Wasted Opportunities - the Production of Power and the Challenges to Organizing Informal Reclaimers

Movements and organizations attempting to organize informal workers are constantly faced with the challenge of overcoming social divisions and power relations between informal workers. And yet, the burgeoning literature on organizing informal workers pays curiously scant attention to the ways in which power relations between informal workers shape  the ways in which they organize and circumscribe their terrain for political action.  This paper explores how the informal institutions that reclaimers (waste pickers)  develop in order to govern their labour process produce power laden social identities and relations that hinder their ability to organize collectively to transform their place within the value chain. Although grounded in an ethnographic study of reclaimers on a garbage dump in Soweto, South Africa, it draws on comparative experiences in Asia and Latin America in order to draw out the broader implications for the theorization and practice of organizing informal workers.