The power of informal transport workers

Dave Spooner

Urban passenger transport in developing countries is dominated by the informal economy. Informal transport workplaces – bus terminals, taxi ranks, motorcycle taxi stands, and minibus parks – are major transport hubs of national economic and political importance.

Most of the world’s transport workers are informal. They face police harassment, criminal extortion, job insecurity, low incomes, discrimination, and no access to social security. Yet they provide essential services for millions across the world. In Asia and Africa most urban passenger transport is informal, employing many thousands of workers in a wide range of occupations. Women workers are the most precarious and low paid in the sector, facing discrimination, violence, sexual harassment and abuse. Informal work is now also widespread in the developed world with the proliferation of transport jobs in the ‘gig economy’.

Motorcycle taxis, couriers and delivery services are increasingly popular in congested cities. Huge numbers are involved. In Kampala, Uganda, for example, the authorities estimate there are 120 000 boda-boda (motorcycle) operators. In 2013 the boda-boda industry in Uganda was the second largest employer after agriculture, reported Standard Bank researchers (Nasasira, 2015).

A worker-driven way out of the crisis in Mediterranean agriculture

Giulio Iocco

Karin Astrid Siegmann

SOS Rosarno, an association of farmworkers, farmers and activists in Calabria, Italy, represents an innovative response from below to the extreme exploitation and precarity of migrant farmworkers in the Mediterranean region, as well as to the retailer-driven crisis of small-scale farming. 



The crisis of farmwork
Agriculture is a major employer in Rosarno, an enclave of intensive citrus fruit production in southwestern Calabria. Here, each year, growers employ about 5 000 farmworkers. Since the late 1980s, foreign migrant labourers gradually became essential within this workforce, now totalling approximately 2 500 migrants. While indispensable to value addition in the regional citrus fruit sector, they endure extremely harsh conditions.

Migrant farmworkers receive only about two thirds of the minimum wages established by local labour contracts, while commonly working longer than the stipulated limit. For specific tasks, piece-rate payment further increases the incidence of overtime. Farmworkers also experience extreme precarity in employment relations: discontinuous daily employment, informal contracts without social security entitlements, and indirect hiring through intermediaries. The latter’s fees further reduce already meagre wages. Appalling working conditions are compounded by extremely precarious living conditions. Within a highly stratified workforce, West African workers - the reserve army of seasonal farm labour – experience the worst conditions. The vast majority live either in an over-crowded tent town or in abandoned buildings where they have no or very limited access to electricity, hygienic services like clean water. Their legal precarity prevents them from exercising basic civic and human rights. Owing to the lack of adequate action by unions, this isolation further increases their vulnerability vis-à-vis labour intermediaries and employers (Garrapa 2016, MEDU 2017).