one to perceive the boss as a giver who will solve the problems of transfer to the new country (providing transportation, housing, food, work, etc.), generating a feeling of debt to him. The moral obligations that flow from the relations of family or shared origin rooted in these labor contexts are subject to conflict, negotiation, or imposition, since they are constructed from and for social differentiation (Narotzky, 2002). Employers’ pursuit of greater productivity involves reduction or suspension of wages, extreme control over the work, deplorable housing, etc., and these actions break the rules laid down between workers and employers and generate the conditions for breaking with all the rules taken for granted as part of the natural order of things, among them loyalty and acceptance of authority. In this way relations become stricter and less personal, increasing a potential freedom for workers that, as Thompson (1979) would say, makes their “nonfreedom” more apparent.

Complaints and Lawsuits

The appearance of new laws on the trafficking of persons for labor exploitation has had unexpected effects. Very few immigrants personally file legal complaints about the labor conditions they are subjected to. Complaints are made primarily through the Ombudsman’s Office as a result of information provided by the social movements, or the UFASE as a consequence of campaigns of sensitization promoting the identification of “suspicious” situations. The scarcity of complaints by immigrants themselves tends to be linked to their foreignness’s fostering ignorance of the receiving country’s labor rights and a perception of the situation to which they are subject as “natural.” As Sigaud (1996) points out, the legalistic logic that permeates these representations stresses knowledge/ignorance of the rules or access/lack of access to justice, neglecting the social relations of power in which the workers find themselves (exchanges and dependencies) and family ties of proximity, attachment, and affection.

The experience recounted by Ana is an example of this. Her experience of social movement struggle, focused on public and collective condemnation of the exploitation in the clandestine workshops, has allowed her to connect her personal experience in the workshops with other experiences, detect similarities, and organize them into meaningful categories of a collective character. Despite this, she did not file a legal complaint about the exploitation of her husband and daughter: “I’m not going to file a complaint for my grandchildren and my daughter, but I decided that I was going to struggle to denounce what is happening. As Cardinal Bergoglio said the other day, we don’t have to hate. We only ask for justice, and the way we do it is good. That is what I want.” This decision, based on emotional dependency, is not a result of any lack of awareness of oppression. It is also not one that is considered typical of the subaltern and especially of the women among them (Juliano, 2000) but rather, as Bourdieu (1999) points out, due to the schemes of perception and dispositions to respect, admire, and love that instruct the body and the social being. Any attempt to transform those perceptions and dispositions clashes with the resistance of the feelings and stubborn demands for conformity of the familial spirit, failing to respond to which may bring one contempt (prevention from seeing one’s children or grandchildren, conflicts with husbands or children, abandonment, etc.).

In cases in which family relations do not play a role, workers report that collusion among employers, border agents, and police has generated a certain mistrust of the police and skepticism about the possibility of justice for workers. In the framework of the judicial process with regard to the trafficking of persons for labor exploitation, questioning immigrant workers alone will never produce truth but will have to be combined with the knowledge of specialists (labor inspectors, psychologists, social workers) with regard to the existence of exploitation that constitutes a crime. This requires the existence of a series of “elements of context” (debt, deception, withholding of documents, restriction of freedom, lack of the possibility of hygiene or food, overcrowding, coercion, and physical violence). The reports analyzed usually make the following recommendation (Ministerio Público Nacional/OIM, 2009: 95):

At the same time and to the extent that it cannot be established with sufficient precision what degree of exploitation workers are subjected to, it is prudent to have labor control, health, and hygiene inspectors present during the investigation, as well as migration officials if we are dealing with foreign workers. Nor can we rule out the existence of a language barrier (for both victims and traffickers), and in this regard it is useful to provide for the possibility of having official interpreters or translators. Inspectors in the areas of labor, security, and hygiene, municipal (where appropriate), migration, and any other administrative area that could be linked to the subject being investigated will not only tend to fulfill the tasks of the areas to which they belong but also subsequently show existing conditions there to the judicial authority so that it can assess and gauge the severity of the labor exploitation discovered.

Here the complexities of the textile workers’ subjectivities, shaped by unequal fields of power, are completely buried. Thus testimonies such as those of Mónica and Ana suffer a de-singularization that transforms conflicts that at first seem “personal” and combine interests, passions, bodies, men, women, money, feelings, and treachery into “categorical conflicts” through a process of stylization and shaping (Boltanski, 2000: 269): “The victims were misled, vitiating their will and making use of the notion of the vulnerability and poverty in which they lived in their country of origin to disregard their free consent, given that the mere promise of work, an improvement in their economic situation, was sufficient to deceive them and result in their recruitment” (Poder Judicial de la Nación, 2011: 7).

Institutional actors’ recognition of and intervention in the trafficking of immigrants for labor exploitation is guided by the media and the justice system, which are characterized by the language of human rights and the category of “vulnerability.” This may safeguard their right to be free from coercion and violence in the workplace in textile workshops, but it limits their ability to manage a “voluntary” return home and the possibility of their having jobs with dignity (Davies, 2009) and making demands free of the socially accepted language of “victims” of “trafficking and exploitation.”

Conclusion

The social and political analysis carried out in recent years in Argentina on the immigrants known as “vulnerable victims” in the textile workshops has been strongly conditioned by international judicial proceedings and instruments, and this interferes with their incorporation into the neoliberal political economy. In the framework of neoliberal ideology, the presence of textile workshops that house thousands of workers under harsh working conditions is understood as an appendix of the world capitalist system rather than as emerging from a set of strategies for creating flexibility in a context of inequality of income and profit-making capacity. The neoliberal economic policies applied in the 1990s by the Menem government achieved a complete opening of the market and the importing of manufactured goods and provoked a profound crisis in the textile sector that resulted in business failures and high rates of unemployment. At the same time, those measures favored the development in that sector of a business strategy that involved the outsourcing of production—the contracting of suppliers who in turn subcontracted small workshops involved in the informal economy in an effort to reduce labor costs (Benencia, 2009). ⁸ Thus it constructed a growing labor market that offered work under degrading conditions (absence of contracts, intense work rhythms, unhealthy environments, etc.) for low wages, absorbing only the labor needed at a particular time. In the current conjuncture, men and women coming from bordering countries in an “irregular situation” ⁹ whose ideological representation as “needed for jobs others do not want” and need for income from work have made them the ideal workers for the expansion of these economic sectors (textiles, horticulture, construction, services, etc.).

In view of the relations of exploitation and domination characteristic of these workplaces, the implementation of Argentine law reveals who the actors in them are—boss/exploiter and worker/victim. It also reveals the difficulty of framing this relation in terms of the crime known as “trafficking of persons for labor exploitation,” which is in contradiction with the liberal judicial apparatus that appeals to the freedom to work and contract. This is used to conceal all kinds of labor abuses that are rarely denounced, prosecuted, or sanctioned.

The lack of a clear idea of how to combat labor exploitation allows the government to avoid having to follow complaints to their origins in the textile multinationals. Prosecution for trafficking of persons for labor exploitation ¹⁰ has focused on the owners of small textile workshops, relieving the two top labels that subcontract their services of any responsibility, despite the fact that Law 12713 on home-based work establishes that owners, intermediaries, and workshop managers are jointly responsible for the working conditions of their workers. The Justicialist Party’s Ministry of Labor and the businessmen of the Chamber of Commerce have proposed changing that law to “flexibilize” the relationship between the large textile multinationals and the workshops (small and medium-sized businesses), thus eliminating the former’s responsibility for working conditions.

As Burawoy (1976) has noted, the recruitment of foreign labor makes possible the organization of a migrant labor system in which the interests of the politically powerful and big capital are combined. With the formal or informal support, legitimate or illegitimate, of the state, a hierarchical ordering of groups of recruited immigrant workers is established through distinctions and categories (nationality, ethnicity, gender, age, irregular, illegal) that allow the control of the workforce and the reduction of its wages. The effective value of these distinctions, especially that of “irregular/illegal,” created and reproduced by the state and its institutions is in maintaining the prevailing processes of inequality so as to exploit particular sectors of the population in various economic sectors.

At the same time, the state institutions have generated a parallel and contradictory dynamic focused on “rescuing” (illegal/irregular immigrant) workers from their appalling working conditions. This intervention is permeated by the discourse of liberation, one of the basic components of the neoliberal “capitalist spirit” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2002), which combines arguments that refer to relief from the burden of “traditional societies,” promises of autonomy and self-realization, and criticism of the failure to fulfill the promise of liberation under the capitalist regimen. According to the guidelines for assisting victims of human trafficking of the Office of Rescue and Assistance of Victims (Ministerio Público, 2009) and the police who participate in the raids, their rescue is associated with the “liberation” of a small group of “illegal workers” identified as “vulnerable victims” trapped in a system of labor relations that rests on family, shared-origin, or friendship ties. It is conducted where the “vulnerable victims” can contribute as witnesses to the “legal war“ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009) against trafficking, not where the workers manage to evade the police raids or do not file complaints. ¹¹ Under these circumstances, the state’s ambiguous threat of expulsion remains suspended under the gaze of compassion and sentiment in order to quiet any kind of criticism associated with violations of human rights.

Similar to the interventions of neoliberal states that produce forms of consciousness that lead citizen-subjects to govern themselves in the name of freedoms won and responsibilities acquired (Trouillot, 2001 [1991]; Shore and Wright, 1997), the politics of “rescue” for judicial purposes contribute to the construction of a new category, the “responsible immigrant,” under the supervision and control of experts (social workers, psychologists, judges, lawyers, etc.), who will “voluntarily” offer his testimony and then return home.

The importance of a system of defense against abuses in the area of labor that have become socially intolerable is undeniable, but the practices and representations of trafficking for labor exploitation, currently dominated by legal logic, tend to obscure class conflicts and produce new subjectivities in which an essentialized and homogenized view of immigrants as passive victims and not as active subjects of their own history is promoted. This view annuls the social trajectories and experiences of these immigrants, hindering the creation of connections and solidarity with other social sectors in the national context that would allow them to effectively contest the exploitation and domination to which they are subject.