The aim of this article is to analyze the security strategies of working-class women in La Plata, Argentina. The hypothesis guiding it is that the innovation and routinization of strategies, understood as rituals of everyday life that make it possible to continue and to project a dimension of the future, become crucial for the autonomy of women. The analysis is based on information gathered through observation and semi-structured interviews from women from peripheral settlements of the municipal area of La Plata. Results show that the strategies give everyday life a particular dose of certainty and colonization of the future, but which mainly deploy practices of avoidance and self-restriction in the use of the urban space. In addition, these strategies are mediated by their own and other women’s previous experiences.

This article documents another way of thinking and dealing with uncertainty and the management of the future from ways of relating to work located “on the fringes” of the work society. It is an empirically constructed investigation based on semi-structured interviews with professionals who resist work and which show that for this category of individuals, uncertainty implies assuming our common vulnerability without much worrying about what may happen tomorrow, and entails an active and autonomous way of appropriation of his life and of revaluation of ways to build solidarity from gratuity. In short, it is a way of materially building life and the future in break with the work-consumer society.

Wrrenteria has historically been one of the main Basque industrial centers, which in the sixties and seventies allowed it to reach full employment and labor stability, especially for male industrial employment, until the mid-seventies when the transition governments began to restructure industries, supposedly to prepare for entry into the European Economic Community and the challenge of free market competitiveness. The loss of thousands of jobs was followed by a deregulation of the labor market that generated a further precarization of living conditions, which was intensified by the 2008 financial crisis and austerity policies. In this article I propose to show how, for the younger generations of this city, past futures continue to cast shadows on the ways in which they now contemplate a future marked by growing uncertainty. In that sense, I discuss the common sense of "going backwards," pointing out that going backwards seems not only to allude to past generations' achievements being undone, but to a confused reconfiguration of what they can now expect from the future.