Senses about work and consumption in the reception of social policies in a pandemic context

Abstract

Considering how state interventions to assist the population in poverty and/or unemployment before and during the pandemic have been assuming centrality; this article aims to explore the feelings that appear in relation to social policies, consumption and work in the potential recipients of the Emergency Family Income in Argentina. This program took place a few days after Preventive and Mandatory Social Isolation (ASPO) was decreed in the country due to the health emergency due to COVID 19, and sought to assist the unemployed population, informal workers and/or autonomous workers, whose income is would be directly affected by the isolation situation.

The methodological strategy consisted on a virtual ethnography in a Facebook group of recipients of the Emergency Family Income in Argentina, in August 2020. In this framework, the analysis concludes that in the recipient’s feelings, work appears as the north, while having a plan/program is described as “given money” and as an unstable resource. In turn, and in direct connection with the above, receiving the IFE would enable expenses such as housing, buying food, directly associated with reproduction. Other expenses are seen as investments -such as setting up a vegetable store- while another group of expenses is valued as splurges. Work and consumption appear in State interventions as central elements, loaded with meanings that reveal elements of the social structures of the present century.