Beyond Established Unions: The Informal Transport Sector and Worker-Led Organizing in Tanzania

There is a growing academic interest in trade union organizing among urban informal workers across the Global South. Much recent research focuses on established trade unions, often staff-led, affiliated to a national trade union congress, and with additional ties to international donors. The emphasis is then on how these established unions expand beyond a core membership of formal employees to also recruit informal workers, either directly or via their associations (Rizzo 2017; Spooner and Mwanika 2018; Steiler 2023). This literature makes a vital contribution. However, there are forms of labour organizing that occur independently of established trade unions—or that are even in tension with these unions—which deserve more attention (Atzeni 2021; Bieler and Nowak 2021; Nyamsenda 2018). This paper develops this point through a study of organizing among informal transport workers in Tanzania. It takes as a focal point a 2015 strike involving different categories of road transport worker—city bus drivers, upcountry bus drivers, and some truck drivers. The strike represents one of the few instances of nationwide industrial action in Tanzania’s post-colonial history, and crucially, it was organised entirely independently of formal trade union structures. The strike had an extended pre-history, one of incremental organising and experimentation. It also had a long afterlife, spawning a new ‘worker-led’ union, a plethora of promises from the state and capital, new institutions for mediating labour relations, repeated threats of industrial action, and, in 2022, a follow-up strike among truck drivers. The paper retraces these cycles of contestation, exploring what they tell us about forms of worker-led organizing, the potential for informal transport workers to leverage ‘associational power’, and the remaining political-economic obstacles that nevertheless limit long-term improvements to precarious work conditions. The paper draws on 10 months of fieldwork in Tanzania, including semi-structured interviews, archival research, and press reviews.