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      Informalisation and the end of trade unionism as we knew it? Dissenting remarks from a Tanzanian case study

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            Abstract

            This paper analyses the political organisation by informal transport workers, and their partial achievements in claiming rights at work from employers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's largest city, from 1995 to the present. The paper takes issue with the influential view that, due to widespread economic informalisation, trade unionism and workplace labourism are no longer a viable option for defending workers' interests. From less despondent approaches to the possibilities for labour(ism), it borrows the insight that making sense of workers' unrest requires a political economy approach. This entails, first and foremost, locating workers within their economic structure, and understanding their relationship to capital. The paper thus starts by sketching out the state of public transport in Dar es Salaam, the predominant employment relationship in the sector, and the balance of power between bus owners and workers. It then analyses workers' organisation since 1997, workers' strategies to achieve (in conjunction with the Tanzania transport workers union) the formalisation of the employment relationship with bus owners, and their progress towards it. The conclusion reflects on the broader lessons that can be learned from this case study.

            [Informalisation et fin du syndicalisme traditionnel? Réflexions dissidentes à partir d'une étude de cas en Tanzanie.] Cet article analyse l'organisation politique des travailleurs informels du secteur des transports, et les résultats de leurs revendications pour faire valoir leurs droits fondamentaux au travail auprès des employeurs à Dar es Salaam, première ville de Tanzanie, de 1995 à maintenant. L'article conteste l'opinion influente selon laquelle, en raison de la généralisation du travail informel économique, le syndicalisme et le labourism ou « travaillisme » sur le poste de travail ne sont plus une option viable pour défendre les intérêts des travailleurs. À partir d'approches moins pessimistes sur le potentiel du « travail(lisme) », l'article suit l'idée selon laquelle la compréhension des conflits sociaux nécessite une approche en terme d'économie politique. Ceci implique, avant toute chose, de placer les travailleurs au sein de leur structure économique, et comprendre leur relation au capital. L'article commence donc par esquisser l'état du transport public à Dar es Salaam, les relations d'emploi prédominantes dans le secteur, et le partage du pouvoir entre les propriétaires des bus et les travailleurs. L'article analyse ensuite l'organisation des travailleurs depuis 1997, les stratégies des travailleurs pour arriver (en conjonction avec le syndicat des travailleurs du transport de Tanzanie) à la formalisation des relations d'emploi avec les propriétaires des bus, et les progrès accomplis. La conclusion se penche sur les leçons plus larges pouvant être tirées de cette étude de cas.

            Mots-clés : syndicats; économie informelle; droits du travail; transport urbain; gouvernance urbaine; Tanzanie

            Main article text

            Introduction

            This paper analyses the political organisation by informal passenger transport workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's largest city. It focuses on the modalities, goals and outcomes of workers' mobilisation, in partnership with the Tanzanian transport union, since 1995. The general interest of this case study, and the wider debates to which it aims to contribute, is twofold. It stems from (a) the actors who are its protagonists, namely African workers in the informal economy in partnership with a trade union; and (b) the goals which workers' political mobilisation can (or cannot) achieve in increasingly liberalised and informalised economies.

            Starting with the latter, the pervasive informalisation of work since the 1970s, a phenomenon which occurred across the world but more intensely in developing countries, has hit trade unionism hard. Trade unions have seen their membership shrink, and by and large have been unable to reach substantial numbers of informal workers, prompting a debate on whether globalisation signals the end of trade unionism. As the majority of workers today operate in the informal economy, central to this debate is the role trade unions might play in organising informal workers, quite apart from embracing broader goals.

            A view now widely held argues that, due to increasingly informal employment relationships that do not conform to any direct employer–employee relationship, workplace labourism is no longer viable. Take, for instance, Standing's (2011) highly influential voice in the study of labour under globalisation. He is a leading advocate of the need to ‘re-embed the economy in society’, arguing that although ‘In principle trade unions could be reformed to represent precariat interest’, in practice they cannot reasonably be expected to play any central role in this process. In his words, ‘Trade unions lobby and struggle for more jobs and a larger share of output; they want the economic pie to be bigger. They are necessarily adversarial and economistic’ (Ibid., 168). As ‘who or what was the enemy’ (Ibid., 2) is no longer clear, trade unions are deemed to be institutions whose role has been made redundant by the informalisation of employment.

            Others, while less pessimistic about the relevance of unions to workers in the informal economy, share a negative view on the place that rights at work might play in their future agenda. Gallin (2001, 536), for example, suggests that ‘only by organising the informal sector can the trade union movement maintain the critical mass in terms of membership, and representatively it needs to be a credible social and political force’. However, as for the goals around which organising will take place, Gallin concurs with Standing in suggesting that workplace claims and the formalisation of precarious forms of employment cannot be the bread and butter of unions. The observation that the ‘direct employee/employer relationship’ has given way to ‘more diffuse and indirect relationships’ – including self-employment, paid work in informal enterprises and casual work without fixed employers, often in combination – leads Gallin to conclude that ‘trade union organising can no longer focus primarily on the employment relationship’ (Ibid., 537). What is at stake instead is ‘not formalising the informal but protecting the unprotected’ (Ibid., 537).

            These contributions capture well the current trends that have been disadvantageous to traditional labour organisation in developed and developing countries alike. However, the increasing pervasiveness of unclear and informal employment relationships should not lead to the presumption that new forms of organisation cannot emerge and cannot be successful at challenging the status quo at work. Such a dismissive stance sits at odds with, and fails to explain, the ongoing occurrence and diversity of labour unrest across the world. In this light, a broader goal of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the possible goals for organised labour by analysing one instance of workers' mobilisation, and partial success, in formalising their employment relationship. To do so, the paper draws on three analytical insights from existing work on the patterns of ongoing labour unrest and on the sources of workers' power.

            The first insight is from Silver (2003), who has mapped labour unrest on a global scale from 1870 to 1996, its geographical shift with ‘the relocation of production within industries’, and its shift across sectors over time, to argue that the impact of globalisation and of its distinctive restructuring of production and of labour relations ‘is less unidirectional than normally thought’ (Silver 2003, 6). While labour pessimists have well understood the way in which the ease of mobility of capital has translated into new types of vulnerability for workers (such as the loss of jobs due to capital reinvestment in more labour-friendly countries and/or workers' reduced bargaining power due to the capitalists' threats of relocating their investment), they have failed to appreciate how it has also generated new types of capital's vulnerability to labour resistance. Making sense of ongoing labour unrest, of why and where it takes place, and how it has changed over the years, requires a political economy approach to the labour relations which mediate workers' participation in the economy and of the balance of power between those who own capital and those who work for it, no matter how indirect the relationship between the two appears to be. This provides a powerful insight into labour unrest that this paper will apply to the context of Dar es Salaam's bus transport workers.

            A second viewpoint central to this paper's narrative is Wright's widely adopted (Kabeer et al. 2013; Selwyn 2007; Silver 2003), conceptualisation of the sources of workers' power. According to Wright, workers' power can be schematised as deriving from two possible sources. First is the structural power that (some) workers command. This derives from workers' specific ‘location… within the economic system’. Following this argument some economies, and some industries within them, have more potential to generate labour unrest than others.1 Whether workers take advantage of their structural power rests in turn on their second source of power, which is associational. This derives from the political organisation of workers along trade union lines or other institutional forms. Drawing on such a conceptualisation, this paper will identify the sources of power that bus transport workers in Dar es Salaam command.

            The third insight that this paper will deploy is that there is no straightforward correlation ‘between workers’ bargaining power and the actual use by workers of that power… to struggle for better working and living conditions' (Silver 2003, 15). Whether the socio-economic position occupied by workers translates into political consciousness and a shared identity, depends on a number of complex factors (see Bernstein 2010, 115–117 for a synthesis). Most notably, workers do not automatically experience (and make sense of) exploitation ‘self-evidently or exclusively’ along class lines, either in an unmediated or direct fashion. Active efforts (by outsider activists or by workers themselves) at constructing a shared notion of injustice and exploitation, play an important role in successful instances of workers' political mobilisation.

            Exploring the complexities of constructing common ground between trade unions and the ‘informals’ is the main strength of much recent work on the politics of organising informal labour in Africa, the further general theme to which this case study aims to contribute. The study of efforts to realise this common ground, both successful and unsuccessful, has stressed the importance of a contextualised understanding of practical activity to this end, focusing on the agendas of both informal workers and trade unions and their relationship to the state. It has cautioned against generalising ‘about the possibilities or impossibilities for alliances on the basis of structural differences or innate affinities’ (Lindell 2010, 19–22, 22 for the quotation).

            Empirical studies of organising efforts in the informal economy have been at their most insightful when attention to the political behaviour of ‘informals’ has been rooted in an understanding of the structural position occupied by them in a given economy (Meagher 2010; Andrae and Beckmann 2010; Boampong 2010). Other studies on the politics of informality in contrast suffer from a political economy blindness (Brown and Lyons 2010; Jason 2008; Jimu 2010). Fundamental questions such as how an economic activity is organised, who owns what in it, and its social relations of production, go either totally unaddressed or are skirted around. As the location of the informal workers within the broader economic system, and their potential material interests, are not spelled out in this work, its contribution to understanding the political behaviour by informal actors is limited. By contrast, this paper investigates the way in which a common ground between a group of informal workers and a trade union was built by firmly locating workers' political actions within their economic structures and against the challenges that these structures pose to workers' agency.

            The paper is part of a broader study on the political economy of passenger public transport in Dar es Salaam from 1983 (the year in which the public sector monopoly over urban transport formally ended) to the present.2 Work on the earlier period focused on the factors that prevented workers from making demands on employers or on the state (Rizzo 2011). The establishment, in the late 1990s, of an association of transport workers in Dar es Salaam and its efforts to claim labour rights in the mid 2000s, marked a shift in the political attitude of workers. In response to these events, later rounds of fieldwork in 2009 and 2011, on which this paper is based, explored the reasons behind workers' more assertive attitude towards the state and employers.

            A variety of sources inform this paper. The Tanzania Communication and Transport Workers Union (COTWUT) kindly allowed the author to consult its files on Dar es Salaam passenger transport workers. The correspondence between the transport workers' association (UWAMADAR) and COTWUT provides first-hand and unusual insights into the process of how two distinct institutions developed an understanding of one another and how they went about ‘building’ the interests of Dar es Salaam transport workers and making demands to promote them. The correspondence between UWAMADAR and COTWUT (hereafter the Coalition) and the bus owners' association provides glimpses into how the workers and bus owners related to one other over time. Newspaper articles on the subject were used as sources of further background information on the activities of the Coalition and their relationship with employers and the state. Interviews with workers, leaders from the transport trade union and the workers' association, employers as well as relevant state officers, were carried out to probe and expand the key findings emerging from newspapers and archival files on transport workers in Dar es Salaam.3

            The paper is divided into five sections. The following section sketches out the nature of public transport in Dar es Salaam, and the employment relationships predominant in the sector. Its main focus is the balance of power between bus owners and employers, the sources of workers' power and the reasons for workers' political quiescence up until the mid 1990s. The next section analyses the political organisation by workers since 1995, its goals and the strategy that workers developed in conjunction with the Tanzania transport workers union. Particular attention is paid both to the process through which the union and the association constructed a shared meaning of ‘the daladala worker’, and to the division of labour between the two parties. The paper then goes on to document the Coalition's partial achievement of its main goal: the establishment of rights at work through the formalisation of the employment relationship between bus owners and workers. It analyses how the Coalition changed its strategy by responding to the challenges raised in negotiating and implementing a workers' contract within a previously informal labour market. The conclusion summarises the main arguments of the paper and reflects on how they relate to the broad themes to which it aims to contribute.

            The context: Dar es Salaam, public transport and its employment relationship

            In order to analyse the strategy of bus transport workers in Dar es Salaam to claim labour rights, it is necessary to understand the context in which they operated and the sources of power and vulnerability that workers derived from it. Dar es Salaam is today a city with approximately three million people and a virtually defunct public sector transport company.4 In the region of 10,000 privately owned minibuses, also known as daladala, provide the cheapest means of motorised public transport to its population. Kin or own-account employment, so central to mainstream conceptualisations of economic informality (de Soto 1989), are the exception to the rule in this sector. The operations of daladala are characterised by a clear division between a class of bus owners and a class of transport workers. Over 9 out 10 of these workers, the total number of which is estimated to be between 20,000 and 30,000, earn a living by selling their labour power to bus owners.

            The ownership of buses is not significantly concentrated. A variety of sources, including surveys and discussion with workers, consistently suggest that the ‘average’ bus owner owns one or two buses. Owners are organised through the Dar es Salaam Commuter Bus Owners Association (DARCOBOA).

            Workers lack a precise employment relationship with employers. They are casual workers operating buses that they do not own. To some degree, they are neither waged nor piece-workers. Bus owners demand a daily rent (hesabu in Swahili) from workers for operating the bus. The daily return for workers will consist of whatever remains after the daily rent to bus owners, and petrol costs, have been deducted from gross income. Should the lack of a direct employment link between workers and employers lead us to understand these workers as self-employed micro-entrepreneurs, as is widely held? Not really, because as Wuyts points out, commenting on these very workers, ‘they are entrepreneurs only in the sense that they have become managers of two sets of risks under adverse conditions of extreme competition: the daily insecurity that results from an uncertain income, on the one hand, and the ever-present chance of job loss, on the other’ (Wuyts 2011, 12). In other words, the modalities of remuneration by employers transfer business risks onto the workforce. At the beginning of each working day, the profit for bus owners is known, the return for the workforce, if any, is uncertain.

            Daladala workers have low marketplace power. The existence of an oversupply of unskilled job seekers significantly tilts the balance of power between bus owners and bus workers in the former's favour. The daily rent expected for a day of work is imposed by owners on workers and is not negotiable. Meagre returns, harsh working conditions (the average working day lasts 15 hours and the working week more than 6.5 days), and occupational uncertainty (as work on a given bus lasts less than eight months on average) are the familiar litany of exploitation that transport workers in Dar es Salaam share with workers at the lower end of the informal economy (Meagher 1995). Financially squeezed by bus owners, workers' compulsion to speed, to overload the buses and to deny boarding to passengers entitled to social fares can all be explained as actions aimed at maximising return from work on a given day. The infamous unruly conduct of daladala workers thus has its roots in the lack of regulation of labour relations in the sector. To make matters worse for workers, economic exploitation goes hand-in-hand with, and is fuelled by, a discourse of criminalisation of the workforce by the state and by bus owners. Such a discourse frames the main cause of daladala workers' ‘unruly’ behaviour as their greed and bad manners, rather than their struggle to make ends meet.

            While these workers command low marketplace power, the urban public transport sector in which they work confers on them, at least potentially, workplace power (the other sub-type of structural power). Silver noted that ‘transportation workers have had, and continue to have, a strategic position within the world capitalist economy and within the labour movement’ (Silver 2003, xv). Such an empirical finding is explained not so much by the ‘direct impact of their actions on (often public) employers’ but rather by the ‘upstream/downstream impact of the failure to deliver goods, services, and people to their destination’ (Ibid., 100). Such insight arguably applies to the Dar es Salaam case. As private buses have long constituted the only means of (barely affordable) motorised public transport available to the public, unrest by its workforce would seriously affect the mobility of the vast majority of Dar es Salaam's population. However, their inability to take advantage of their structural power was caused by their lack of associational power. This was evident in the absence, up until 1997, of an institution representing workers in urban transport policy-making. The oversupply of workers, the fragmentation amongst different types of transport workers sub-categories (with different roles and stakes at ‘work’), and their spatial dispersion across thousands of atomised units of labour (buses) were in turn barriers inhibiting workers' political organisation.

            During fieldwork in 2001–2002, it could be observed that, while falling short of making demands on employers or on the state, workers' behaviour did show signs of collective consciousness. The initiative, by some groups of workers clustered around some routes and/or stations across the city, of establishing informal associations shows awareness of their common plight. Through these associations, workers generated collective savings which were spent to provide members with an informal source of social wage and welfare protection. Important as such initiatives were in helping workers to manage the effects of precarious employment, they did not aim to challenge its causes.

            Since the late 1990s, however, the political landscape of passengers transport in Dar es Salaam experienced a change with the establishment of a transport workers' organisation. At least formally, the very presence of an institution, founded by transport workers for transport workers, reversed the political asymmetry that had characterised urban transport policy making until then. The analysis now investigates the events that led to its foundation, the goals that it set itself, the strategy to achieve them, and the extent to which it succeeded.

            From political quiescence to political organisation: early days

            A handful of drivers and conductors, who would later become the first leaders of the daladala workers' association, first began to think of establishing an organisation to defend their interests in 1995, but ‘had no idea where to start’.5 As such, the plan lay dormant until the summer of 1997, when a group of daladala workers organised a meeting to that purpose. The 42 drivers and conductors in attendance agreed to investigate the steps involved in establishing an association. The most significant finding was that, according to Tanzanian law, trade unions rather than associations have the right to represent workers vis-à-vis employers or the government. In response to this, the workers' delegation visited the Dar es Salaam branch of COTWUT. Their visit ultimately resulted in the Union Dar es Salaam Secretary agreeing to return the visit to a larger group of members of the would-be association.

            Heavy on formal protocol, the first visit of the Union City Secretary was nonetheless notable for the way in which both parties made substantial efforts, from the outset, to build common ground. Such efforts initially centred on achieving a shared understanding of the occupational problems faced by daladala workers and on identifying a strategy to address them. The welcoming speech by one of the daladala workers, having emphatically stated his ‘ joy for meeting [the union] today as we did not expect to have an institution that listens to our cries’,6 introduced the unionists to the reality of working on daladalas. He did so by illustrating some of the main problems faced by its workers: the possibility of being killed by students ‘hungry for school’, in retaliation against workers' refusal to ferry them at the discounted rate that the government had set but not funded; the lack of sympathy for workers by the general public, whose expectation that ill people and pregnant women should travel for free overlooked the financial implications of this for the workforce. The speaker also emphasised how the lack of associational power was at the root of workers' plight when he added that ‘all these problems came from not having anyone to protect us and by not knowing where to take our complaints’.6 Now that the group had potentially found an institutional partner to voice workers' grievances, it put forward the key goals towards which they wanted to work:

            • 1.

              To lead us to claim rights from rich people. [We want] employment like in other sectors. If a worker is fired, his employer should look after him.

            • 2.

              To oversee owners and protect us from them legally, so that the government can benefit from the existence of formal employment.6

            A labourist goal was thus put forward by workers from the outset. The first meeting ended with the workers' request to meet the union's General Secretary to take the agenda forward. The Union City Secretary, in forwarding their request to his superior, strongly endorsed it. As he put it, ‘you will remember that for a long time we have been trying to find a way to get these workers involved in our union but it was very difficult to get them’.7 Daladala workers in Dar es Salaam constituted a highly visible constituency, counting between 20,000 and 30,000 potential members. The request for a partnership with their prospective association was thus met with interest by COTWUT.

            Such interest in turn reflected the new landscape in which Tanzanian unions found themselves, following political liberalisation in the mid 1990s. A key force in the anti-colonial struggle in the 1950s, the Tanzanian trade union movement became heavily controlled by the one party state shortly after independence (1961). In Shivji's words, the way in which TANU reorganised trade unions was ‘contrary to virtually every principle of voluntary organization of workers or trade unions’ (Shivji 1986, 233) and this fundamentally curtailed the autonomy of unions from the party and their capacity to represent workers' interests. The control of the ruling party over organised labour eased ‘as a side effect of multiparty democracy’ (Fisher 2011, 128). New legislation, first in 1998 and then in 2004, went some way to cutting the umbilical cord between the ruling party and unions. Most notably, membership in unions became voluntary and unions' budgets were no longer part of the ruling party budget. Instead they now depended on their capacity to secure membership fees.

            Such formal changes have resulted in a contradictory scenario. On the one hand, the detachment of unions from the ruling party is widely perceived as far from complete; on the other hand, there is an increased occurrence of strikes, negotiations, go-slows and use of workers' votes as part of new ‘repertoires’ of unions in Tanzania following political liberalisation (Ibid., 141). Within this context, a new element of trade union activities is their increased attention to the ‘informals’, albeit with limited success in reaching them at national level and with important differences in the degree of interest in informal workers across unions. Amongst them, COTWUT appears to be at the forefront of the struggle to engage with informal workers. It has attempted to organise lorry and taxi workers, in addition to daladala workers, to whom the analysis now returns.8

            The meeting between the union General Secretary and daladala workers marked the beginning of the partnership between COTWUT and the association of daladala workers. It was also another step forward in refining the strategy to fight the cause of the association's members. The two parties agreed that priority should initially be given to meeting the legal requirements for the workers' association to exist. This was no small task, especially in light of the fact that in Tanzania the government Registrar of Societies ‘possesses excessive powers’ (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions 2006, 3). Furthermore, daladala workers had no legal expertise. It thus fell on COTWUT to support the would-be association in navigating the Tanzanian legal system. Almost single-handedly, the union drafted the constitution of the association so that it could comply with the regulations of the Registrar. This process took nearly three years. As the association's chairman recalled, gratefully, ‘the draft constitution was sent back with requests for revisions nine times, COTWUT did not lose hope and took care of these revisions’.9 The association was formally registered on 7 April 2000. According to its constitution, and reflecting the mutual interest in each other, UWAMADAR was an association in itself but also a branch of COTWUT.

            The registration of the workers' association laid the legal foundations on which the transport labour coalition rested. Shortly after, the two institutions intensified their efforts to ‘construct’ further a shared understanding of the coalition's objectives, and of their respective roles in achieving them. The correspondence between the two, whose members were very different by education and working conditions, provides some insightful glimpses into this process. Along these lines, in June 2000 the union's Dar es Salaam Secretary warned his General Secretary, ahead of his meeting with UWAMADAR members, that the people with whom he was going to meet ‘are not used to leaders of the workforce [i.e., trade unions]’.10 The union was not used to daladalamen either, and needed educating about the reality of being a casual worker within the Dar es Salaam passenger transport system. A meeting, called for that purpose, still left the Union's General Secretary unclear about the working environment of daladala workers. He therefore asked UWAMADAR to put in writing the issues mentioned at the meeting. Two weeks later he received a letter, from UWAMADAR's General Secretary, entitled, ‘The problems that drivers and conductors get at work’. He was bringing to his attention ‘some of the problems faced by drivers and conductors’. The synopsis that he gave is worth quoting extensively, for it allows an unusual glimpse into one instance of constructing a shared meaning of workers' exploitation.

            First of all, a bus driver in town wakes up as early as 3 am to go and get the bus wherever it slept, as many buses sleep at the owners' place.11 After this he will start work which will end between 10 and 12 pm. Many things usually happen to him, such as to be attacked by thieves, and escaping that, there is no escaping from being stopped by Traffic Police at least three times a day. But the owner does not want to know all these things. He only cares that his daily sum (hesabu) does not decrease. There are days in which it rains a lot, and there is no business. But the owner does not want to know this; if he gets a flat tyre, the owner does not want to know the hours that he struggled to fix the tyre.

             The daily sum that owners demand, for example for a DCM bus, is 45,000 to 40,000 shillings…

             Think about a DCM bus operating from Gongo la Mboto to Kivukoni [one of the longest routes in Dar es Salaam]. It consumes 80 litres of diesel per day. At 506 shillings per litre this makes 40,800 shillings per day. Now driver and conductors, if they pay for breakfast, it is 1,000 shillings per day, if they eat lunch, it is 1,000 shillings. If you add this up you will see what is left for workers to divide from the day. 40,000 (owner) + 40,800 (diesel) + 2,000 (food)= 82,800. The money you can get from a DCM is between 80,000 and, for a very good day, 85,000. Will there be a shortage of mess on the streets if you bear in mind that these people have no salary? …

             Imagine that at times owners even tell you that work uniforms, you need to buy them yourself …

             Given these circumstances will the driver avoid creating a mess in the streets? Will he avoid refusing to ferry students? Will he avoid shortening the route so that he can get many trips to earn enough money?12

             The letter went on to list the costs incurred by bus owners, to conclude that:

             Taking into account all the expenses, taxes and maintenance, there is still a need for owners to establish a salary for workers, drivers and conductors…

             It is hard to explain thing after thing but these are the conditions …

             In light of the above we ask COTWUT to sympathize with the workers so that it can help us so that owners give out salaries for workers. I hope that you will appreciate the importance of the problem and work on it.12

            The reference in the letter to the struggle to ‘explain thing after thing’ emphasises the centrality that getting to know each other played in the early days of the coalition. Two further aspects – its wealth of detail on the economics of passenger transport in Dar es Salaam and the repeated (and rhetorical) question on workers' incapacity to avoid ‘creating a mess’ – provide clues of the Coalition's division of labour and strategy to promote transport workers' rights. The union was intended to support the cause of daladala workers ‘from above’. This entailed drawing on its technical expertise in labour law and on its political connections. The details of daladala operations and costs were presented in response to a precise request by the Union. It foresaw that their lobbying efforts with key state officers for employment contracts would be objected to on the grounds that the business of passenger transport was not profitable enough, and hence contracts were not affordable for employers. Thus, similarly to other instances of organising efforts by informal workers (Narayan and Chikarmame 2013), information – such as details quantifying the economic reality faced by daladalamen and the uneven distribution of the wealth created in transport – was used to support the Coalition's demands for a fairer redistribution. As for the letter's reference to workers' economic compulsion to ‘create a mess’, this formed part of a broader strategy in response to the discourse criminalising transport workers. It emphasised that the financial pressures faced by transport workers lay behind their ‘misbehaviour’, and subsequently argued that a less chaotic and more secure transport system necessitated a more secure and better remunerated workforce (see Barrett 2003 for a similar strategy in the context of South Africa). Thus, in exploiting the public nature of the service provided by transport workers, the strategy was to frame their interests as part of a wider societal ‘common good’. Trade unions do not therefore necessarily frame their demand for rights at work in narrow and economistic terms. The nature of the economic sector in which their members operate clearly affects their discursive options.

            In order to be politically credible such lobbying ‘from above’ had to go hand in hand with the adhesion of workers to the cause – and to COTWUT and UWAMADAR as the institutions promoting it – ‘from below’. As noted by Fisher (2011, 140) with reference to Tanzania, trade unionists face the ‘fundamental question of how union power is backed up. You may have the authority to speak on behalf of your members or to represent labour matters in general, but is there a supporting majority behind you, the official asks’ (Fisher 2011, 140; see also Adu-Amankwah et al. 1999). Reaching a critical mass of members amongst daladala workers was UWAMADAR's responsibility within the coalition. It was a goal in and of itself but also an essential prerequisite for any Union's lobbying ‘from above’.

            This left the ball in UWAMADAR's court.. However, reaching daladala workers amounted to an enormous challenge, common to organising efforts by ‘vulnerable groups’ (Lindell 2010, 9), that had to be delivered within serious financial constraints. ‘[There was] no money to promote the issue in newspapers, or for organizing attractive events to promote the issue. [The only way was] talking to drivers and conductors, one by one, “You have been doing this job for many years. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow how will it look like?’” (Author interview, 2009a.) So there was an element of sensitising workers to the importance of employment contracts, and of trying to break the short-term time horizon of daladala workers' attitude to work that was both an effect and a cause of workers' occupational precariousness (Wood 2003). The albeit small financial support by the Union, to hold events at which UWAMADAR could advertise its agenda, is worth noting here, as it suggests that the Union was prepared to invest some of its funds to promote the organisation of informal workers. This helped, in a small but significant way, to partly address UWAMADAR's lack of funds and the lack of visibility that came with it.13

            Having gained legal status, and some resources to act, the focus turned to UWAMADAR's recruitment strategy. Ending the unregulated nature of the employment relationship in the sector, which from the outset was the ultimate goal of the organising drive, could not be reasonably achieved in the short term. As with other instances of organising vulnerable (women) workers in the informal economy, shorter-term ‘forms of practical support which had more immediate and visible returns’ (Kabeer et al. 2013) were often essential to attract/retain members who were daily pressed by their precariousness. However, this was not without risks as promising short-term support measures beyond capacity to deliver has the potential to undermine the credibility of any organisation. Different institutions have responded in different ways to this dilemma. The choice of explicitly avoiding promises of financial and other benefits is not unheard of (Barrett 2003 on transport workers in South Africa). However, the choice by workers' organisations to provide services to their members is more common (Bonner and Spooner 2011; von Holdt and Webster 2008; Workers' Education Association of Zambia 2006).

            A letter entitled ‘The way to run UWAMADAR’, circulated in March 2001 to its prospective local leaders, both to recruit them and to guide their efforts to bring more workers on board, documents the strategy adopted by this workers' association. UWAMADAR leaders did not shy away from ambitious promises. In return for a small fee, UWAMADAR pledged the following package to its members: support of a lawyer's services for work-related legal cases; to pay for the cost of the renewal of driving licences and to cover the cost of members' funerals, as well as health care expenditure for members and their families. Last, but not least, the letter stated that ‘the employment issue is a very important one’, and promised efforts to end the lack of regulation of employment in the industry.14

            In making sense of UWAMADAR's strategy, another important element to consider is who was to promote its agenda at street level. The association opted for transport workers themselves. It identified its leaders at individual stations/routes, and it educated them about the association's broad mission and more discrete goals. It was then the branch leaders' task to recruit more members. Such a strategy provided workers with some leadership over the recruitment drive. Evidence suggests this approach raises the chances of success in organising informal sector workers (Gallin 2001; Bonner and Spooner 2011; Barrett 2003).

            The strategy adopted by UWAMADAR was a risky one, especially because the limited resources of the organisation could not reasonably finance the provision of the range of promised services. Unsurprisingly, as learned during fieldwork in 2009, there are people who consider UWAMADAR as ‘cunning thieves’ or ‘useless’ (author interview, 2009b). However, UWAMADAR's remarkable success in recruiting members suggests that its strategy paid dividends with a significant number of workers. In 2003, UWAMADAR had 5236 members, approximately 44% of the total (estimated) workforce (UWAMADAR, Konrad Stiftung, DDI 2003, 23).15 With the legitimacy ‘from below’ that such membership conferred on the Coalition, the time was right to begin lobbying for employment contracts for daladala workers.

            Labour rights through collective bargaining

            As argued earlier, the unclear nature of the employer–employee relationship in the informal economy, and the frequent presence of many (uneasily identified) intermediaries amongst them, is central to the argument that demand-making by organised workers around labourist goals belongs to the past. As the employer–employee relationship is not obvious, the argument goes, collective bargaining over working terms and conditions, the main weapon traditionally deployed by organised workers to confront employers, is no longer a realistic option (Gallin 2001; Standing 2011; Devenish and Skinner 2004). While this argument accurately describes the main challenge faced by workers, it fails to explain why such a challenge cannot be overcome in some instances, as well as why labour unrest around labourist goals still occurs.

            In the case of passenger transport in Dar es Salaam, the workers' goal was to spell out the employment relationship between bus owners and workers. It has been argued, in a study of the same sector in urban South Africa, that the existence of an organisation of bus owners helps the process of collective bargaining with employers (Barret 2003, x). The Coalition's primary counterpart was DARCOBOA, the association of bus owners/employers, and it was with them that the transport labour Coalition aimed to negotiate a collective agreement. As such, a way to force employers to the negotiating table had to be found.

            To understand the strategy adopted by the Coalition, it is worth recalling the ‘structural power’ commanded by daladala workers in a city in which privately owned buses constitute the only means of (barely affordable) motorised public transport available to the public. A strike would seriously affect the mobility of the vast majority of Dar es Salaam commuters with immediate knock-on effects on virtually every economic activity in the city, and beyond. At the same time, this ‘structural power’ had limits. The possibility of a strike was constrained in a context of oversupply of unskilled labourers (low marketplace power) since workers on strike without contracts could be easily victimised by employers and lose their job. Therefore, the Coalition had to rely on a less confrontational form of pressure on employers in order to encourage the state involvement and mediation between the two parties, just as has proven crucial in other contexts (Barrett 2003; von Holdt and Webster 2008; Kabeer et al. 2013). Time and again, rumours, occasionally reported in the press (Nipashe, 9 June 2008; The Citizen, 7 December 2009; Tanzania Daima, 29 March 2010; Habari Leo, 6 April 2011), would spread about a forthcoming strike by daladala workers. The Coalition would promptly deny any involvement with it – or were unavailable for comment – and yet on the day of the strike buses on some routes, or some buses on several routes, would be withdrawn from transport service provision for part of the day, causing disruption to passengers who would in turn complain to public authorities. Workers also resorted to violence, using stones to attack the buses of those workers who did not adhere to the protest (The Citizen, 10 December 2009). In the words of COTWUT General Secretary, ‘workers were stopping work when they wanted to complain about something. And the government mediated, called a meeting with DARCOBOA, UWAMADAR, COTWUT, to solve the problem’ (author interview, 2011).

            As Silver has pointed out, there is much to be understood by studying ‘anonymous or hidden forms of struggle… where strikes are illegal and open confrontation difficult or impossible’ (Silver 2003, 35). In this instance, wild-cat strikes and localised walk-outs were an effective strategy in that they exploited the structural power commanded by workers. On the one hand, they were insufficiently confrontational to trigger retaliation by employers; on the other hand, they were assertive enough to establish the demands of workers on the political landscape and to attract the attention of Dar es Salaam transport policy-makers. Public officials' desire to deal with transport workers' unrest with haste, led to their gentle but firm pressure on DARCOBOA to negotiate a solution to their grievances with the Coalition.

            Forced to sit at the negotiating table, the daladala owners' association reacted ambiguously to the issue of contracts. As its chairman wrote to UWAMADAR, ‘DARCOBOA has no employees. Drivers and conductors are employed by private owners of individual buses’. The guidance that the association prepared was thus to be seen as no more than ‘advice to owners, who will decide themselves, not DARCOBOA’.16 At the same time, DARCOBOA also played an active role in the process of collective bargaining, and succeeded in including in the contracts elements that rendered its adoption difficult (see below). On one occasion DARCOBOA's chairman even falsely claimed that owners were ‘the ones who proposed this [i.e., employment contracts] to the government as a way of reducing accidents’ (The Guardian, 5 August 2009).17

            For all the bus owners' delaying tactics, the negotiation over workers' employment contracts proceeded slowly but surely. A collective agreement became legally binding on 26 March 2004, following the seal of approval by the Tanzania Labour Court. As Mr Semvua, the Union Deputy General Secretary, recalls, the collective agreement:

            … had three things, big ones. It spelled out the employer–employee relationship which was not there until then. That contract mentions that the driver and conductors of such a bus are such and such and makes them employees. It established a wage level and the working hours per day. It established the right to holiday for employees. (Author interview, 2009c)

            The contract legally brought to an end the unregulated nature of the employment relationship in the Dar es Salaam passenger transport sector that was central to bus owners' squeeze on workers. Seven years after the first meeting between daladala workers and the Union, the Coalition had therefore scored a significant achievement in advancing the cause for which it was set up.

            Barriers to the enforcement of employment contracts

            As is often the case, daladala workers' entitlement to labour rights de jure did not smoothly translate into their enforcement. The reasons why the vast majority of workers did not enjoy employment contracts de facto were hotly contested by the political actors involved in bringing them about. The relationship between UWAMADAR and the Union turned tense over the matter, with the City Secretary of the Union blaming UWAMADAR for its failure ‘to organise its members’. As he put it, ‘The power of the Union is in the hands of its members. It is now up to the members to organize and start demanding the contracts’. He further added that the bus owners ‘have deliberately been neglecting the legal contract, knowing that the drivers are not sufficiently organized to take actions’.18

            UWAMADAR, on the other hand, stressed that the characteristics of the workforce and of the labour market were a major obstacle to the mobilisation of daladala workers to claim their right to contracts. First, from the initiative of the association of bus owners, the collective agreement established specific skills as prerequisite for drivers and conductors to qualify for a contract. These included, for drivers, possession of class C driving licences. Given the low level of education of the vast majority of daladala workers, and the fact that many amongst the workforce held class B licences, such conditions proved to be a spanner in the works for the Coalition (HabariLeo, 30 June 2007). If this was not enough, then the extremely rapid turnover of labour, a structural characteristic of the daladala labour market, also negatively impacted on the workers' association's capacity to reach out to members. As its chairman put it, ‘You find a good branch leader, but before you know it work has taken him to another route. End of the story’ (author interview, 2009a).

            While the lack of education of the workforce and its occupational fluidity were the proximate causes of the slow enforcement of contracts, above all, as UWAMADAR reflected, ‘the problem with contracts is that the government did not get involved’. While the role of the government in steering the process of collective bargaining between employers and workers had been fundamental, the contract had no built-in mechanism to ensure that the state oversaw its enforcement. From the ashes of their bitter exchanges in the press, the union and UWAMADAR found new common ground in concluding that the widespread adoption of contracts required stronger support from the state.

            Labour rights: bringing the state back in

            This is not to say that the Coalition had overlooked the central role to be played by the state. Given DARCOBOA's uncooperative attitude throughout the negotiations, only three days after the collective agreement had been approved, the Union General Secretary, in writing to the Chairman of the Dar es Salaam Transport Licensing Authority (DRTLA), underlined that the DRTLA [was] relied upon ‘as a very important connection’ in making this happen.19

            But once a collective agreement on contracts was legally signed, a more focused effort at strengthening its relations with the state apparatus became the main activity of the Coalition. The choice of who was invited as the guest of honour at UWAMADAR's annual meeting illustrates this shift in strategy. Up till 2004 the invitation went to the General Secretary of the Union, reflecting UWAMADAR's primarily inward-looking focus on consolidating its alliance with its trade union partner. In 2004, for the first time, and subsequently, the invitation was extended to state officers. The first ‘outsider’ to be invited as guest of honour to celebrate the anniversary of UWAMADAR foundation was Lieutenant Makamba, at that time Regional Commissioner of Dar es Salaam.20 Such moves were not just symbolic. It was to Makamba that the Union leader wrote four months later, to complain that DARCOBOA did not attempt to influence their members to issue contracts for their workers, and that even DARCOBOA leaders did not issue contracts for the workforce of their own buses. The Union City Secretary also informed the Regional Commissioner that a strike was becoming unavoidable. To avoid this, he called on the local government, ‘the one who steers us all in this region’,21 to organise a meeting with DARCOBOA, UWAMADAR and the Transport Licensing Authority to discuss the issue further. Guests of honour were therefore also key ports of call for the Coalition and, as such, the choice of who they were was strategic.

            Over time, the Coalition broadened its goals. It did so by forging alliances with other groups with whom it shared strategic interests. Three instances of organised workers' increased ambition illustrate this. First, joining hands with the Tanzania Drivers Association, the Coalition held meetings to publicise the ‘problems faced by daladala drivers’.22 A new goal was to challenge the ambiguity of the law and its negative implications on the workforce (see also Barrett 2003, on a similar effort by South African transport workers). The party took issue with drivers being held exclusively responsible for violations of road safety rules, whereas it argued that there were ‘violations which are obviously the responsibility of the owner. For example, the bad condition of the vehicle; not owning a transport licence; not having insurance; not having a vehicle inspection report’. It asked that ‘the Road Traffic Act would be modified to openly distinguish the violations for which owners or drivers are responsible’.22 Second, the pressure on the issue of employment contracts continued, but it now included a vision on changes required in the private sector to ease the enforcement of workers' employment rights. The coalition thus urged the government to ensure that passenger transport was ‘provided by companies instead of individual owners. This will make it easier to adopt contracts’.22 In response to the adoption of doctored contracts, it called the Ministry of Work, Employment and Development to prepare a blueprint of employment contract. Third, it pushed for a stronger intermediary role by the state, and demanded that the newly-established Sea and Maritime Transport Regulating Authority (SUMATRA) make the depositing of workers' contracts a condition of issuing bus owners with a passenger transport licence22 (see also HabariLeo, 30 June 2007).

            The attitude of public authorities to these demands was rarely one of cooperation at the outset. For instance, the state's initial response to workers' requests to address the ambiguity of the law amounted to a firm rebuttal couched in techno-legalist terms. The Permanent Secretary claimed that ‘although these faults apparently are the sin of the owner, the driver is the temporary owner when he operates a vehicle. Furthermore the law prevents the driver from operating a vehicle when it is not roadworthy or without important documents’.22 Such words suggest that the key state officers had no appreciation of the way in which the ‘temporary ownership’ of vehicles by drivers reflected employers' strategy to transfer the uncertainty of returns from work onto the workforce. The concession that ‘fear of losing their job’ forced workers ‘to drive the vehicle according to the preferences of the owner and against the law’, shows that although there was some awareness about the uneven balance of power between workers and bus owners, it did not translate into any commitment by the state to meet workers' demands.

            The state's position often softened over time, due to continual pressure by workers.23 It was in response to another threat of strike, in 2010, that the Minister of Transport declared that the sins of drivers, conductors and poor quality of the vehicle would carry ‘their own weight’ (DarLeo, 3 December 2010). There was now a commitment to accept workers' previous requests to make the law less disadvantageous to workers. Similarly, in 2009, workers' call for a stronger intermediary role for the state in enforcing contracts was met and registering contracts for workers, inclusive of workers' photos and signatures, became one of the requirements for the issuing of passenger licences. This was no small victory. As the Union General Secretary put it, ‘at least workers now had a place to start. Unlike the first collective agreement between owners and workers, the issue of contracts is now a role of SUMATRA, a government office, under the Ministry of Transport’ (author interview, 2009c).

            At the same time, leaders of UWAMADAR and of the Union were under no illusion that making the enforcement of contracts a reality would be a straightforward process. As the COTWUT Deputy General Secretary put it, ‘the biggest challenge in implementing the rule is the fact that daladala owners are accustomed to exploit workers without contract, so they will try everything they can to avoid this change’ (ibid.). Expected tactics by employers to avoid the regulation of labour relations included enclosing with the contract the photo of a person who is not the actual driver, or the wrong signature. But even taking these likely strategies by employers into account, the Union leader emphasised the significance of the further marginal gains made by the Coalition. As Semvua put it, bus owners' room for manoeuvre in avoiding labour regulations was progressively shrinking: ‘the day that an owner gets into an argument with his driver, and is asked to produce the contract, he will be in trouble’ (ibid.).

            Conclusion

            This paper has analysed the political organisation by daladala workers since the late 1990s, its alliance with the transport trade union and how it evolved over time. It has outlined the goals that the Coalition set for itself, the strategy to achieve them and the slow but incremental advances against them in the period 1997–2010. The events analysed in this paper are context-specific. They are also open-ended as they reflect the outcome of a political battle between different groups with conflicting interests over labour rights for Dar es Salaam transport workers. While these characteristics do not make the case study replicable, a number of general considerations can be derived around the actors involved, African workers in the informal economy in partnership with a trade union, and the goals which workers' political mobilisation can (or cannot) achieve in increasingly liberalised and informalised economies.

            What can be learned on the relationship between trade unions and workers in the informal economy from this instance of a partly successful partnership between the two? The first insight is about process: realising ‘associational power’ by workers entailed a slow effort at constructing a common ground between informal workers and their union counterpart. The complex nature of this process partly explains the very slow pace at which change took place and underlines the need to allow adequate time frames when studying the politics of informality (Kabeer et al. 2013). The paper also shows the importance of informal workers' leadership to the success of their political organisation. While the union provided its political connections and know-how to support lobbying on behalf of transport workers, workers themselves were the initial trigger to form the Coalition, its key outreach workers, and the leading partner to set the Coalition's goals.

            Furthermore, the Transport Union's attitude towards minibus workers and their association sits uneasily with the characterisation of unions' attitudes towards organising informal actors as ineluctably uninterested or opportunistic. In this case, notwithstanding some tension between the two organisations, the Union was prepared to invest resources and energy in supporting the organisation of precarious workers, the success of which was of significant importance to both the Union and workers themselves. The contrast between this relatively positive story and less positive instances suggests the need to move away from overgeneralisations, towards nuanced and contextualised approaches to the study of trade unions and their relationship to economic informality and precarious workers within it.

            The second general insight that can be derived from this case study on the politics of organising in the informal economy is methodological, as the paper shows the pay-offs of political economy as an analytical approach. Far too often studies on economic informality skirt around the questions of who owns what, and with what outcomes, in the informal economy. By contrast, this paper demonstrates that understanding the way in which the workers are linked to (capitalist) employers, locating workers within their economic contexts, and mapping the sources of both their precariousness and power, is essential in making sense of why and how workers mobilise politically.

            The last general insight to be learned from this case study stems from the fact that its findings sit uneasily with, and raise questions about, the widely held belief that collective action by organised (or organising) labour along labourist goals belongs to the past, and that social protection is a more realistic and strategic target in tackling workers' precariousness.24 The workers on whom this paper has focused shared the lack of a clear employment relationship to their employers: the main characteristic that is argued to cause the impossibility of workers' mobilisation for a ‘rights at work’ agenda in the informal economy. This was indeed the main source of workers' precariousness at work, but also the very stimulus and goal of their mobilisation. Drawing on the work of Wright and Silver, this paper has argued that Dar es Salaam minibus' workers, when challenging the unclear nature of employment relations in the sector, drew on the significant ‘structural power’ which they commanded by virtue of working in a transport system in which they provided labour to the cheapest form of available public transport. While the circumstances and context in which these workers' mobilisation took place are necessarily specific, that such workers could command a degree of structural power stresses the importance of disaggregating the realm of possible for different groups of workers in different economic sectors and countries and, above all, of putting ongoing labour struggles at the centre of the reflection on the possibilities for action by precarious workers.

            Note on contributor

            Matteo Rizzo works across the Departments of Economics and Development Studies as a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His main research interests are informal labour under globalisation, urbanisation, the political economy of agrarian change (past and present) and development aid. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Taken for a Ride: Neoliberalism, Informal Labour and Transport in an African Metropolis, 1983–2010.

            Author interviews (all in Dar es Salaam)

            2009a. S. Mlawa (UWAMADAR General Secretary) and J. Mnkeni (Treasurer), September 10.

            2009b. Kizito (a daladala worker), September 4.

            2009c and 2011. B. Semvua (currently COTWUT Deputy General Secretary), September 10. Semvua was Assistant to COTWUT Dar es Salaam Secretary until June 2000, when he became t6he City Secretary himself.

            2009d. A. Sulemani (former Director of Road Transport Regulation, SUMATRA), September 8.

            Acknowledgements

            I would like to thank for constructive comments to earlier drafts of this paper Ben Fine, Gabrielle Lynch, two anonymous referees, Danisha Kazi, who also provided excellent research assistance, and Mark McQuinn, who also kindly shared his fieldwork interview cited in the paper. My gratitude also goes to UWAMADAR and COTWUT staff for sharing their time and materials on the organisation of urban transport workers.

            Notes

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            Footnotes

            Two further sub-types of structural power are to be considered. By marketplace bargaining power Wright means the power that workers command due to conditions in the labour market across economic industries. A tight labour market will lead to workers' high marketplace power. The second subtype, the workplace bargaining power, results (or not) from the specific industrial location of workers, e.g., minibus workers operating in Dar es Salaam, horticulture estate workers in Brazil, etc.

            This will be published as a forthcoming monograph entitled Taken for a ride: Neoliberalism, informal labour and public transport in an African metropolis. Oxford: Blackwell Wiley, Antipode Book Series.

            The author shared a draft of this paper with UWAMADAR's leaders, who provided useful comments and corrected some of its inaccuracies. The author also plans to deliver a paper copy of this article to COTWUT as email communication with its deputy secretary proved impossible.

            UDA, Dar es Salaam public transport company, was operating about 20 buses in 2010. Unless otherwise stated, this section draws on Rizzo (2011, 1183–1200).

            The history of the relationship between UWAMADAR and COTWUT is recalled in ‘UWAMADAR speech before COTWUT General Secretary’, 9 November 2000. Titles and contents of the Swahili documents quoted in this paper have been translated by the author.

            ‘Temeke, Tandika, Mbagala, shule ya uhuru branch’, handwritten speech, signed by Mlawa and Kayombo (both UWAMADAR's leaders later on) 13 July 1997.

            Dar es Salaam Zonal Secretary, COTWUT to General Secretary COTWUT, ‘The establishment of the daladala workers organization’, 8 September 1997.

            It should also be pointed out that efforts by COTWUT to recruit members from new (sub-)sectors go alongside its struggle to retain some of its current membership. For example, the Telecommunication Workers Union of Tanzania (TEWUTA) was formed in 2004 as a breakaway from COTWUT. Its founders were a group of retrenched Tanzanian Telecommunication Company workers who felt betrayed by the redundancy package negotiated by COTWUT on their behalf. In response to this, they started a new union (McQuinn, personal communication, based on his interview with TEWUTA's Head of Research, Loans and Economy, 15 August 2006). Furthermore, post office staff recently shifted their membership from COTWUT to TEWUTA (Babeiya 2011, 128).

            ‘UWAMADAR speech’.

            From Dar es Salaam Zonal Secretary COTWUT to General Secretary COTWUT, ‘Request from the association of drivers and conductors of urban buses (UWAMADAR) to meet with you’, 7 June 2000.

            This is a literal translation which aims to reflect the broken Swahili in which this document was written.

            Secretary UWAMADAR to General Secretary COTWUT, ‘The problems that driver and conductors get a work’, 5 July 2000.

            This can be discerned from a number of letters documenting the trade union's positive response to UWAMADAR's requests of financial support from the Union for events to be held.

            ‘The way to run UWAMADAR’, 10 March 2001. The same document outlined the financial plan to make UWAMADAR financially sustainable. This entailed the payment of a daily sum (2000 shillings) from each branch and the payment of fees from individual members (2000 shillings to join in and 250 shillings monthly) and proactively looking for sponsors – including UNDP, JICA, and the Nyerere Foundation who had shown an interest in supporting the organisation.

            Such a percentage was based on the estimate that there were 6000 private buses operating in Dar es Salaam at that time.

            Chairman DARCOBOA to Jimmy Mnkeni UWAMADAR, ‘The contract for decent work’, 31 March 2003.

            General Secretary DARCOBOA to Zonal Secretary COTWUT, ‘Seminar of daladala owners’, 9 February 2004. Both UWAMADAR leaders and transport public officers suggested that such claims were false and had to be interpreted as an attempt by employers to downplay the strength of the labour coalition. See author interviews (2009a) and (2009d).

            ‘Contracts yet to materialise’, unknown day and month in 2004, The Express, http://www.theexpress.com/express%20367/news/news2.htm#5 (accessed on 30 August 2011).

            Dar es Salaam Secretary CotwuT to Chairman DRTLA, 29 March 2004.

            General Secretary UWAMADAR to Regional Commissioner Dar es Salaam, 19 April 2004.

            Dar es Salaam Secretary COTWUT to Regional Commissioner Dar es Salaam, ‘Complaints against DAR(CO)BOA on the implementation of decent work contracts for drivers and conductors of daladala’, around 29 July 2004.

            ‘Minutes of a meeting on the conditions and problems of drivers with the Permanent Secretary Ministry of Infrastructural Development called by the Tanzania Drivers Association’, no earlier than 13 July 2006.

            It is fascinating to note the way in which these negotiations disappear from the radar of newspapers and from the Coalition's correspondence, only to remerge years later.

            Doubts have been raised on the strategic superiority of a focus on social protection over and above rights at work as a measure to tackle precarity. As the political momentum behind universal social protection is nowhere to be seen in many developing countries, calls for it lack the necessary pressure that is likely to result in its adoption (see Lerche 2012).

            Author and article information

            Contributors
            Journal
            crea20
            CREA
            Review of African Political Economy
            Review of African Political Economy
            0305-6244
            1740-1720
            June 2013
            : 40
            : 136
            : 290-308
            Affiliations
            a School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London , London , UK
            Author notes
            Article
            794729 Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 40, No. 136, June 2013, pp. 290–308
            10.1080/03056244.2013.794729
            38d8236f-a496-42ea-9137-6fd6d76dc6b7

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            Page count
            Figures: 0, Tables: 0, References: 31, Pages: 19
            Categories
            Articles

            Sociology,Economic development,Political science,Labor & Demographic economics,Political economics,Africa
            urban transport,informal economy,labour rights,urban governance,Tanzania,trade unions

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