Organizing Informal Workers Globally: Comparing a Global Union Federation and a Global Informal Worker Organization Network

With economic globalization and with the precarization and informalization of work, efforts have increased to build global labour alliances among formal workers on the one hand and to organize informal workers on the other. These two endeavours overlap considerably. Global labor organizations have taken on a growing role in organizing and advocating for informal workers. I explore this overlap by comparing two global labour federations: one arising from heterogeneous networks of informal workers—the International Domestic Workers Federation—and a longstanding one of formal employees that has increasingly attempted to include informal workers—the Building and Wood Workers International. The contrast reveals similarities, divergences and trade-offs, with important implications for the future potential for building global organizations of informal workers.

Publisher: Département des relations industrielles de l’Université Laval