I welcome the fact that my article, ‘Informalisation and the end of trade unionism as we knew it? Dissenting remarks from a Tanzanian case study’ (2013), has led to a debate about informalised workers and unions in Tanzania, and about how to research labour struggles. Gundula Fischer's comment raises two criticisms of my article. The first concerns what Fischer terms ‘Rizzo's and Standing's (implicit) assumptions about labour history’, a problem of overgeneralisation of the trade union experience, allegedly. The second is that its lack of contextualisation of the history of, and current debates within, the Tanzanian labour movement prevents ‘a more sophisticated picture’ to emerge. In this rejoinder I will explain why I find these two lines of critique unconvincing.
Presumed assumptions about labour history
Starting with Standing's and my (implicit) assumptions about labour history, Fischer makes a number of claims. One is that in my contribution it ‘remains vague how Standing's and Rizzo's position relate to each other’ and what my ‘dissenting remarks actually oppose’. However, my paper explains at some length what I perceived to be the problems with Standing's (and others') view that ‘due to increasingly informal relationships that do not conform to any direct employer–employee relationship, workplace labourism is no longer viable’ (Rizzo 2013, 291). I then substantiate this critique through a case study on organising and partially succeeding in claiming rights at work in the informal economy. By reading the introduction to my paper, readers can adjudicate whether my dissent from rights-at-work pessimists is clearly articulated or not. For now, it is also worth noting that, against her own claim, Fischer paradoxically shows that she is actually quite clear about the way in which Standing's position and mine differ, when she writes that my ‘starting point is Standing's thesis (2011) that the informalisation of work has made trade unions redundant. In particular, the growing absence of a clearly demarcated employee–employer relationship is seen as robbing trade unions of their target.’ It is this thesis that my case study critically and explicitly engages with. Fischer clearly understands what my disagreement with Standing is about, so it is puzzling that she argues that it is not clear what I oppose.
This problem of internal contradiction with her argument aside, Fischer argues that the implicit assumption about labour history that Standing's work and my own share is an overgeneralisation of labour realities and of the trade union experience. In her words, ‘a more critical distance from all too generalising tendencies would have further sharpened [my] argument.’ However, as any reader of my 2013 article I think will agree, I too, like Fischer, have a concern about the overgeneralising claims over the impossibility of struggles around rights at work in the twenty-first century. The very last sentence of my paper states:
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. (Rizzo 2013, 305)
A big part of Fischer's claim that my work overgeneralises comes from ‘the title, which refers to “the end of trade unionism as we knew it”’. Building on this, Fischer asks:
But was there ever a common trade unionism, known to all, that could be said to have ended? And if so, what features did it have? Did the Tanzanian labour movement, or more specifically COTWU [the Tanzanian Communication and Transport Workers Union], have the characteristics of ‘trade unionism as we knew it’, so that it can be cited as an example of renewal or continuing significance? All in all, it remains vague who is meant by ‘we’. Does Rizzo refer to the experience of countries in the North or the South, or even on a global scale? … How do these specific developments relate to ‘trade unionism as we knew it’? (Fischer 2014, in this issue)
Unfortunately, Fischer omits to spell out what the general trends and key shifts in labour history and in trade unions realities are. This is a major omission, as without this, it becomes impossible to understand what is distinctive about individual contexts and their histories. One thus risks falling into a shallow relativism whereby individual countries' uniqueness is emphasised over and above their conformity/divergence from general trends. Munck, whom Fischer cites selectively as a voice against overgeneralisations in labour studies, actually identifies such general trends when he argues that momentous changes in the organisation of production and the remaking of the ‘working class’ associated with globalisation ‘over the past 35 years’ meant that ‘traditional relations of representation and hegemony construction have been thrown in disarray and trade unions are no longer the undisputed articulators of mass discontent’ (Munck 2013, 754,755). The way in which this trend has manifested itself in individual countries is context-specific, due to uneven patterns of incorporation of countries in the global economy and due to balances of power between labour and employers which are both country- and sector-specific. But the fact remains that a general trend all scholars working on labour and trade unionism must reckon with is the increasing elusiveness of clear wage relationships due to the increasing informalisation of work. This has posed major problems to trade unions whose primary activity, and main source of membership, was until the 1970s the representation of workers at the (mainly formal economy) workplace. As argued in my 2013 paper, some have argued that the challenges that globalisation and informalisation pose to organised labour have made redundant both trade unions as institutions and the defence of rights at work as a political agenda. It is in this sense, and without – in my opinion – overgeneralising, that I write about trade unionism ‘as we knew it’: a trade unionism whose bread and butter until the 1970s was the representation of workers at work. My research engages with these debates and criticises despondent (over)generalisations of the impossibility of a rights at work agenda in the informal economy, through a close look at one specific context, that of the Dar es Salaam passenger public transport system and its informal workers' organisation to claim labour rights. Fischer's claim that I should have taken ‘a more critical distance’ from Standing's ‘all too generalising tendencies’ thus rests on very unconvincing ground.
The lack of contextualisation of the history of, and current debates within, the Tanzanian labour movement and its presumed causes
The second criticism by Fischer is that the lack of contextualisation of the history of the Tanzanian labour movement in my paper weakens its contribution. Key questions missing from my work are, as Fischer writes:
What were the initiatives of COTWU before daladala workers approached them? Did the transport workers' union have plans or strategies in place to win members in the informal economy, and if so, how successful were they? … What were the effects on the union of the partly successful coalition? Was the cooperation between COTWU and the daladala workers a one-time issue or did it prompt unionists to pursue new recruitment strategies or forge more alliances? (Fischer 2014, in this issue)
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. (Rizzo 2013, 297)
Second, and more specifically on the history of organised labour in Tanzania, I also devote two paragraphs to present background information on the history of trade unionism in Tanganyika/Tanzania from the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s, through the socialist period and to the present day. This might not be a lot, but the intention was to acknowledge the importance of the longer historical context of the trade unions, within the space limits of a journal article. I explain how political liberalisation and the formal detachment of trade unions from the ruling party and from their budgetary support explain trade unions' increased need to secure membership fees and, within it, their ‘increased attention to the “informals”’ (Rizzo 2013, 297). I also argue that efforts by unions to support the organisation of informal workers are characterised by ‘limited success in reaching them at national level and [by] important differences in the degree of interest in informal workers across unions’ (Rizzo 2013, 297). Thus, Fischer once more caricatures my claims, making them more optimistic about unions' interest in the ‘informals’ than they actually are, to then argue, unconvincingly:
Studying the attitudes of labour leaders towards the above recommendation – with a focus on those unions known as most active in this endeavour – I have reached a conclusion that differs in some respects from Rizzo's results: union efforts at stemming informalisation do exist, but are sporadic. (Fischer, 2014, in this issue)
Instead, Fischer first wrongly identifies the goal of my paper and then takes issue with the evidence it presents. She writes:
COTWU has the capacity to organise informal workers. This is what Rizzo's article intends to show. However, the description focuses more on the activities of the informal workers than on the activities of the union. (Fischer, 2014, in this issue)