Workers in Informal Employment: Organising and Bargaining Collectively

What is the course about?

This course offers a platform to analyse and discuss the political economy of informal employment and forces driving it. Our focus is on worker collective power and specifically on strategies for collective organising and bargaining in spaces where worker rights are commonly denied.

Across the four content chapters, we will get to learn more on themes such as: workers in informal employment organising and bargaining collectively to resist and overcome their exploitation; the power structures and forces that drive and sustain informalisation, and critical reflections on questions of worker collective power and action, including collective bargaining. 

Check our trailer here. 

Key concepts

Informal employment, informalisation of work, political economy of labour, key drivers of informality, precarity, collective representation, worker collective power, and collective organising and bargaining. 

Course materials and workload

This course has 4 content chapters. A chapter contains a series of units; each unit is composed of one video lecture, two quiz questions, one exercise, one key reading (the link of which is provided right under the video) as well as additional readings (under the Additional Materials tab). All the course materials, including video scripts, can be downloaded and used offline. Zoom workshops with the course experts are recorded and added to the course content for those interested in going deeper into the issues discussed in each video lecture. 

The estimated workload for each chapter is about 8 hours.

Course certificates

Certificate of Participation (CoP): can be obtained for free once you have completed 80% of the course.

Certificate of Accomplishment (CoA): can be issued only by the Global Labour University Online Academy. For details on the requirements, read carefully the information in Chapter 1, Unit 2.

Course content

What will you learn?

Upon completing this online course, the course participants will be able to: 

• understand how various groups of workers in informal employment experience precarity; analyse the factors that constrain and facilitate their collective action; as well as draw analytical insights on the conections, similarities and differences from such actions;
• apply the arguments and learnings from the case studies and argue on the merits of alternative strategies from those currently pursued;
• understand the political economy of informal employment, the power relations, forces, and discourses that drive and sustain the informalisation of work and apply this analysis to their own context; and
• examine the concept of workers’ collective power, and challenge dominant narratives and terminologies that undermine the project of building such power. 

What is the target audience?

workers, trade unionists, labour and other activists, labour researchers and practitioners, NGOs, students, media and others.

What prior knowledge is required?

This is a multi-disciplinary course drawing on the fields of social, political and economic sciences. It is at the level of a Masters’ programme, but the concepts are explained in an accessible language and illustrated through examples. Therefore, it is also possible to participate in the course using the skills and knowledge acquired. The course requires a working level of English.