The labour market is a key institution for shaping the distribution of resources in an economy. This is true for two reasons. First, wages are an important source of income for most individuals. Second, the wage relationship is a key site of contestation over the resources that are produced.
However, in Africa the industrial working class is very much a minority of wage earners. Instead, what you have are quite flexible classes of labour. What I mean by this is that while people still need to sell their labour power – either directly on a wage labour market or indirectly through some form of product market – categories like ‘worker’, ‘peasant’, ‘employed’ and ‘self-employed’ are fluid.
This presents a unique challenge for organising labour in Africa, however groups of precarious workers, NGOs and some trade unions are trying. I would like to present three case studies to illustrate this development. First, labour broker workers at Heineken’s brewery in South Africa illustrate how organising in the formal sector takes place while “working under conditions of informality”. Second, Tanzania’s dala dala workers – informal minibus drivers and their assistants – demonstrate workers’ efforts to challenge informalisation in the public transport sector. And third, informal tailors in Nigeria give us a good look at how formal and informal workers can come together under a single textile workers’ union. I conclude by emphasising the hybrid nature of the forms of organisation that are forming on the periphery of the labour movement in Africa.
