Abstract

PERELMITER, Luisina. Law and Justice at the State Frontline. Labor inspectors' experiences in Buenos Aires. Trab. soc. [online]. 2020, vol.21, n.34, pp.31-40. ISSN 1514-6871.

State and public policies are usually observed from a top-down perspective. Yet, a growing literature focuses on state agents’ practices and daily bureaucratic encounters to reconstruct on- the-ground how policies are enacted, and the state is experienced by different social groups. Drawing on six months ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2015 in Buenos Aires with labor inspectors, I engage this literature in order to analyze inspectors’ practices in diverse situations. Particularly, I analyze the relationships between the experience of "enforcing the law" and that of "doing justice" in such situations. I argue that this relationship has the form of a mundane tensión in the institutional life of this street-level bureaucracy; dilemmas that do not cause any rupture of the system itself, but that gives content to what I call the experiential dimensión of citizenship. The article crosses, thus, two issues of relevance for a sociology of the State sensitive to the challenges of contemporary society. On the one hand, the question of how the State deals with the difficulties in effecting universal principles of justice. On the other, the question of how much of these difficulties contribute to blurring the boundaries between the legal and illegal in the institutional life of that State.

Keywords : street level bureaucracy; labor inspectors;informality;law; justice.