Informal Workers Organizing in Rural and Urban Area

Case Studies of Indonesia, Cambodia and Philippines

Asia Monitor Resource Centre (AMRC)

Framing Informalization

We use four case studies to frame elements of informalization:

• Organizing rural informal workers in North Sumatra Province, Indonesia and Philippines

• Organizing Waste Pickers in Indonesia• Organizing Beer Promotion Workers and other

informal economy workers in Cambodia• Organizing contract workers in Indonesia

Framing Informalization• Dispossession of land and means of production• The society is turned into source of cheap labour

who are ready to marketize themselves to be waged labour

• Labour mobility in which workers “voluntarily”shape their mobility network

• Dispossession of political and legal rights of workers

• Diminishing of democratic and bargaining space

Organizing informal workers…Common issues• Competition among workers to remain in the

labour market• Competition over livelihood territory • The exclusion of marginal groups in decision

making• Informal workers often do not recognize

themselves as workers• Informal workers groups are not politically

recognized

Strategies (Lesson withdrawn from case studies)• Reinventing social solidarity between landless peasants

and casual plantation workers through formation of cross sector alliance. Rights to land and the need to exchange solidarity support become the backbone of the alliance

• The peasants and workers are aware of their potential and capacity to organize themselves and with support from other sectors, they can constitute bargaining power.

• In Philippines, rural workers/plantation workers unions and farmer organization from six provinces formulated agendas to be proposed to congress

Strategies (Lesson withdrawn from case studies)• In Cambodia, the groups apply

multilayered strategies which is started by building workers’ confidence to organize, introducing the importance of workers’organization and role of federation and confederation

• Community based organization for contract workers

• Urban poor community organization

Reconstructing Workers’Bargaining Power

Workplace Organizing

Contract workers union with the regular coordination with permanent workers union

Community based organizing/UnionCommon issues

LivelihoodAccess to public utilities such as clean water and healthcare etc

CommunityBroader scope such as municipality

Solidarity group/Cross Sector Alliance

Exercising political rights to improve the bargaining positionTargeting the management

discriminative policy against contract workers

•Facilitating a sharing medium for contract workers from various factories

•Bridging formal and informal sector workers

Targeting policy makers and policy making mechanismExample 1: case study of

leveling up the organizing scope

Case Study of Urban Poor/Community Organizing in Central Java Province in Indonesia

--This is a picture of a community meeting to discuss the action against forced eviction plan declared by the mayor.

--Most of the community members are informal workers. They also reject the relocation plan offered by the mayor as it will marginalize them from their workplaces

-- They are completely aware that their rights as workers are not covered by the labour law so they refer to their constitutional rights as citizens fully entitled to the rights to earn living and sustain their livelihood.

-- The groups regularly discuss their action plan. They argue that it is important to exercise democratic decision making in the organization as it is the most effective way to counter unwanted division instigated by the State apparatus.

Beer Promotion Girls (BPGs)Organizing in Cambodia

A Workshop on informal workers organizing in Cambodia -- In this workshop, BPGs shared their organizing experiences.

Organizing Steps: Establishing workers’ power

The mobilizing process then is to raise awareness on workers rights and women rights.In this stage, the organizers try to build up the workers’ confident

Once the workers get their confident to struggle for the betterment of their working condition, then they join the union in which they learn how to organize and mechanism within the workers’organization

The next step is to discuss the bargaining target. Prior to it, they learn to map out the recruitment process (clarity in terms of industrial relation).

Building solidarity with beer factory workers. Once they had a joint strike for better working condition

Elements of Collective Bargaining

• Concrete and specific desired changes—parameter of success

• Identification of bargaining target along with identification of actors or groups who can support the struggle

• Political recognition—To be recognized as pressure groups and/or involved in the decision making process

Way forward…

• Regional sharing/strategy exchange• Facilitating in depth research to capture

the outlook of workers movement in Asia• Networking of rural informal workers

(landless peasant and plantation workers) • Linking up struggle in rural and urban