Living in the legal limbo. A socio-legal approach to sex workers and waste pickers' claims for labour recognition.

This thesis explores the relationship between work, criminality and law. It does so by understanding how the legal/illegal dividing line shapes, and is shaped, by the moving borders between work/non-work and crime/non-crime. The groups described in this thesis exist in an area of in-between in which socio-legal dynamics of power and resistance emerge. The notion of ‘legal limbo’ that is defined an explored in the thesis refers to activities, situations or orientations that are neither legal nor illegal in a specific legal system. In the search for an empirical account of the notion of legal limbo, this research uses income-generating activities that are not protected by labour law nor are they conceived as crime, as its primary focus of analysis: sex workers and waste pickers in the city of Córdoba-Argentina. In order to empirically assess these two groups’ dynamics in the legal limbo, this thesis adopts a qualitative methodology. The fieldwork has been divided in three stages: first, a pilot study with groups whose income generating activity was in the legal limbo in the city of Córdoba; second, the fieldwork with sex workers and waste pickers; and third, series workshops to facilitate contextual debates about what these groups want from the law. Empirically, then, the thesis explores the betwixt socio-legal position of those workers. Therefrom, the key research question that therefore guides this inquiry is: What are the socio-legal dynamics of power and resistance around sex work and waste picking in the city of Córdoba-Argentina?