Informal Workers’ Organizations and Class Solidarity

• In Event: 20402 - Worker Resistance in New Fields of Activism

Abstract

Over the past two decades, workers at the bottom of the labor market have become increasingly organized as they seek to improve their working and living conditions. Despite the confluence of forces acting against their collective resistance—including the atomization of work, low pay, unstable employment, and lack of labor protections—precarious workers are transforming labor movements in the global North and South. While we have accumulated knowledge of the innovative organizing strategies used by informal workers, there is a dearth of scholarship on the class politics of these new organizations. This has led some scholars to preemptively conclude that informal workers’ struggles necessarily have a particularistic and exclusionary character.Through a comparison of four organizations of platform delivery workers in São Paulo—a traditional union, a workers’ association, a social movement organization and a grassroots informal worker collective—I show that there are significant differences in how informal workers’ organizations approach class solidarity and class politics. I argue that differences in the political orientation of informal workers organizations can be largely attributed to differences in how they address organizational constraints, specifically the provision of short-term rewards to its members.

Author

• Janaina Saad, University of Wisconsin-Madison