This article investigates outsourced cleaning-workers’ possibilities of mobilization through a case study focused on a group of workers in a Chilean private university. Outsourced cleaning services within universities are characterized by their precarious working conditions and their workers have been therefore portrayed as harder to organize and mobilize. However, in 2017, eight outsourced cleaning-workers joined a national intercompany union and in 2018 called a strike, constituting themselves as the first outsourced cleaning workers’ union to achieve that within the university’s history. I argue that their precarious working condition under neoliberalism combined with intersections of class, gender, and race oppression configure the workers as subalterns in the Gramscian sense. Furthermore, I claim that subalternity fostered their mobilization and its success was due to their engagement in local forms of community unionism.
Keywords:
Outsourced cleaning work, intersectionality, new syndicalism, subalternity, neoliberalism
Rojas Müller, F. (2021). Mobilizing subalternity: outsourced cleaning-workers’ unionization in a Chilean university. Revista Punto Género, (15), pp.114–136. https://doi.org/10.5354/2735-7473.2021.64401
