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130 Int'l Lab. Rev. 39 (1991)
Organizing the Self-Employed: The Politics of the Urban Informal Sector

handle is hein.journals/intlr130 and id is 55 raw text is: International Labour Review, Vol. 130, 1991, No. 1 Organizing the self-employed: The politics of the urban informal sector Bishwapriya SANYAL * Introduction The voluminous research on the urban informal sector I has centred on analysing the UIS as an economic entity; of its politics we still know very little. This is rather odd because most economic analyses of the UIS have been policy-oriented (in the sense that they commonly prescribe a range of policies to promote the sector) and none of these policies is likely to be pursued unless it has strong political support. Yet we know very little about how and whether this political support can be generated. Neither do we know much about the political dynamics within the sector, nor about the politics of its external relationships with the government, with established political parties or with organized labour in the formal sector. Without a proper understanding of these relations, however, both internal and external, how can we assess the political feasibility of any policy? Some scholars may disagree with this pessimistic assessment of the state of our knowledge and point out that considerable research has already been conducted on the politics of urban squatters. True, the body of literature describing the various political strategies that squatters and governments use in dealing with each other is quite rich; but one cannot equate the politics of the squatters with the politics of the UIS. First, not all squatters earn their living in the UIS: as many as 60 per cent of them may be regular wage earners (Nelson, 1979). Second, the politics of squatters always arise in response to territorial issues, such as demands for land tenure or the provision of water, electricity or other utilities to their particular area. The politics of the UIS on the other hand often have no territorial basis; for example, UIS trade-based groups, whose members usually live in different parts of the city, may organize to demand better access to inputs for their trade. This is not to say that UIS politics are never concerned with territorial • Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I Since Keith Hart coined the term informal sector in a mimeographed paper, subsequently published in journal form in 1973, and the ILO popularized the concept through a case study of the Kenyan economy in 1972, much has been written both on the theory and on its practical application to development planning. See Portes, Castells and Benton, 1989; Richardson, 1984; Sethuraman, 1981; Bromley, 1979. Copyright C International Labour Organization 1991

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