Chris Tilly

Informal work is compensated work that is itself legal but falls beyond the reach or grasp of standard employment laws. “Beyond the reach” means work that simply is not covered by those laws. Self-employed workers like street vendors, but also many employed by others - domestic workers, agricultural workers, day laborers - are informal in this sense in much of the world. “Beyond the grasp” means that in theory the law applies, but...

Research on informal worker organizing has recently advanced from simply demonstrating that informally employed workers can organize successfully to analyzing how these organizations succeed. Though numerous case studies examine informal worker mobilization in a single sector within a single country within a single historical period (and often within a single organization), few studies have attempted to leverage cross-national or historical comparisons...