This article takes an ethnographic perspective to analyse the ways in which social movements in Buenos Aires, Argentina, politicise experiences of precarity through the creation of popular economy initiatives. I argue that we cannot understand these organising processes exclusively in relation to the pursuit of ‘formalisation’ or the improvement of working conditions. In the context of new forms of State intervention, the notions of ‘rights’—to labour and to the city—that these movements put forward, express ways of envisioning full inclusion in society that encompass notions of worthiness and ‘dignified life’, forged over the course of grassroots political action.