Comparing street vendor organizing strategies: Learning from cross-national and cross-city comparisons

• In Event: 20481 - Section on Sociology of Development Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1. Mobilization and Social Movements

Abstract

Informal work engages the majority of the global workforce, and scholarship about how to achieve better work has increasingly encompassed informal as well as formal workers. The last decade has seen a flowering of research on informal worker organizing. This body of scholarship has made important contributions, but has given only limited attention to organizational-level dynamics that shape organizations’ forms and strategies. In this paper we take a closer look at such organizational dynamics in street vendor organizations. We use an exploratory nested comparative design—comparing organizations across two cities in each of Mexico and the United States—to uncover and analyze differences in organizational outcomes. We particularly focus on services provided to vendor-members and leadership structures as outcome variables.

The four cities in our sample are Mexico City and Oaxaca (a state capital in the lower-income South of Mexico) in Mexico, and New York and Los Angeles in the United States. We have observed meetings, actions, workshops, and day-to-day organizing by the organizations under study, as participants or invited observers—in addition to observing street vending in the four cities. We have interviewed key leaders, including member-leaders and paid staff where they exist.

Our findings fall into five areas. The first two don’t concern organizational dynamics, but provide context: the power resources each organization mobilizes, and the centrality of the basic right to vend. Three other elements highlight organizational functioning. One is how the organizations fit into larger organizational ecosystems advocating for vendor rights. A second element is the services the groups provide to their members. A third element is the mechanisms for leadership selection and development. We have tentatively grouped the organizations into three organizational models, and attempt to explain the differences among the models in terms of available resources and the disposition and legacy of each organization.

Authors

• Chris Tilly, University of California-Los Angeles

• Georgina Rojas-Garcia, CIESAS

• Alonso Pérez-Avendaño, CIESAS