Working lives of youth in poverty in urban Argentina

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how people between 15 and 24 years old work and live in poverty. These young people have several years of working experience, since most of them began working during childhood or adolescence and are part of families—both nuclear and extended—with low incomes. Methodologically, the text has been based on the complement of fieldwork by the two authors. Chaves’ fieldwork was located in a suburban neighborhood of the city of La Plata (Province of Buenos Aires), and Assusa’s fieldwork was located in different neighborhoods of the city of Cordoba (Province of Cordoba). Both made interviews and kept records of participant observation. Population analysis through Permanent Household Survey (PHS) processing is also provided, contributing elements for an initial characterization of the situation of working and poor youth in Argentina, which also allows us to make diachronic (change in time) and synchronic (differences and inequalities among social classes) comparisons that make possible for readers from other regions to understand the strong trends in social conditions in Argentina. The richness of combining both data records and the complement of quantitative and qualitative results provide a much wider interpretation framework for the analyzed phenomenon.