Inscription: Taxi Work Relations, the Ficha, and the Political Economy of a Market Device

By indexing several key variables in the industry to the “ficha,” the taxi fare multiplier, Buenos Aires’ taxi union recreated economic, fiscal, and legal relations emerging from taxi work. In principle a perfect example of a market device, an actant facilitating economic exchange, the ficha consistently transformed the taxi industry’s income uncertainties into certainties for the union, abstracting its income from wages, contracts, and the amount or value of work. Examining this case study from a political economy approach, I propose the trope of inscription to understand how structural inequalities can be written into the market devices that reproduce them. The political economy approach is a powerful complement to market devices as emergent technologies revolutionize the nature, quality, and management of work in ways shown to reproduce and naturalize hierarchies.


Introduction
Taxi fares in Buenos Aires, Argentina, are set by the city government, which holds a public hearing every time the fares are reviewed. I arrived in the city in July 2015 to research its taxi industry; by January 26th, 2016, when the only such hearing during my fieldwork took place, I knew most key players in the trade well. Held in a large meeting room in a government building in downtown Buenos Aires, the hearing was an open and free event: any citizen could sign up as a speaker, and among the dozen presentations, there were consumers' rights NGO representatives, speakers from four of the taxi-owners' associations, a taxi driver, a government employee, and a citizen claiming to represent himself and other citizens. The discussion involved cost and revenue estimates for coming months; a debate over whether to consider the competition with subsidized public transportation in the form of buses, subways, and intraurban trains (Uber had not yet arrived), and, if so, how; and other economic, financial, material, and technical considerations. One of the main objectives of the fare revision was to compensate for inflation. Because Argentina lacked centrally produced credible inflation indexes, the task was to agree on some rate that reflected general price hikes and the cost of providing the service without overcompensating and throwing the industry into recession.
As we socialized during the meeting, a reporter from a prominent national newspaper sat next to me and wondered who was speaking for the union. Relative to other metropolises, Buenos Aires' taxi industry is atomized: about half the taxis roaming the streets are driven by their owners, propietarios, organized in several commerce chamber-like associations. Driving the rest are what Argentines call choferes, "chauffeurs," people employed to drive a taxi that belongs to someone else. This employment relation is the condition for belonging to the taxi drivers' union, by far the largest and most vocal and influential player in the trade. I had by then met most of its directors, bureaucrats, and many employees, and expected at least a ceremonial presence. From where I sat, I swept the room in one gaze, to no avail. I mentioned this later to Sebastián, a taxi owner who had been driving his own taxi for 30 years and employed someone to drive a second taxi he owned. He smirked: "the union is always there." To face fluctuations in production and income, recurrent inflation, and monetary instability, it is common practice in Argentina to hold paritarias: a three-way salary negotiation between union leaders, employers' representatives, and representatives of the state. Paritarias are held at national, provincial, and local levels, can pertain to specific professions or general trades, and include all workers in a given activity, even if they are not affiliated to the union. The resulting agreements amount to law in the working conditions of workers involved and only cease to be valid when a new paritaria takes place. 1 As such, paritarias are key producers of labor policy and relations in inflationary and monetarily unstable contexts like Argentina's, where real wages and purchasing power are hard to anchor. These negotiations determine salaries, which determine union contributions under several rubrics, that is, unions' economic lifeblood. But according to Malena, one of the taxi union's directors, Buenos Aires' taxis were the only Argentine industry with no paritarias: "It's all indexed to the fare, and that is set at the public hearing," she explained-the very same public hearing nobody from the union had even attended-adding: "why would (we) bother with those frictions? Let the propietarios do it." What was actually set in the public hearing is what Argentines call the "ficha," the fixed amount the taximeter increases by every given number of meters or minutes spent in a taxi in motion. The ficha is effectively the matrix for the fares of all possible taxi rides. Since the passing of what the industry calls "the taxis law" in 2010, heavily lobbied for by the union itself, the ficha became the single multiplier from which choferes' salaries would be determined, and through the salaries, social security charges, pensions, taxes, contributions, and other monetary transferences that characterize formal employment and union belonging in Argentina. The bulk of the union's income depended arithmetically on the value set for the ficha. Was some backstage arrangement I was unaware of the simple reason why the union was both "always there" and not even present? How could the union count on the propietarios bearing the brunt of the negotiations setting the monetary price of the service, the value of work and of all contributions based on the premise of carrying out said work, and thus its own economic lifeline? I argue here that the ficha works as an archetypal market device, a "material and discursive assemblage that intervenes in the construction of markets," organizing the relations to which it gives life (Muniesa et al. 2007, 2;see also Callon 2010;Hébert 2014;Mackenzie 2006). Economically speaking an index, mathematically speaking a multiplier, the ficha is written into the equations of several accounting and legal frameworks that create and streamline labor relations in the taxi market, its efficacy fueled by the transportability of numbers' arithmetical properties. But through these very arithmetical properties, the ficha also emerges as a powerful actor in the entire political economy of the industry. In managing to index most of its financial flows to the ficha, the union freed its income flows from the amount, quality, or intensity of its members' work at the same time and in the same way it ensured its reproduction as an institution, and that of choferes as workers and as union members. Moreover, as economic fluctuations affected smaller stakeholders both before and in greater proportion, for a greater fraction of their income depends more fully and directly on the ficha's value, the union could wait for them to fight for its price, skirting the potentially politically erosive instance of paritarias. The same arithmetical properties that structured and stabilized wages and work relations also buffered the union's income from macroeconomic dynamics, further reproducing inequalities in the political economy of the taxi trade.
Founded by Muniesa et al. (2007), the market devices approach helps explain how abstract economic principles come to life through "agencements" (Muniesa et al. 2007, 3), associations between actants and their properties, such that "items such as the shopping cart, a financial pricing model, or the stock ticker" become economic (Hébert 2014, 21). Following from studies situating these agencements in historical, cultural, geographical, and structural circumstances (Hébert 2014;MacKenzie 2006), this article examines the ficha as a market device in the tradition of political economy (see Di Leonardo 1993;Gregory 1982). This approach examines not economics as exchange or consumer preferences, but the conditions of production, reproduction, and accumulation that surround and qualify the moment of exchange. Through a case study of how a particular economic actor deployed a market device and its mathematical, legal, and affective properties to create certainty and ensure its reproduction, the trope of inscription conceptualizes how structural inequalities can be written into, and thus entrenched and reproduced by, the market devices that create economic relations. Buenos Aires' taxi ficha provides an apt example of the power of the market devices approach, seen through a political economy lens, to explain the encoding of asymmetries in labor relations. At the forefront of the reinvention of the social by increasingly efficacious and sophisticated market devices (Noble 2018;Rosenblat 2018;Rosenblat and Stark 2016), work is an exceptionally fertile and timely site to examine how emergent economic relations encode, reproduce, and naturalize complex inequalities that are, quite often, written into them from the start.

Market Devices: From Economics to Political Economy
Most literature concerning market devices references the brief but efficient introduction to Muniesa et al.'s edited volume (2007) as single founding document and theoretical reservoir, defining a market device as a "material and discursive assemblage that intervenes in the construction of markets" (2) in line with the "pragmatic turn" and its empirical emphasis. Market devices are anything that "renders things, behaviours and processes economic" (Muniesa et al. 2007, 3) and that shapes what markets are, and what kinds of calculations are possible or not. Material and immaterial infrastructures, prices, price-setting rationales, paperwork, and a myriad other actants creating, shaping, or hindering the possibilities and the terms of all kinds of exchange can be examined as market devices (see for example Kjellberg 2007). In this sense, the ficha that frames, prices, and legally and mathematically stabilizes labor relations in the taxi industry in Buenos Aires is an excellent case in point.
Theoretically, these devices are defined as assemblages in the Deleuzian sense of the term, emergent and generative bundles of agency. From this perspective, the approach's strengths are to "avoid ex-ante explicative principles…adopt an anti-essentialist position that is particularly suited to the study of situations of uncertainty…focus on actors' capacities to operate across multiple spaces [and] be attentive to the empirical intricacies of agency" (Muniesa et al. 2007, 3). The strength of market devices in economic analysis is no surprise. First, it draws from the performative turn in studies of economic relations (see Hébert 2014, 21) and its notion that "economics" brings about the economy it seeks to describe. Indeed, its canonical version also echoes Latour's "studied apoliticism" (Lévi and Valverde 2008, 823), its dispersion of agency and what effectively plays out as anti-historicism: what counts are the emergent relations among actants of various natures in the present tense. Appeals to historical, structural, or any other patterns premised or centered on human agency are epistemologically hubristic but also biased a priori, stunted to what "actually" matters from the get-go (see Jansen 2016 for an in depth critique).
Second, it is a powerful frame to understand economic processes because economics itself, particularly neoliberal economics, is also a science of the present, rejecting ex-ante explicative principles, structures, and patterns, and thinking instead in the abstract immanence of exchange and data (Carrier 2016;Gregory 1982). As Karen Hébert's study of Alaskan fisheries shows, market devices are prime sites of economic policy in late capitalism. Markets, including labor markets, are increasingly designed following the tenets of economic rationalization (Hébert 2014). Examining the materialities that emerge around market devices, she argues, is the route to understanding how the transposition of economic ideal types creates new economic relations that can confirm or challenge their logical design.
Thinking through the materialities of Buenos Aires' taxi work in line with Hébert's work, I propose that the market devices approach can be used differently. Their deployment to enable and shape economic relations and new forms of exchange can also involve harnessing market devices as sites of certainty, stabilization, and confirmation of existing relations that a strict economic outlook would not allow us to fully apprehend. Labor relations are a prime arena for such a study, where wages, values, and contracts often involve both hierarchical asymmetry and several actors jockeying for certainty of employment or income.
Not only was the ficha creating a lot of certainty and stabilizing work relations from one month or year into the next, but precisely because of the mathematical properties that made it a very successful market device, it was actively hedging and conflict-proofing the financial flows of the main actor in the taxi trade-incidentally, the one that lobbied to set it up the way it was. As an economic actant, the ficha acted on and through a series of political, legal, fiscal, financial, and affective relations that were manifold, emergent, and intricate, but that affected other actants with a certain differential regularity. In other words, the ficha was organizing work relations in the taxi trade such that not all things were equally likely to all those involved at any same time (Bourdieu 1986), and through its actions choferes were certain to carry on being choferes, propietarios being propietarios, and the union's role as mediator between them, guarantor of workers' rights and political player.
In this sense, a political economy framework can open up specific market devices, and market devices as an approach, in ways that enrich the kind of ethnography that can emerge. Quite distinct from the linear addition of descriptions of political concerns, historical context and economic variables, I take political economy in the British anthropology tradition, as the study of processes of production, accumulation, and reproduction of social relations (Carrier 2016;Di Leonardo 1993;Gregory 1982, 12-15). Concrete economic relations and market exchanges, however, messy or emergent, are always inserted in these processes. The more efficient market devices are in organizing and funneling relations, the more indispensable a political economy approach becomes to understanding the asymmetries, imbalances, and power differentials encoded in them. This is especially urgent in labor relations, increasingly designed not to be reflected on in terms of structural inequalities and asymmetries (Rosenblat 2018;Rosenblat and Stark 2016). The trope of inscription emphasizes how market devices can carry within them certain terms that through the nature, circumstances, or properties of the device, increase or perpetuate the asymmetries between the actants involved.

Work, Unions, and Inflation
According to local and international economic consultants, private institutions, and certain NGOs, Argentina's inflation rate for 2015 hovered around 30 percent. The taxi drivers I met in mid 2015 were squeezed between growing costs of gas, insurance, general vehicle upkeep, and a tariff for their trade set by the city government, unrevised for almost a year by then. By late 2015, Sebastián was working as much as earlier in the year but making significantly less money. His children were financially independent, he owned his house and two taxis, and he lived on the produce of his work as a taxi driver and the rent he charged for the second taxi. He had no significant debts, but as prices went up and the flat fare of taxis made them comparatively cheaper, having more work did not entirely compensate for more expensive repairs and the increasing cost of living in Buenos Aires. Sebastián had at least the extra income from the taxi he rented out, but he had only managed to increase its rent by 15 percent. Aside from the fact that the chofer of the rented taxi had been working for him for years and was reliable, punctual with rent, and more of a friend than a mere employee, Sebastián knew that increasing the taxi's rent any further under frozen tariffs would have made it impossible for his chofer to honor it. In Buenos Aires, it is rare for large conglomerates to own hundreds of taxi cars, and the number of taxi licenses a single juridical or physical person can hold is capped at 700-1.89 percent of the 37,000-strong taxi fleet. Taxi cars are most often owned by individuals, so Sebastián's circumstances were fairly representative.
Of course, people who only owned one car had it worse, and the worst off in all the industry were choferes, whose car rents almost universally went up while their income was naturally capped by the number of hours in the shift. This was the case for Federico, a chofer whose car rental rose by 12 percent in 2015. The general arrangement in the industry is that whatever a taxi chofer makes beyond the daily rent, and after deducting a car wash and two tanks of fuel, he keeps for himself. Federico had managed to find a cheaper car wash and cut down on lunch costs by preparing food at home or even skipping lunch. Still, he had discussed with his propietario the possibility of repaying arrears in instalments, which snowballed extremely quickly, and he was thinking of looking for a job in construction. It was not so much that construction paid particularly well, but that wages in that industry had kept pace with inflation, a process spearheaded by unions.
In rapidly industrializing 1930s Argentina, leader Juan Domingo Perón reorganized Argentine unions and their mechanisms to funnel workers' demands. This process consolidated tripartite salary negotiation mechanisms involving capital, labor, and the state (Murmis and Portantiero 2011), called paritarias, where wages for an industry or trade are negotiated and legally binding minimal salaries are set, holding for the whole trade or profession, including workers not affiliated to the union. In the context of the inflation and economic instability that Argentina has been experiencing for many decades now, paritarias are recurrent, conflictive, and fully fledged policy instruments, where union leaders assert themselves with respect to their workers, other leaders, and the general political landscape. Aside from any sense of duty to their workers or the general workers' cause, at stake is also the economic lifeblood of workers' unions. Union contributions from workers and employers alike are defined as percentages of a given worker's pre-tax salary, watered down by inflation. At a first approach, as an Argentine citizen myself, that any trade would not have paritarias in the Argentina I knew made no economic, political, or cultural sense. I will explore this particularity later; let us turn now to the employment conditions in the industry taxi drivers lived in and the nature of their work.

Informalities, Uncertainties, and Agents in and On a Trade
Before owning his taxi cars, Sebastián had been a chofer, and as such lived through the days when choferes' work was what Argentines call en negro: legal and legitimate work, often carried out in broad daylight, but undeclared or otherwise invisibilized to the state (see Lazar 2012). Under Argentine labor law, wages are the basis for calculating employers' payments to the state as taxes, to the union as contributions, and retentions to employees' salaries. Retentions are a percentage of a workers' pre-tax earnings that the employer withholds at the moment of payment and reroutes in part to the union and in part to the state to fund, among other things, the pension system. Employers take on workers en negro to skirt all of these charges. Until the 1990s, the taxi industry's levels of en negro employment were almost universal. Choferes carried around black notebooks where employers would sign, often in pencil, as sole record of the work relation. Some remember this trade as one of gentlemen's agreements: informal but cordial terms. For others, the conditions were effectively exploitative. Sebastián worked first with a friend of the family, and then with a friend of that friend. Neither the union nor the state ever knew that he was employed, and he had no pension. Because of the nature of taxi work, roaming for passengers, the atomized nature of the industry, and the fact that drivers worked on their own, it was exceptionally difficult to spot or stop this kind of informality. In the mid-1980s, Sebastián bought his first taxi car and became a propietario. He has since worked for himself.
Taxi work is a peculiar economy, exceptionally rife with uncertainties. Just as no two taxi journeys were ever exactly alike, no two days played out the same in terms of amount of work, hours of work, trips completed, or money earned. To a degree, the trade incorporated and reflected all the uncertainties of Argentina's macroeconomic performance. During the hyperinflation of the early eighties, taxi drivers, whether choferes or propietarios, used to wait it out at street corners, engines switched off so as not to waste fuel, until someone found them. Work was similarly scarce right after the 2001 economic crash and during the late nineties, but during the early nineties it was fine, and between roughly 2003 and 2006 it was exceptionally good.
But against this background, Sebastián's and other drivers' stories always entwined luck and skill. You never knew who was around the corner, and our evenings involved several anecdotes past and present with varying degrees of verisimilitude of unexpected trips far into the Province or exceptionally uneventful days. Rainy days were sought after and rush hours were a mixed blessing, but you never really knew where a passenger could take you. Also, in 2015 and early 2016, Buenos Aires saw almost daily street protests and traffic blockades where, if caught unaware, taxi drivers could waste the best part of a working day. Twice during my fieldwork, Federico, a shrewd driver who knew the city's rhythms well, ended up stuck in protests that ate into his 12-hour shift to the point that he did not manage to cover the car rent.
As these people understood their trade, an infinity of actants shaped every single exchange in any given day, often at the same time and in indistinguishable ways: macroeconomic woes and street protests, the price of gas and the propensity of employers to avoid taxes, the weather at any given minute, and the exact spot in the city where a given minute finds one. This dispersion, which some researchers argue epitomizes urban life (Amin and Thrift 2002), is maximized by the nature of taxi work in Buenos Aires. Although there are loyalty mechanisms and "radio taxi" companies that offer pre-booked rides, according to drivers themselves, the vast majority of rides are hailed. The transaction is not only history-less, but passenger and driver are perfect strangers who are highly unlikely to ever meet again. In strict economic terms, the work of taxi drivers involves so many uncertainties, potentialities, and emergent interactions that it almost embodies the abstracted principles of a perfect neoclassical market. Practically uncountable sellers and buyers meet anonymously and fleetingly, perfectly disembedded from each other (Granovetter 1985).
Inclined to speak with the seasoned wisdom of those who have been around the block and who can afford pause for amused reflection, Sebastián took to this dispersion with Borgean curiosity. Federico's reality was quite different. His wife worked two jobs, they had just had a child, and come luck, skill, grand economy, or rain, the car rent had to be paid. Federico was yearning for certainty. The propietario of his car was a decent man, but for the length of my fieldwork, he remained under enormous pressure, cutting costs wherever he could and hustling for a fare in all imaginable ways. We spoke often about his potential move to construction, a trade he had been in in the past, had enjoyed, and was eager to go back to, but inevitably his thinking looped back: "I may be late with the car rent, but at least with this job, whatever happens, I have a health insurance for my wife and child." "Whatever happens" did not just refer to the work or car rent. Irrespective of how much money he made, even if he did not make any at all, so long as he remained in the trade and carried on working as a chofer, his health insurance was assured by the union. Like virtually all taxi choferes, Federico belonged to the union. In the coming sections, I show how, between the early eighties and 2015, the union reframed the financial and economic flows, labor contracts, work conditions, salaries, and taxes that made the entire taxi industry work. By harnessing the ficha as a market device, amidst uncertainty, luck, skill, and however many actants there might be in a complex market of constantly emergent interactions, certain flows were now hedged and certain others could not even happen anymore.

The Ficha as a Market Device
The taxi industry Sebastián knew as a chofer no longer existed. Following three highly publicized crimes in 2001, the union lobbied the government to formalize Buenos Aires' taxi industry, which happened in progressive waves culminating in what is called the "taxis' law"-law 3,622, passed November 11, 2010. 2 This law standardized and streamlined all decrees and regulations pertaining to the trade, in a sense simply inserting the labor relation propietario-chofer into long-existing codes of labor and commerce. In particular, in a section pertaining to salary, the law confirmed a certain decree from 2007 establishing that "from November 1st, 2008, all choferes in the trade will receive a minimal monthly salary in Argentine Pesos equivalent to 5,350 taximeter fichas." 3 This declaration changed the nature of taxi drivers' work and the industry as a whole. As mentioned earlier, ficha is the Argentine name for each discrete increase in the taxi fare, in the case of Buenos Aires every 200 meters, every two minutes of stillness, or particular combinations thereof. To set the ficha is to set in principle the value of all possible taxi rides but also and according to this law, effectively to set the salary of all choferes in the city. The law also required propietarios to pay the union the equivalent of forty fichas per month for burial expenses insurance and 170 fichas for "social purposes." However, this same law that defined the minimum salary mathematically through the ficha is now embedded in the edifice of Argentine labor law, embedding with it the practices it pertains to. This larger body authorizes unions to charge a monthly union fee, which the taxi's law sets as 2.5 percent of the monthly minimum wage-which is in turn set by the ficha. Similarly, the union receives another 3 percent for "cultural promotion," and 2 percent goes to finance the mandatory yearly training and health check-ups of all choferes in the city and "professionalization courses" the union offers anyone wanting to become a chofer. Malena was responsible for both, and for managing and allocating these funds to ophthalmologists, clinicians, and road technicians, but also catering, general maintenance, the production of study material, and the upkeep of a digital and material archive of sensitive information about current and past choferes-about 40,000 people.
Until that January 26th, the day of the hearing, a ficha had been 1.69 ARS between 6 am and 10 pm and 20 percent higher (2.02 ARS) during the night hours. The ficha was increased by 20 percent. The new daytime ficha was 2.02 ARS, and the night ficha was 2.42 ARS. The government gave the taxi industry three working days to adjust all taximeters to the new values: as of Saturday January 30th, all fares should be updated. Some taxi drivers, especially those driving their own cars, chose to work for an extra day or two with the old, lower tariff (this was not strictly speaking legal, but no passenger would have complained) and avoid the long queues, thus lost time and revenue, at taximeter shops. But those like Sebastián, who employed choferes, rushed to update their taximeters and to check their calculators, financial documents, and accountants if they had them. With the new ficha, the whole architecture of economic and financial transferences from them to choferes and the union would increase automatically on January 30th.
The taxi ficha in 2015 thus created, framed, and priced not only the entire network of work relations, but also fiscal, financial, and economic exchanges between workers, their employers, the state, and the union. With the ficha emerged an entire "calculative space" (Kjellberg 2007) whose prevailing premise was to abstract economic transferences from the produce of work and fiscal duties from the concreteness of the employment relation. At the level of this calculative space, the amounts that were exchanged were emancipated from the concreteness of the relations that in principle created the obligations. Federico's solace in his health insurance come what may is explained by the fact that all transferences to the union detailed above are fixed by the iron-clad grammar of mathematics and the selectively iron-clad grammar of this law. The union receives those transferences monthly, irrespective of his actual output or performance, understood in actual rides, money flows, or time at work, and of whatever uncertainties may afflict them: the weather, strikes, inflation, etc. These transferences were even independent of however much the propietario might receive in any given month.
One could always argue, for the sake of theoretical exhaustiveness, that this calculative space is also subject to uncertainty, contingencies, and the assemblage-like nature of actants. Indeed, halfway through my fieldwork, Uber arrived in Buenos Aires. The conflict is ongoing, and it is still unclear in what concrete senses taxi work will be affected, beyond common-sensical considerations of competition, price dumping, and so on. But as I show in the next section, by arithmetically indexing the terms and the prices of work relations in the taxi industry to the ficha, the union effectively wrote into the processes the ficha indexes structural hierarchies such that the final effect is to minimize, if not completely exorcize, the uncertainties it has to deal with.

A Market Device at Work
As both a market device and one of many parts of a law, the ficha was designed in principle to work through its arithmetical nature and properties alongside a number of other devices and mandates. The union had lobbied for it, and one of its members helped write it and pass it during his period at the legislature of the City of Buenos Aires. In practice, the union was more meticulous about some aspects than others, putting the ficha and its properties to work in very specific ways.
Like vast swathes of Argentina's middle classes (Lazar 2017), Sebastián had a negative view of unions in general and this one in particular, arguing cynically that it did not care about the choferes-so long as the contributions were paid. This could be held as true in two related senses. First, very few choferes I met actually made, after deducting daily car rentals, the minimum wage set by the law of 5,530 fichas per month, pre-taxes, and I know of no cases where this was challenged. Second, in two of its articles, the law the union helped draft actually went against, albeit diagonally, the practice of the "daily car rent," and the peculiarity that the employee rents out the means of production from the employer. Yet the practice continues, virtually unchallenged, and is by far the most common arrangement. Sebastián received 900 ARS per day from his chofer; Federico paid just over that amount to his employer. But the point is that at the end of the month, from whatever money employers had received, they had to calculate all transferences to the union in terms of the multipliers set by the law. The union policed these contributions, its main lifeblood, more ferociously than the taxman.
The first floor of the union's headquarters was a wide, open space, with the furniture disposition and aura of a call center. "All of these people are union delegates," Malena explained, pointing at around a dozen and a half people wearing the union's informal uniform: a black and yellow jacket emblazoned with its leader's name on the back. Union delegates were relatively junior members; their job during their parttime shifts was to chase up the union charges indexed to the ficha, check the database the union shared with the government and employers' associations for proper registrations, handle employees' paperwork, and reroute them to the union's lawyers when cases became too complex. This kind of policing was independent of any controls by tax authorities. These were union members-cum-employees surveilling labor relations in their industry with the explicit goal of ensuring that in terms of transferences and payments the law was being followed, reproducing choferes as proper laboring subjects vis-a-vis the trade, city authorities, and the union all at once. This reproduction worked from one day to the next, from one month to the next, and to the tune of several multiples of a ficha emancipated from the uncertainties of taxi work, it ensured the stability of economic and financial flows into the coffers of the union.
Sebastián's relationship to the union, affectively dense, was mediated by the ficha and the amounts it was written into in several ways. A few days after he went to register the chofer driving the second taxi he owned, union delegates began calling him regularly. A mistake had been made when entering the chofer's social security number, and contributions had not gone through properly. Sebastián had to be physically present at the union's headquarters with his own documents, those of the car he owned, and those of the driver he was seeking to employ. Months later, he was summoned again after being accused of making a smaller transfer to the union the previous month. He had not, but sorting out the misunderstanding took a few phone calls and weeks.
Partly for these reasons, he thought the public hearing was a pantomime. The rate of the ficha's increase and the act of the increase in itself would have been agreed by the union, who was "always there," beforehand. Why, if that was not the case, had it not gone up months ago, when propietarios' associations started complaining about it? Sebastián's reasoning, drenched in his frustration with the union, was both wrong and right. I asked Malena how the union could afford not to attend the hearing to lobby for a value of the ficha that would maximize their income. Malena shook her head: The taxi owners' associations get restless way before we do when inflation bites. They are smaller traders, many of them drive their own taxis, and it is much harder for them to cushion financially and economically. If they drive their own taxi, rising costs eat into their own income. If they employ a chofer, they can only raise the car rent so much before the equation becomes impossible even to the most eager and competent chofer in the world, so still their general income dwindles down. Of course, our income in real terms also falls, but the nature of the union's income still guarantees its functioning, partly because it is independent of actual levels of economic activity, and partly because with our scale we can manage uncertainty much better than them. Long before inflation is a problem for us, taxi owners have done the lobbying and fighting for fare revisions.
For as long as she remembered, it had always been the owners' associations pushing first for fare revisions, and it had certainly been so this time. Malena confirmed, too, that the indexing of the salary and all relevant flows to the ficha had also been expressly sought by the union to do away with paritarias and their discussions. Not only are the union's income flows shielded from continuous renegotiation on terms that could in principle be up for grabs, but also paritarias are in themselves instances of attrition, always exposed to public view in an economic and political context as uncertain as Argentina's.
The messy materiality of real life often interacts in unexpected ways with the rationalizations and designs through which market devices are imagined (Hébert 2014). In the case of the ficha, however, economic anxieties, affective dispositions, and bureaucratic meticulousness are all working alongside the ficha's arithmetical properties and legal framework to shape economic relations in a way we could describe as successful, or at least sufficiently aligned with the original expectations. However, the ficha's capacity to frame and organize existing and emerging relations is one and the same with its capacity to create different kinds of certainty that affect different actants in particular patterns. Hedged economically and financially from the vagaries of an extremely uncertain market of exchanges and the actual output and value of labor, the union's structural position in the industry and in the lives of its workers is strengthened with the monthly iterations of these calculations at an industrial scale. As this case study shows, it is precisely the multiplicity of actants and the various ways in which they can act on each other that incentivizes some among them to seek to stabilize uncertainty, to funnel open-endedness, and to restrict variability in their favor. Put simply, there is a political economy to these relations, a temporal and logical regularity and a distribution where some events are, or are understood to be, likelier than others to the point of maximizing their chances to exist in the future-to reproduce themselves.

Inscription: Labor, Market Devices, and New Technologies
The ficha creates and frames exchanges between several actants, like any market device would. In doing so, the ficha also inscribes the relations it indexes with a mark greater than that its condition as a mere multiplier would in principle imply. This mark lay in the ratio between the time it took propietarios to feel the urge to request a fare revision and the time the union could afford; in the differential between the salary the law writes the ficha into, and thus union charges, and the salary a chofer actually perceives; and in the ways in which all the relations revised in this article pan out differentially for particular actors in ways that are not random.
Implied in the original theorization of market devices is the notion that when mobilized in economic exchanges, actants behave in unexpected and un-programmatic ways, which in turn force other actants to respond and position themselves in an ever-changing space of relations. To examine a market device through a political economy analysis is not to kill off its versatility, empiricism, and pragmatic power-it is not to create a "political economy device," so to speak. In fact, it is precisely by taking these uncertainties seriously as such, as did my own informants more than anyone else, that it is visible how, perhaps unsurprisingly, those same actants drew on laws, arithmetical properties, and affect to craft particular kinds of certainties. In this sense, one cannot understand the ficha as market device without examining these certainties and their conditions of emergence, which are, themselves, only revealed by a political economy examination. One could not make full ethnographic sense of these exchanges without examining the actions of the ficha, but equally, one could not understand the actions of the ficha without understanding how other actors are positioned with respect to it and the exchanges it creates and acts on. Written into those exchanges, playing out in impossibly varied uncertain ways in every single one of the 1.5 million taxi rides of Buenos Aires each day, complex processes of production and accumulation reproduce themselves in ways that even some of its transactors do not fully comprehend.
It is precisely in light of this last consideration that I hope this examination of the ficha as a market device will provoke us to make inscription as a political economy trope central in conceptualizing future labor relations. If the dispersion of actants interacting with the ficha required a political economic analysis to unravel all the relations the latter is written into, and reproducing, in a comparatively straightforward industry, the challenges new technologies present to an anthropology of work are Herculean. This does not mean new technologies are necessarily market devices just because they involve bits, algorithms, and fiber optics. A good old shopping cart can be framed as a market device (Grandeclément and Cochoy, 2006). But the layers upon layers of code, maximizations, software, interfaces, hardware, and electromagnetism that make, for example, ride-sharing or food delivery economy platforms, are already effectively being used and reflected on by their users around the world in a rationality that privileges the immanence, dispersion, and multiplicity of economic exchange reasoning-the tropes of efficiency, optima, price surges, and even notions of quality and expertise (del Nido, forthcoming). Not only is the stuff and interaction of these layers barely comprehensible to the vast majority of the population, it is also often deliberately built to be secretive and inaccessible to the layperson (Noble 2018;Rosenblat 2018;Rosenblat and Stark 2016).
New technologies are not only reinventing how we work but redefining what even counts as work and what work is made of. Beyond binaries, these redefinitions build on, and speak of, emergent relations and fleeting opportunities. However, the structures of authority, the distribution of various forms of capital and the concrete, material effects of uncertainty are far more often reproduced than not, and the differential mark I referenced above is always, strangely, carried by the same actants. In this sense, the market devices approach as deployed in this article would allow us to take the open-endedness and dispersed agency of these labor relations seriously, as economic exchanges, while at the same time forcing our gaze toward the "terms and conditions" inscribed into the algorithms that outright invent these relations and confirm them with a single tap.

Conclusion
The virtue of the market devices approach is its eclecticism. As I have shown for the case of the taxi ficha in Buenos Aires, anything can become, if properly leveraged and framed, an assemblage creating and organizing economic relations around it. Through the ficha, the terms of exchange of the taxi ride, set by the government, penetrated the fiscal and financial duties of employers and employees, the nature of the employment relation and the legal framework that gave sense to all of them. As I have shown, the work of taxi drivers is an exceptionally apt example of the continuously emerging uncertainties of economic exchange, and in this sense, the ficha cannot be understood as anything other as a device that, in organizing and creating those exchanges, brought particular kinds of certainty to some of the actants involved. Because of this, it was impossible to fully understand the circumstances and consequences of economic exchanges at the market level without tracing how the ficha was crucial to a differential mark in the relations between these actants. By inserting the market devices approach and its economic reasoning emphasis in the tradition of a political economy analysis, I have argued that the work of market devices must also be understood in light of the patterns of production and accumulation written into it, and thus secured and reproduced by its workings. Foregrounding simultaneously the smoothness with which market devices carry the terms of their conception into the markets and economic exchanges they shape, and the embeddedness of those terms in existing political economy patterns, I believe the trope of inscription offers a productive way of conceptualizing the structural effects of market devices. Labor relations are amongst the most contentiously affected by technological disruptions. Also, wages, work conditions, management, and the question of what even counts as work are thorny reminders that labor relations are fraught with profound asymmetries that these disruptions will most likely exacerbate. A political economy approach making use of the market devices toolkit will be particularly well placed to examine how work relations, in the fleeting immanence of market exchange, still carry the mark of complex and persistent inequalities that are ever harder to unmask.