Deliverers in a hurry of generalized uberization, butchers of junk food pigs, over-qualified professionals of culture and education on the cheap, workers in sweatshops or new proletarians in the delocalized digital chain of customer services: the series “The new proletarians” draws the portrait of a new world of exploited and precarious work. Last article: the valorist and the waste sorter as emblematic workers of the society of overconsumption.
His first name is Michel, but he prefers Junior to distinguish himself from his namesakes, which are too numerous for his taste. Junior started at 7 years old to sell cans and bottles gleaned from his entourage in Montreal. He was “12 or 13” when he left school to make it his job in the late 2000s.
“Because I started very young, I discovered a little passion and over time it grew and grew and grew. I have become one of the top valuers in Montreal,” explains Junior, using the term now established to designate collectors and resellers of returnable containers.
The competition has always been fierce. “I often argued with people who thought the street was theirs,” he says. He himself was always active in the Plateau Mont-Royal district, in Montreal, according to recycling days, five days a week — or rather five nights — from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m.
“The night is not the same world as the day. In those days I was a bit wild. I liked being alone. I was doing my own things. I disgusted no one. »
Junior filled his big green wheelie bin two, three, four times a night. He stored his collection in a space lent by an aunt, then resold the glass and metal to a grocery store. On the worst nights (and they happened quite often), he only pocketed a few tens of dollars.
“My best week, I made $950. No tax. Until the BS grabbed me and made me pay it back. I was just allowed to make an extra $200 a month. I did not know. I got beat up because the grocery store was signing up valuers for sales of $100 or more. »
Junior is 28 now. He stopped his collections during the pandemic because his aunt died and his yard was no longer available to store the harvest. Since then, he has worked full-time for the Les valoristes coop, which buys recycled containers and stores them on the site of the former Berri Street bus station in Montreal. The brick building on the Voyageur block has also been waiting to be recycled for a good fifteen years. The sad urban curse of the East strikes again and again.
“The coop brought me a lot, says the former urban gleaner. I opened up to the world. I work with a nice big smile. »
He is paid $14.25 an hour, minimum wage. All in all, he saves more than time from his nocturnal outings hunting down glass and aluminum which have also enabled him to become aware of the bewildering waste of our hyperconsumption society. He says he rescued clothes, furniture and even two fully functional flat-screen TVs from landfills.
Excluded from the system
In this series on the new proles, who toil hard to earn little, Junior occupies a rank apart. He has now entered the traditional salaried labor market, but after having struggled alone, so to speak outside the system.
Karl Marx, who nevertheless knew a bit about the exploited masses, spoke of the ” lumpenproletariat to describe the marginalized in rags or rags (Lumpen), excluded from the economic system in “the lower spheres of pauperism” inhabiting especially the cities, “living on the waste of society, individuals without a specific job, vagabond, people without fire and without a confession”. The Italians prefer the term sottoproletariato “, or the underclass, to describe this fourth world of rich societies, the one that parades daily at the coop Les valoristes.
Obviously, this position of misery is also a misery of the position. Who would want to be placed in the underclass that also includes “vagrants, criminals, prostitutes”? The remark on the symbolic stakes of the classification is also valid for the category of new prolos, the workers from below today.
“I think that Marx is still topical,” says Professor Pascale Dufour, of the Department of Political Science at the University of Montreal. “It’s not that Marxist theory no longer works. What is problematic is rather the heterogeneity of the reality that you are trying to capture with the term new proletarians. We now prefer the term precarious. »
The precarious therefore suffers job insecurity, while finding themselves in very different trades. His salary is relatively low when he is not outright paid by the piece, by delivery, by the task. He benefits from a minimum coverage by social rights. He can also be hired by a company that does not respect labor standards concerning the maximum hours worked per day or per week or the simple fact of being able to leave his post to go to the toilet. The precarious is also rarely unionized.
The proletarian, old or new, finds himself in a particular, relatively uniform working condition, as an employee, generally in a large industrial enterprise. The worker is organized and has established a certain power relationship with the easily identifiable employer.
“The difference in precariat comes from condition rather than status, and this condition tends to become precarious: it does not improve, it does not regularize because the sectors of activity concerned operate with precarious work, sums up the specialist in social movements. The business model is designed on this precarious basis. »
The processor is one of the last links in the complete chain of recovery jobs. The next link is that of waste sorters in recovery plants. L’Study on labor needs in sorting centers in Quebec (2020) identified nearly 1,500 employees in this sector alone, some of whom are well paid (foreman, engineer, manager, etc.). Sorting is often done at minimum wage (less than $15 compared to $22 or $23 for the vacuum cleaner) and it has a retention rate of 61% of employees.
Issoufou, too, sorts the garbage, but in an atypical place: the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau airport. It sorts out recyclable containers (mostly water bottles), items not allowed on airplanes (large personal care products, for example) and now, many, many protective masks discarded by the millions of annual travelers. . It also helps to recycle these materials. The restaurants and other businesses at the airport add to the masses.
Stratzer’s sorters process approximately one and a half tonnes of waste per day. They divide the material and recover the recyclable part. Stratzer would like the first sorting to be done more at the source. Ongoing calculations will tell dealerships what they generate as waste and ask them for adjustments.
Issoufou works with a dozen other sorters. The two daily shifts cover from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Their sorting center occupies a secure corner of the airport. Commercial wheelie bins brought in by cleaners pile up near stainless steel tables where piecework is done.
“We make efforts to keep it clean,” he explains. Arrived in Quebec from Mali in 2008, he has held this part-time job for about a year and he has another full-time job in a food company in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, for a total of more than fifty hours per week. “It’s more difficult there, more demanding,” he says.
He and his wife, who also works full time, have four children, ages 5 to 16, all born here. The family lives in Pierrefonds. The father travels by public transport. Stratzer pays him $18 an hour ($2 more than when he was hired). He is not unionized.
“The rent has gone up,” says Issoufou. We pay $950 a month. The price of food goes up a lot. I have four children to feed and clothe, that’s why I work two jobs. »