In this Labour Studies Podcast (also available as a YouTube Video), Pat Horn speaks on "Organised Workers in the Informal Economy"
The podcast and video are provided by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), Rhodes University, South Africa.
Please follow the link for the podcast: https://anchor.fm/
Please follow the link to the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) YouTube Channel for the video: https://www.youtube.
This recorded webinar, available as both podcast and video, is from our series on "COVID-19 and the Working-Class Movement in South Africa." Veteran labour activist and feminist Pat Horn will speak about how organised workers in the informal economy successfully fought for the ILO's 2014 rights-based Recommendation 204: the need for transitions from the informal to the formal economy. Since then, the battle has been to get states to actually implement Recommendation 204. While some sections have been fast-tracked during the COVID-19 pandemic, new forms of work such as platform work have grown during the pandemic. This has provided organising opportunities, giving rise to new formations, such as a new São Paulo -based union: recently established by the CUT in Brazil, it caters for workers in the informal economy and new forms of work.
SPEAKER: Pat Horn is coordinator of the Collective Bargaining in the Informal Sector Project at Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), in Durban, South Africa. A veteran trade unionist, she is a founder (now Senior Advisor) of StreetNet International, with affiliated organisations from 57 countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Eastern Europe. She is also part of the South African National Task Team responsible for implementation of ILO Recommendation 204 on transitions from the informal to formal economy, representing the NEDLAC Community Constituency.
This talk was originally given on 28 October 2020.
The Labour Studies Podcasts are from our popular Labour Studies Seminar Series, launched in 2015. We cover "labour studies" in the broadest sense: labour and left history, policy and political economy, unions and popular struggles. We cover "labour studies" in the broadest sense: labour and left history, policy and political economy, unions and popular struggles.
NALSU, based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team from disciplines including Economics, History and Sociology, it has active partnerships and relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. It draws strength from its location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and the contradictions of the post-apartheid state, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture. https://www.ru.ac.za/