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Chris Tilly
UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment
The global ascendancy of neoliberalism has brought with it the growth of informal employment. Informality tends to disarm trade unions, both because informal workers lack legal rights and because they lack market or structural power. There are successes in organizing informal workers, ranging from India’s SEWA to US immigrant worker centers, along with domestic worker and street vendor associations world-wide, but most arise from community-based organizing with little union involvement. Some unions have recognized the importance of organizing informal workers, and there have been important experiments in joint action. But such experiments remain limited, and much union activity around “informal” work involves policing the boundaries of existing unionized work, focusing on subcontracting and the like, rather than more individualized, fundamentally informal forms of employment. On the whole, organizing informal workers remains a continuing challenge for trade unions.
This paper will offer a comparative survey documenting what the existing literature tells us about how formal unions have or have not interacted with or participated in organizing informal worker organizing in five countries: Brazil, China, Mexico, South Africa, and the USA, focusing on key examples of notable successes and failures. The five countries have several shared features: all are large countries in which formal unions had significant power in an earlier epoch; all have neoliberalized; all have seen significant growth trends in informal employment. There is also a key contrast: China, Mexico, and USA have weak unions; Brazil and South Africa have strong unions. The paper is designed to be programmatic as well, asking the question, “What kind of collaborative, comparative, fieldwork-based research would be most effective in advancing our knowledge of this issue?