Formal Organising in the Informal Sector: The Hawker Sangram Committee and the Politics of Hawking in Kolkata, India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this article offers a close reading of the Hawker Sangram Committee (HSC), an independent street vendors’ union in the city of Kolkata in the state of West Bengal in eastern India; I explore the manner in which the politics of the HSC expand or complicate our understanding of street vendor politics and informal worker organising in the Global South. I argue that the HSC’s ability to implement its politics and successfully organise rests heavily on its dual strategy of organising (simultaneously building the struggle at the macro and micro level), which widened from space-bound little struggles to larger collective action (while still holding on to the former). I contend that the execution of this dual strategy is possible because of its structure, in which its member unions function autonomously, with member union organisers/leaders connecting the local hawkers to the central HSC leadership. Thus member unions comfortably negotiate a relationship where they participate as the HSC, with no political party banners, on work and livelihood issues related to hawking, while retaining their autonomy and various political identities at all other times. This parallel relationship has arguably built a stable base from which the HSC movement was able to scale city-wide, nationally and internationally, without disintegrating at the local level. KEYWORDS: informal workers; street vendors; hawkers; Hawker Sangram Committee; Global South
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".