ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how efforts to govern irregular labour have been intimately connected to efforts to manage contradictory processes of neoliberalization. While the ILO’s interventions dealing with informal economies and unemployment have remained coloured by residualist ideas, the political dynamics engendered by this organic crisis have often heavily influenced the specific colouring of the ILO’s interventions in practice. It examines a pair of projects. First, it examines the development of a project on ‘Upgrading Informal Apprenticeships’ operated by the ILO in Eastern and Southern Africa. The project originated in Tanzania, which is the main focus of the analysis here. The ILO’s project has emphasized the improvement of institutions governing apprenticeships in the informal sector. However, in terms of the actual implementation of follow-up initiatives, many of the concerns raised in the initial report about exploitation and the rules around graduation have largely fallen from view. My analysis situates these dynamics in the context of wider state strategies around the ‘formalization’ of informal economies and political struggles over the status of ‘informal’ workers. Second, it traces the development of microinsurance policies in Francophone West Africa, linking the trajectory of this development to broader struggles over the authority of the state engendered by the widespread informalization of labour.
