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Chapter 1 introduces the puzzle of organized street vendors with the stories of two street vendors: Rosa, the founding leader of a champagne ladies’ union in La Paz, and Renato, who works as an unorganized electronics vendor in São Paulo. The chapter then situates the puzzle within existing research on collective action, civil society, informal work, and state capacity. According to most scholars, informal workers do not organize, which makes Rosa’s union and its affiliation with a national street vendor confederation puzzling. The chapter outlines an explanation for why informal workers organize, assesses alternative explanations around grassroots activism and clientelism, and presents the research design for the book. Specifically, it finds that officials encourage informal workers to organize self-regulating groups. The chapter argues that this is most likely to happen where officials have governance goals and career ambitions but face capacity constraints and where informal workers have the know-how to organize self-regulating groups.

Chapter 2 develops a theory of state intervention in collective action. It argues that as unorganized people create negative externalities, officials increasingly have an incentive to encourage people who organize self-regulating organizations. When officials intervene with cash, licenses, and access to the bureaucracy, they lower the barriers that kept people from organizing on their own. Once informal workers take these incentives and start organizations, officials can bargain over regulation and enforcement with representatives instead of a mass of individuals. The theory builds on contributions from Olson (1965), Ostrom (1990), and Holland (2017). The theory is formalized in a game theoretic model to show that officials and informal workers are strategically linked. The chapter uses the model to demonstrate the exact conditions under which we can expect informal workers’ organizations as a result of officials’ encouragement. The model produces multiple equilibria that reflect the different levels of organization that we observe in informal sectors around the world. The equilibrium conditions generate clear expectations for the patterns that we should see in the empirical chapters if the theory is correct.

Chapter 3 introduces survey data from around the world and establishes broad trends in informal work and civil society participation. Descriptive statistics show that informal workers organize in nearly every country in the sample and extensively organize in many. I estimate a data set of informal workers using survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and a machine learning algorithm. Regressions on the estimated data set, a data set of known informal workers, and a data set of self-employed workers suggest that informal workers are more likely to organize in low-capacity countries. The chapter then turns to survey data from the 42 countries around the world in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) database and find similar patterns between informal work, state capacity, and political participation. The quantitative analyses point to cases to examine in more depth. Two cities in the La Paz department of Bolivia, La Paz and El Alto were selected, to see how informal workers interact with officials with lower enforcement capacity, as well as two districts in São Paulo, Brazil, to understand how informal workers interact with officials with higher enforcement capacity.

This chapter investigates the magnitude of paid informal work and estimates of its scale, which have remained relatively constant since the early 1980s, ranging from 6 percent to 8 percent of GDP, despite fundamental changes in the economy and labour market over this period. It notes that Harding and Jenkins point out that a lack of regulation has been the historical norm, and changes in institutional boundaries and regulations cause a corresponding realignment of formal/informal relationships. It also examines factors based in the local economic structure, and the internal factors based in the estate's social composition that sustain demand for informal labour, goods, and services. It points out that what matters is not how many people or firms participate in informal working practices, but how those practices operate on the fringes of, yet inseparable from, the wider economy. It also explores why the informal economy works for some and not for others, and how the responses of people to a series of wider economic changes and employment insecurity draw upon resources based in localised forms of knowledge and relationships.

This chapter argues that we need to rethink ‘work’ from the perspective of the global majority for whom wage employment has never been the norm. It outlines three dominant ways of conceptualising work – as commodified, informal and precarious – and demonstrates the ways in which all three are constructed against a particular idea of wage employment. An alternative framework of ‘ordinary work’ is presented which de-centres the wage through a focus on everyday values and practices in diverse economies. This framework proposes to broaden the socioeconomic imaginary of work, opening up new possibilities for how work, identity and security might be woven together differently. The chapter ends by outlining the structure of the book, organised around three key themes: ruptures, struggles and possibilities.

The most senior Council configurations—the Economic and Financial Affairs Council and the Foreign Affairs Council—as well as the Eurogroup, are charged with policy coordination rather than with law-making. They work under the direct supervision of the European Council and meet more frequently than any other Council formation. The shift in focus towards policy coordination and deliberation has been reflected in a series of attempts at institutional engineering, which were aimed at enhancing informal working methods and face-to-face debates between ministers. Council reform was most successful in areas where the distinction between coordination and law-making was particularly pronounced. The case of the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council, instead, reveals the differences in the two modes of decision-making. Policy coordination within the Council is backed by an increasingly sophisticated system of coordination comitology, which links member state administrations and Commission resources.

This chapter focuses on the working lives of cycle-rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It highlights the significance of unwaged rickshaw labour in enabling rural-urban migrants to navigate ecological and financial emergencies. The chapter argues that while hardly a safe or secure mode of work, the rickshaw industry nonetheless constitutes a relatively stable site of return when other labour projects fail. The importance of the rickshaw industry as a safety net for some drivers is increasingly undermined by the implementation of government licensing and mobility restrictions in Dhaka city. In analysing these restrictions, the chapter contests the idea that informal work is always already inherently precarious. Instead, it highlights how politics and policy interventions impact work-lives and make informal work precarious.

Chapter 7 discusses the broader implications of the argument for the world’s two billion informal workers. The chapter advances the theoretical claim that when individuals break the law, they can paradoxically get help from officials to organize. It elaborates implications for effective formalization policies, using the mixed success example of a tax reform in Bolivia. It also draw parallels to policing and enforcement trends in the United States. The chapter carefully summarizes the material covered in the preceding chapters. The chapter concludes the book with implications for state intervention in civil society, as well as contentious politics, enforcement, and state building.

This chapter examines the moral norms surrounding hard work and self-sufficiency. It discusses how work, particularly in the informal economy, is a means for some face-savers to become incrementally mobile and exercise agency. For young men, evidence of self-sufficiency and work ethic is key for proving their self-worth and masculinity to others. This push to be seen as “responsible enough” or “man enough,” in turn, stipulates the prioritization of jobs that pay relatively well over the status of the job. For young women, too, work is a means by which they can avert threats to their reputations and signal to others that they are doing well for themselves. Those young men and women who can demonstrate that they are self-sufficient hard workers are often the first to be incentivized by others. However, as such support is often limited, those youth who have certain preexisting qualities or resources—street smarts, family support, and risk-taking abilities—are able to climb the ladder much more easily than their counterparts who are not blessed with similar strengths and backgrounds.

This introductory chapter begins by telling the story of Elena, a Bulgarian women who found herself without employment following the privatization of the garment factory she had worked in her whole adult life. It explains how she survived the transition to a market economy by scrounging together informal work of various types. This book is centrally concerned with what regulatory strategies can best improve the working standards and lives of Elena and workers like her around the world. It goes without saying that employment creation policies and those that foster industrial growth are crucially important for improving Elena’s well-being. This book is not aimed at addressing these types of policies, however. It is concerned with the realm of regulation—hard laws, soft initiatives and other institutions that shape behaviour and set incentives in particular directions. The chapter describes the prevalence of informal, low paid work worldwide and defines core terms. It concludes by summarizing the outcome of the global search conducted in this book for realizable policy responses to this persistent problem.

This chapter explores some of the challenges that organizers of domestic workers in Ecuador face. Its discussion of domestic worker organizing touches on the three major themes of this book: social reproduction, informal arrangements that render domestic work invisible, and class relations that degrade and dehumanize workers. Workers' engagement in long hours of paid and unpaid social reproduction makes them difficult to reach and organize. Informal arrangements, and lack of political will and political effectiveness to change these arrangements, combine to make the enforcement of existing laws difficult. Moreover, relationships with the left-leaning state, embedded in traditional assumptions about who constitutes the working class—assumptions that leave out women and informal workers—have been fraught. The chapter then shows how domestic workers and their advocates have been organizing, what strategies they have used to demand the rights of these workers, and what the implications of these strategies are for political action and change.

Chapter 5 develops an ethnography of street vendors, their organizations, and the city officials who they interact with in the city of La Paz, Bolivia. The chapter is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the city over four research trips in 2012, 2014 to 2015, 2018, and 2019 as well as administrative data on 31,906 street vending licenses in the city. Fieldwork included interviews, participant observation at dozens of meetings between bureaucrats and organized vendors, ride-alongs with the Municipal Guard, a street vendor survey, working as a street vendor in a clothing market, and selling wedding services with a street vendor cooperative. The theory’s observable implications are illustrated with ethnographic evidence, survey results, and license data from La Paz. I discuss how street vending has changed in the city and how officials have intervened in collective action decisions as the informal sector grew. The chapter demonstrates that officials increased benefits to organized vendors as the costs of regulating markets increased. Additionally, the leaders that take advantage of these offers tend to have more resources than their colleagues, and as the offers increased, so did the level of organization among the city’s street vendors. The chapter also discusses the many trade-offs that officials make in implementing different policies, and how officials manage the often combative organizations that they encourage.

Chapter 6 develops the theory in a comparative context, by adding case studies of organized and unorganized street vendors and the city governments that they interact with in El Alto, Bolivia and two districts in São Paulo, Brazil. The chapter is based on original interview, survey, participant observation, and ethnographic data that was collected during a total of three months in each city over four research trips in 2012, 2014 to 2015, 2018, and 2019. As part of the project, the author briefly sold selfie sticks as a street vendor in a central district of São Paulo in 2015. Comparing the city of La Paz to the neighboring city of El Alto holds many national-level features constant but varies city government enforcement capacity. Comparing two districts in São Paulo to each other and then La Paz and El Alto adds more variation on enforcement capacity. São Paulo, the large, modern metropolis of the region’s richest country, with many employment opportunities, services, stable laws, and a history of labor organizing, should have more organized street vendors than La Paz, according to resource- or political context-based theories of collective action. Instead, only 2 percent of São Paulo’s 100,000 vendors are organized, compared to 75 percent of La Paz’s 60,000. I explain this difference with the interaction between individual resources, official incentives, and local government enforcement capacity.

Around the world, political parties founded on trade unionism are struggling to mobilise voters while far-right populism is on the rise. In Brazil, the 2018 election that brought Bolsonaro to power was a resounding defeat for Brazil’s traditional left-wing Worker’s Party (PT). This chapter interrogates the relationship between Bolsonaro’s victory and the crisis of wage labour and labour politics in Brazil. It does so by analysing political discourses of street vendors during the 2018 election in the city of Belo Horizonte. I argue that the decline of the PT must be understood in relation to the historical exclusion of non-waged workers and their interests from the trade union movement. Moreover, I show that this decline was accentuated at the local level by the connection between the PT and local revitalisation policies that constrained street vendors’ access to urban space. By doing so, the chapter reveals the multiscalar dimension of the ‘labour crisis’ which manifests itself at the intersections of local and national politics.

Chapter 4 tells the history and structure of street vending in two municipalities in the La Paz department of Bolivia and two districts in the São Paulo state in of Brazil. This chapter demonstrates how officials actively intervene in informal markets and workers’ organizations, and suggests how those interventions vary over time, creating highly structured organizations around La Paz and fleeting organizations around São Paulo. The chapter then develops the specific incentive structures that officials and workers face. Chapter 4 grounds the game theoretic model’s assumptions in observations from street markets in La Paz: It shows that unorganized street vendors create negative externalities, that street vendors approach collective action decisions with a cost–benefit analysis, that officials offer private benefits to organized street vendors, especially leaders, and that once organized, street vendors self-regulate and bargain with officials.

This concluding chapter argues that the book's analysis confirms previous research on Latin American domestic workers' experiences published mostly in Spanish and Portuguese, while generating new insights. The book's findings, when viewed along with research from other parts of Latin America, suggest that the experiences of nonmigrants, internal migrants, and international migrants in the region are quite similar. Their working conditions are equally dismal. Domestic workers are exploited as a subclass of worker, a subclass of human, whether they were born in the same country as their employers or not. They are always the other. Setting migration aside, then, as the primary variable explaining exploitation, the book's analysis focuses on three dimensions of oppression that act as obstacles to domestic workers' rights: social reproduction, informality, and class. Scholars and activists can target these obstacles in the effort to improve working conditions.

This epilogue looks at several new factors affecting domestic employment in Ecuador today which may change the landscape for workers, employers, and activists. First is the new government. If before, there was worker-friendly rhetoric and praise for humble domestic workers, but little concrete improvement in policies and conditions, today even the rhetoric is gone. The best way to reach and make claims on the new government is still unclear, and it will be difficult to obtain state funding for domestic worker initiatives. Second, there has been a “rupture” in the domestic worker organization Asociación de Trabajadoras Remuneradas del Hogar (ATRH). This situation makes organizing and advocating for domestic workers more difficult and may lead to confusion among policy makers and funders. Third, there has been an uptick in migration to Ecuador from Colombia and Venezuela, as people flee violence, political instability, and economic disaster. Finally, some of the people interviewed in 2018 claim to be witnessing growth in the proportion of live-in, full-time domestic workers. Despite changes in the context of domestic employment, however, workers' status has not changed much since this study began. Social reproduction is still devalued, informal arrangements still prevail, and the class gulf between employers and domestic workers remains.

This chapter discusses the image of the ideal domestic worker, looking at the point of view of potential employers and domestic employment agencies acting as intermediaries. The ideal worker and the ideal domestic employment arrangement, as communicated by the “help wanted” ads, illustrate all three of this book's main themes: social reproduction, informality, and class relations. Paid domestic work, like other forms of social reproduction, invokes stereotypes about gender roles and involves tasks and qualities that connote femininity. Gendered assumptions about social reproduction are thus embedded in the ads, which nearly always label the desired domestic worker as a woman. Work arrangements are usually informal and escape regulation by labor law. The class relations of contemporary domestic employment are also sometimes visible in the text of the help wanted ads. Some ads refer explicitly to the high status of the employers' family and some indicate status indirectly, for example, mentioning where the family resides—almost always in upper-class or middle-class neighborhoods of Guayaquil, including exclusive gated communities. The class relations of domestic employment, rooted in precapitalist and colonial socioeconomic structures, also appear in references to trato (treatment) of the worker by employers. When employers emphasize trato, personal treatment, rather than pay and benefits, they hearken back to patronage relationships based on personal connections rather than labor laws. Even today, emotion, care, respect, and honor loom large in domestic employment.

This chapter canvasses a long-term vision for improving the lives of poor and precarious workers who work in informal conditions. It proposes a bold, transnational initiative that aims to promote a global living wage and regulate supply chains. The chapter puts forward three interrelated regulatory pathways out of informality. First, the promotion of Global Living Wages through a multilateral instrument such as an International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention or United Nations treaty, which would also establish an International Living Wage disputes mechanism for enforcement of these minima; second, the setting up of National Living Wage Tribunals empowered to hear disputes concerning non-payment of living wages due to supply chain dynamics and to hold parties in the supply chain responsible for non-payment; third, the fostering of local pathways out of informality.