In responding to the editors’ invitation to reflect on where anthropologists locate labor and work(ers), I propose the idea of patchwork living as a specific perspective on social reproduction and worker agency that helps to locate labor struggles today. As anthropologists critically examine our assumptions about different kinds of work, my goal is to better incorporate into our analysis the entanglement of the labor of social reproduction with the labor of production or income generation. This is not an especially novel call—Marxist feminists have been pointing out their mutual imbrication for decades (Federici 2012). While the COVID-19 pandemic brought such questions to the fore, they are long-standing. In this piece I discuss how the entanglement between social reproduction and income generation characteristic of patchwork living might shape how we think within anthropology about collective labor struggles.

Drawing on Susana Narotzky’s scholarship (2018), I understand work as those activities human beings undertake to provision ourselves, our households, and our communities; to produce life and make it worth living. Not all of those are waged, and probably only a minority are productive in the most conventional sense of producing use or exchange value in goods. They all articulate with capital in some way, but, with Narotzky, I want to suggest that, when thinking anthropologically about labor, we should start not from how labor sustains capital but from how people expend effort to sustain their lives and the lives of those they love and/or care for. This is especially a concern when the city street or the home is the workplace, but the household and our intimate lives are also spaces where we put work in to generate and sustain life, even if that labor does not also generate income.

Multiple means of making working conditions and the payment for work as precarious as possible have created a very profitable regime of accumulation for capital, enforced by governments from colonial times. Precarity is intimately related to urbanization processes, as landholding in rural areas has been consolidated in the hands of agribusinesses, prompting mass migration to cities (Federici 2012). Once settled in peripheral neighborhoods, workers become available to work for low pay and to invest their labor power in building their own houses and neighborhoods, and in caring for relatives in the absence of state social or health care provision. Across the world, people sell goods on the streets, deliver food, drive taxis, stitch garments for piece rates, borrow money, live from cash or food transfers from governments and NGOs, and so on. They also make bricks, labor in others’ fields, mine metals, transport goods, build offices, dig roads, clean houses, and tend gardens for day rates; or live from the salary earned by the one member of their household with a government job (whether short term or open-ended). Their livelihood strategies involve multiple labor processes, and the overall patchwork might include industrial labor in the very short term, but this patchwork living is far away from the Fordist ideal of relatively stable material labor that underlies the traditional industrial union form of labor organization (Lazar 2023).

Nonetheless, patchwork living does produce distinct forms of labor organization, especially if we include the labor of social reproduction in our analysis. These include guild-based associations of street vendors or taxi drivers, etc., international trade unions (such as SEWA) or NGOs (such as WIEGO), and neighborhood-based struggles for urban infrastructure and liveable lives. Once we put these together, we can see the importance of an eminently anthropological approach to understanding labor struggles, one that in its holism can incorporate questions of kinship, urban life, history, self-identity, and so on.

One of the most active contemporary labor movements for patchwork living is the Argentine union UTEP (Union of Workers in the Popular Economy). UTEP organises workers of the “popular economy,” a local term that it uses to describe “all of those who are excluded from the labor market, who invent our own work to sustain ourselves,” affiliating workers in multiple occupations: “waste-pickers, peasants, artisans, street vendors, market vendors, garment stitchers, workers of recovered enterprises, construction workers, social-community workers.” Dolores Señorans (2020) and María Inés Fernández Álvarez (2022) have shown how UTEP addresses precarity as a labor problem, but one that is also about a liveable life in a broader sense, for example incorporating the importance of being able to project into the future, especially in a context of vulnerability to state violence. In Argentina today, the defunding of the state under President Milei directly targets community organizations’ capacity to provide support for social reproduction, for example, by refusing to meet federal state obligations to fund community kitchens. His austerity program led to the highest poverty rate in twenty years in mid-2024, of 53 percent, and around 27,000 state employees had lost their jobs by early 2025. UTEP is one of the organizations that is responding where possible through street protests in defense of life and labor. Relatedly, the regime’s vitriol against “woke” ideology has prompted protests that blend feminist, LGBTQ+, and human rights activists with community organizations and public sector workers’ unions to defend the state as a space for progressive action. Increased repression of street demonstrations has made this a more dangerous prospect since December 2023. I see all these combined as fights for social reproduction, for liveable lives or life itself, and as such, as an integrated set of labor struggles.

Globally, the struggle for life itself also includes the recent waves of anti-austerity and anti-neoliberal protests, anti-colonial struggles, and movements such as Black Lives Matter, #NiUnaMenos, and Extinction Rebellion. All protest the increased risks of death and of life made unliveable by various means, from state and intimate violence to environmental catastrophe and the structural inequalities that make some more vulnerable than others. In contexts of precarity and informality, people are pushed to engage their individual and kin capacities in a world where states provide only for some, in the form of jobs or welfare benefits; and where even that limited provision is under renewed attack. People struggle to defend those jobs and at the same time they build a mixed ecology of household income-generating strategies, in turn producing mixed kinds of collective action. They do so in the context of state violence, including repression of protests, occupation of territory, and racialized and gendered policing. These structural conditions can promote a sense of fragmentation and powerlessness, and yet workers still find collective allegiances based on their labor, understood as the struggle for liveable lives and the capacity to care for and sustain others. Patchwork living is a modality of labor that is multiple and at times fragmented, but that also coheres in people’s life experiences and strategies for care. It therefore has integrating and connecting effects, grounding common struggles linked by the desire for life itself.