The Unexpected Power of Informal Workers in the Public Square: A Comparison of Mexican and US Organizing Models

Abstract

Street vendors in Mexico and day laborers in the United States, both groups of informal workers who labor in public space, face formidable structural obstacles to securing their rights as workers. Despite their apparent vulnerability, these informal workers have built perhaps the most powerful informal worker organizations in their countries. In this article, we explore and explain to the extent possible the sources, forms, and limits of this unexpected power. We explore organizational and strategic commonalities as well as differences and seek to explain both.

The Informal Economy Revisited

“…Organisations of informal women construction workers in India have won tripartite welfare funds (Agarwala 2013). US day labourers also fall in the intermediate range, having won the legal right to solicit work in public, in some localities also gaining funding to run job centres and provide a variety of services (Sarmiento et al 2016). • A few organisations have overcome the odds to achieve even more substantial successes.…”

Union Campaigns against Precarious Work in the Retail Sector of Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia

“…In other words, the political aspects of workers' solidarity, which are often lost in technical aspects of organising and collective bargaining (Simms et al 2012), are the sine qua non condition to counteract precarisation. Notably, the efforts to build links with workers' communities beyond workplaces, which was said to be crucial in precarious workers' organising in other contexts (Chun and Agarwala 2016;Sarmiento et al 2016), are still relatively weak in all three countries studied. In Estonia, where organising campaigns of precarious retail workers have already borne some fruit, the challenge seems to be linking these clear, though limited, economic achievements at the company level to a more politically oriented approach that could reach beyond the workplace level.…”

“…In sectors such as retail, in which structural power of workers is limited, trade unions have to rely more on various forms of associational power (Silver 2003). Research on precarious workers organising (Chun and Agarwala 2016;Sarmiento et al 2016) provides evidence that the types of associational power that are crucial to success are those linked to union capacities to build links with workers' communities beyond workplaces, utilise their discursive power to address new targets of claims (states, customers, MNCs) and build new, solidaristic identities among the workers themselves. Framed in the language of power resources theory (Levesque and Murray 2010, 339), unions need both new kinds of network embeddedness (solidarities manifested into horizontal and vertical links with other unions and civil society organisations) and narrative resources (i.e.…”

Governance Lessons from Urban Informality

“…Our concern, however, is with understanding informal actors' contributions to governance: understanding how, in the current period of development, displacement and disinvestment, workers and settlers in these cities have often succeeded in winning recognition for their rights of access and possession despite breaching laws and regulations. For instance, Los Angeles construction day laborers, Mexico City street vendors and Bogota waste recyclers defend their right to ply their trades in urban spaces that are by law off limits to them (Rosaldo, 2016;Sarmiento, de la Garza, Gayosso, & Tilly, 2016). In Latin America newcomers to the city extra-legally seize land to build informal settlements that later win state recognition.…”