Informal Workers and Organized Action: Narratives from the Global South

There remains a disconnect as far as our understanding of the relationship between the labour's choice to unionize as individual actor and the broader socio-economic, political and cultural context of that choice, is concerned. At a more micro level, we do not know what shapes an individual worker's decision to participate in unionization and how her working condition is affected by that. Part of this is due to the absolute lack of micro data on informal workers' organizing. This book overcomes this data constraint by utilizing the School to Work Transition Survey (SWTS) of the ILO. Using the SWTS data, the book focuses on the identification of the correlates of workers' propensity to unionize, the outcomes of unionizing and their synthesis with the wider political economy context to arrive at stylized patterns in the way informal workers exercise their agency. The book also reflects upon field data on organizing challenges of migrant workers in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The book does not claim to establish any causality but is interested in bringing out broad patterns that define informal workers' organizing in a particular context. In the process, the book ends up with the preposition that despite all the heterogeneities across regions, informal workers' organizing today can be understood through the lens of pragmatism. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first book to offer a quantitative analysis of informal workers' organizing, followed by its integration with the context it occurs.