This research addresses the work conditions in the Argentine garment industry and the forms of trade union organisation within the Unión de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (UTEP, Popular Economy Workers Union). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and political collaboration with this union, it engages with recent anthropological works on capitalism, labour, and value that have set the grounds to rethink the economy ‘otherwise’ combining contributions from political economy and feminism. Against mainstream and scholarly views that describe popular economies as either ‘marginal’ or ‘alternative’ to market economies, it upholds two main contentions. Firstly, it shows that within contemporary popular economies, social relations usually considered ‘non-economic’ or ‘non-productive’ (intimacy, kinship, politics, ethnic and community relations) are critical to the production of commodities and processes of accumulation by dispossession. Secondly, this research demonstrates that such social ties also made possible the development of collective organisations to extend citizenship and transform unequal supply chains. To do so, this union combined political experimentations with the economy and the production of garments for the market with collective life-sustaining practices such as the provision of care and the struggle for urban space. Thus, this research underscores how contemporary struggles for labour rights and citizenship in Latin America are reinventing trade union politics and challenging distinctions between production/social reproduction, social movements/labour movements, and labour struggles/struggles for place.