Why Do Informal Workers Organize?

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.