Suchergebnisse

Public understandings of informality as a transitionary state on the way to formalization connects with a general lack of recognition of people in the informal economy as collective political actors and more specifically a lack of institutionalized spaces where informal traders can represent themselves for example in discussions about the use of public space or the design of Social Protection (SP) policies. Although the micro-trade sector is poorly coordinated, recently, a few attempts at broader coalitions and cooperation has taken place perhaps pointing towards a future strengthening of representational power. Meanwhile, informal trader associations provide a range of SP services in a system based on reciprocity. While these measures extend only limited coverage, they nonetheless provide services which for most informal micro-traders are difficult or impossible to access elsewhere.

This article investigates the ongoing efforts of trade unions in Kenya and Tanzania to enlarge their constituency by reconceptualising the notion of workers to include people in the informal economy. How this process plays out is of immense importance as it challenges established understandings of who a worker is; this in turn poses very difficult questions about rights, representation and the distribution of power both internally in the union movements and in society at large. Based on original interview data, the article unpacks this highly contested and politicised process. The article shows how union efforts reflect different ways of tackling the need to constitute people working informally as workers and union members in order to increase the social base, and thereby increase political clout. However, these processes are juxtaposed with the urge to maintain traditional boundaries and protect established privileges and power structures, both internally in the unions and externally in the fragile compromise inscribed in the existing tripartite structures. KEYWORDS: informal workers; informal economy; trade unions; Kenya; Tanzania

This working paper examines the ongoing and contested reconceptualizing of who is to be represented by the trade union movement in Tanzania and Kenya. In order to include informal workers, a new and broader understanding of who a worker is becomes necessary, but this in turn poses difficult questions about rights, entitlements, representation and distribution of resources and political power – both within the trade union movement and in the broader societal context. Using original interview data, the working paper reveals different trade union strategies towards balancing the dilemmas posed by including informal workers into the trade union movement with some distinguishable patterns related to differences in the nature of the employment relations of the informal workers. Overall, while efforts are made to emphasize that informal workers are indeed workers – with a view to increasing union membership informal – workers are at the same time considered to be different and in addition a potential threat to the coherence and established order of the union movement.

This paper investigates how the global social protection (SP) agenda touches down in thecontext of petty traders in Tanzania. It examines and compare the SP models conceptualizedand implemented 'from above' by public authorities with what petty traders and theircollective associations do on the ground 'from below'. The data shows that SP offered bypublic channels do not correspond well with the key challenges experienced byinformal traders. First, petty traders are in public discourses conceptualized as smallbusinesses - not as workers. This correlates with an understanding of work-related SP(like unemployment benefit, paid maternity leave, severance pay, work-injury compensationetc.) as pertaining to people in formal employment only. Nonetheless, our data indicate,that the SP needs of informal traders cannot be separated from their work relatedchallenges (such as unhealthy working environments and irregular income). Second,voice and representation is not considered part of SP and people in the informaleconomy are generally not seen as collective political actors who should have access torepresentation in their own right. Our data however, shows that help with negotiatingwith authorities (with regards to access to trading space, harassment or eviction) is ofkey importance to petty traders. Third, while there is an opening towards enablinginclusion of informal workers in less directly-work related SP such as health insuranceand old age pensions, the schemes which are elaborated (or planned) are simply adjustedversions of existing schemes modeled on the needs and abilities of formal workersdemanding regular and long term commitment. SP services are however also offered byinformal traders own associations and though the specific services vary a lot betweenassociations, they generally correspond quite closely to the key challenges experienced byinformal traders. In contrast to the public SP models, the SP models employed byinformal traders own associations are based on trust and reciprocity and directedtowards flexible but also limited cushioning against more short-term needs.

Sustainability initiatives have proliferated in many industries in recent years. This has led to an increasing number of standards that exist in parallel seeking to address more or less the same social and environmental issues. In this paper I explore whether parallelism has spurred a race to the bottom in flower standards seeking to regulate social conditions in the production of cut flowers aimed at the European Union market. The analysis suggests that while less stringent standards still dominate, so-called higher bar standards are gaining importance, as is the active inclusion of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and trade unions in monitoring standard compliance – a practice which potentially could allow standards to address more locally embedded and hidden problems like for example discrimination or lack of freedom of association. Nevertheless, less stringent standards still predominate and although an ongoing multi-stakeholder harmonisation initiative has real potential to 'scale up' more stringent standards, so far it has mainly benefited developed – not developing – country growers and workers.

Export of cut flowers from East Africa to Europe is an example of how tightened quality regulations and increasing concern with social and environmental issues have created a highly codified industry. For producers participating in value chains driven by large retailers, adopt-ing social and environmental standards is a requirement and specificities are dictated by the buyers. In this paper focus is on private social standards and the opportunities and challenges they pose for labour organizations, especially trade unions. By incorporating the concept of labour agency, global value chain analysis is widened to encompass not just industrial development but also labour development. The analysis reveals how strongly-driven retailer chains offer more room for labour to exert its agency than the traditional auction strand of the value chain. Labour organizations can choose to 'ride' the standards, exploiting them to gain influence and advance their own projects. They can also choose to position themselves against the social standards, thereby contesting the legitimacy of private social standards and at the same time delimiting themselves from exploit-ing some of the opportunities offered by these standards. Labour organizations have been able to influence social standard setting and implementation, and to use standards to further labour representation at production sites. However, their ability to seriously challenge the prevailing governance structure of the flower value chain towards more labour representation appears extremely limited. Indeed, it poses a tremendous task to challenge a governance structure that is driven by large powerful retailers employing strategies such as cost-cutting and just-in-time ordering – strategies that put additional pressure on suppliers and promote labour flexibilization and not labour organization.

Mask-wearing political protests have been global front page news for several years now; yet, almost no literature exists which attempts to engage the symbolic density and ritual role played by such mask-wearing acts. We argue that mask-wearing has political potentiality which relates to deeper-lying anthropological features of mask-wearing. The powers of the mask reside in the transformative ability of masks to unify and transcend key oppositional categories such as absence/presence and death/life, creating possibilities where conventional boundaries of the possible/impossible no longer restrict. By questioning the communicative rationality of the modern 'public' and the 'sphere' in which it operates, we approach mask-wearing as a 'communicative opening'. Building on earlier critiques of liberal democratic normativity, we further argue that the 'utopia of transparency' is itself a regulatory power and that mask-wearing exposes the very notions that were supposed to form the background of modern, emancipatory politics: transparency, free speech and representative democracy.

Since the 1980s, various processes of economic globalisation have eroded established found-ations of organised labour. The increased mobility of goods and capital, compared to labour's relative immobility, has made it more difficult for labour to advance its objectives through traditional local industrial action or tripartite social contracts. In this paper, we are concerned with the social regulation of global value chains (GVCs) and more specifically the room for manoeuvre that organised labour has for advancing social regulation in different GVCs via Private Social Standards and/ or International Framework Agreements. We argue, that the governance structure (and restructuring) of GVCs frame key elements of the terrain that enables and constrains labour's strategic opportunities for advancing the social regulation of GVCs. Empirically, the paper is based on detailed case studies of the banana and cut flower value chains. Based on the cases we argue, first of all, that a high level of drivenness constitutes a precondition for social regulation along a GVC strand to take place. Secondly, the functional position of the drivers (e.g. producer- and buyer-driven contexts) determines the particular terrains on which contests for the social regulation of GVCs take place and creates different leverage points that may be activated to achieve social regulation. Thirdly, it is historically and locally specific levels of workplace organisation and trade union resources that determine how labour in practice exercises its agency towards social regulation. The reorganisation of GVCs, while seriously constraining some of the more traditional trade union strategies, nevertheless opens new opportunities and new leverage points that can be strategically exploited by labour. The social standard mechanisms reviewed in this paper illustrate some of the new instruments that in addition to other labour strategies constitute potential fruitful avenues in particular GVC terrains.

This chapter provides an overview of the relevant formal social protection (SP) frameworks in Kenya and Tanzania, focusing on how they relate (or not) to informal workers, including recent advances made in this regard. The chapter also positions the formal SP schemes in relation to the SP literature and shows that both countries are undergoing a gradual shift from the mostly residual towards the more universal end of the SP spectrum, albeit at their own pace. For instance, whilst universal health coverage has become a major policy priority in Tanzania, progress is further ahead in Kenya where a universal health insurance pilot program was carried out in four counties during 2020. As for pensions, newer models range from being fully government funded to relying on informal worker (and employer) contributions, the latter limiting the effectiveness and sustainability of the schemes. Although SP coverage has increased for the general population in both Kenya and Tanzania, when it comes to informal workers, uptake remains limited due to the factors like the cost burden, inadequate benefits, and lack of information on the different SP options.

AbstractIn recent years, various academics, consultants, companies and NGOs have advocated a move towards more cooperative approaches to private sustainability standards to address the widely identified shortcomings of the compliance paradigm. However, is it possible to address these limitations by moving towards stakeholder inclusion and capacity building while at the same time catering to the demands of lead firms supplying the mainstream market? In this article, we analyse how the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) seeks to do just that, in the process identifying three key tensions and competing policy concerns with which standard‐setters have had to grapple – (a) stakeholder inclusion vs process‐control/efficiency; (b) stringency of the standard vs scale of production; and (c) capacity building vs auditing. Combining theoretical considerations about governance in global production networks (GPNs) with a convention theory perspective, we explore these inherent tensions and show that due to pre‐existing power relations in the cotton GPN, it is hard to develop more cooperative approaches because market and industrial values tend to win out despite efforts to follow current best practice on sustainability standard‐setting.