Labour institutions and the dynamic production of informality: collective organisation of hard-to-reach workers in Tanzania
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses the role of labour regulation and trade unions in collective organisation of workers in non-standard, diffuse and informal labour relations in the Global South. The central argument is that labour institutions interlink with and co-create different configurations of informality and hence possibilities for collective organisation. This argument responds to calls in global labour studies for new conceptions of labour struggles that go beyond Eurocentrism and a narrow focus on traditional tools and institutions of workers’ power in the global context. Challenging the formal-informal dualism, the empirical material presented in this paper suggests a more nuanced understanding of the role of labour regulation and trade unions as sites for both the production and the contestation of the category of informal work. This is illustrated by efforts for collective organisation of hard-to-reach workers in the two dissimilar sectors of street vending and domestic work in Tanzania. Using the power resources approach as a conceptual framework for structuring the analysis, the paper examines how collective organisation interlinks dynamically with specific configurations of labour informality which derive from the labour and employment relations, labour legislation, trade union strategies, and public discourses in each sector.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".