Abstract
Reviewed by: Ana Villarreal, Boston University, MA, USA DOI: 10.1177/0730888418769954
Can informal workers organize? Traditional trade unions have long considered informal workers—those who do not receive legal or social protections through their work—as either outside the scope of their responsibility or simply unorganizable. Yet informal work is on the rise in the developed world and has long been predominant in the developing world, pressing traditional trade unions and scholars to pay increased attention to informal workers’ potential for collective action. While much research in this emerging field focuses on the challenges that traditional trade unions face when trying to organize informal workers, this volume emphasizes the multiple ways in which informal workers are organizing around the world.
Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective is innovative in its scope and claims. Drawing on extensive interviews and focus groups with workers, organizational leaders, and stakeholders, this edited volume brings together nine cases of successful informal worker collective action from different occupations in the Global South identified by the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (Solidarity Center) and supported by the Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). The editors Adrienne Eaton, Susan Schurman, and Martha Chen argue that the multiple types of organizations and campaigns featured in this volume call for a broader definition of labor organizing. From Colombia to Liberia, the organizing strategies included in this book push the boundaries of what is commonly considered collective bargaining and even who is commonly considered an employer. On the ground, this new labor movement resembles the old one that emerged in 19th-century England—one that included not only trade unions but also labor parties and cooperatives relying on collective bargaining among other means of securing a better livelihood for all workers. The editors assert that in order to confront the challenges of the current global economy, the global labor movement needs to “recover its historic moral claim to seek human and social rights for all workers and to incorporate many new forms of organization” (p. 17).
The book is structured along two sections to differentiate two types of informal workers: waged workers and the self-employed, although these ideal types may overlap in workers’ lives. In Part I, port workers in Buenaventura, Colombia leverage support from the Solidarity Center to reinstate their formal status through the creation of a new independent union in an extremely dangerous anti-union environment. In South Africa, a trade union organizes multiple strikes with formal and informal workers in retail to raise the minimum of fixed hours for both. In the Dominican Republic, Haitian migrant workers cannot be incorporated into unions by law, but a major labor federation began to advocate for immigration policy reform. In Uruguay, domestic workers are among the few in the world to have the right to collective bargaining. In Cambodia, beer promoters working for commissions became formally employed with the assistance of a local independent union and pressure from foreign unions. In Tunisia, the national labor federation and its affiliates pressured an incoming regime through political alliances, strikes, and protests to end subcontracting in various public-sector agencies. Part II is focused on the organizing strategies of the self-employed. Minibus drivers in Georgia joined an existing union to secure their jobs and basic benefits. Waste pickers in Brazil organized a social movement and pressured the House of Representatives of Minas Gerais to pass a law that recognizes their environmental service. Street vendors in Liberia created a union to negotiate their rights with state authorities from the local police to the President. In sum, informal workers are organizing with the support of traditional unions, and this move from competition to collaboration might be the key to renew the global labor movement.
It is no mere task to coordinate a global research team in order to identify nine successful cases of informal worker collective action from around the world. Case selection followed the priorities of the Solidarity Center, and I was left wondering what we might have learned from the unsuccessful cases that could either confirm or refute the central claims in this volume. After all, why workers fail to organize is a central question in the sociology of work. Nevertheless, this volume shows that workers around the world are finding new and old ways to organize, and I join the editors in hoping that their stories will inspire others to do the same.