ABSTRACT

This chapter examines shifting patterns of contestation over irregular labour in postcolonial Africa, focusing in particular on the activities of the ILO’s World Employment Programme (WEP). It briefly traces the continuities between the ILO’s conception of unemployment in the early 1970s and the colonial discourses analyzed in the previous chapter. It then moves on to examine the WEP’s landmark mission to Kenya in 1971, which played a major role in popularizing the concept of ‘informal’ labour. The concept of ‘informal’ labour articulated a residualist understanding of unemployment that meshed well with state efforts to restrain the cost of labour and limit the political influence of organized labour. This point is underlined by the highly selective implementation of the recommendations of the WEP report and by a number of controversies relating to this implementation.