ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we aim to contribute to the legal and policy debate over strategies for improving informal workers’ labour conditions through collective action. We do so by focusing on two case studies of the concerned actors’ agency, organising mechanisms and partnership-building strategies in Kolkata, India and Córdoba, Argentina. This debate is currently relevant for labour studies scholarship, because informal work significantly shapes the productive forces in the Global South, and is increasingly doing so in the Global North as well. Regardless of the challenge informal economic activities pose to statistical measurement, the available statistical indications offer us a hint of the enormity of informality and. accordingly, indicates the relevance of collective action we want to discuss in this chapter. The International Labour Organization (ILO) Report Statistical Update on Employment in the Informal Economy (2012) 1 shows that in 2009, 49.7 per cent of Argentina’s workers were engaged in informal employment and 32.1 per cent were employed in the informal sector; it also shows that, in that same year, 83.6 per cent of India’s workers were in informal employment and 67.5 per cent were employed in the informal sector.
