Who Works and What Doesn’t: Conceptions of ‘Informal’ Work and New Directions in Labour Protection

In this paper, I explore an often overlooked but highly relevant cause behind different organisational settings and objectives of trade unions and social movements/networks: diverging conceptions of labour and work, and relatedly, diverging agendas for workers’ rights and social protection. Central to these contestations is the notion of ‘informal’ work, which categorises the majority of work relations in the Global South but represents the opposite of the standard employment relation on which tripartite labour regulation traditionally rests. However, accompanied by spreading informal and precarious labour in the Global North, recent years have seen coordination and rapprochement among labour activists on these issues. I illustrate these dynamics in two parts: First, I follow the conceptual discussion on informal, precarious and ‘decent’ work in academic debate and in global labour organisations. Second, drawing on seven months of fieldwork in Dar es Salaam, I analyse conflicts and convergences between strategies of Tanzanian trade unions, supported by the ILO Country Office, and local and transnational networks to organise and represent workers in the sectors of street trade and domestic work. I argue that while major labour organisations previously tended to neglect workers in sectors categorised as ‘informal’, global and local networks successfully rallied for rights of informal economy workers and led to small but significant changes in the conception of labour protection and trade union strategies, particularly concerning domestic workers.