Introduction
Developmental policy, mainstream scholarship and some of the most popular currents of heterodox thought consider informal workers – the billions of individuals around the world who survive in the informal economy – as living outside the purview of class analysis and its attendant insights into class conflict, ideology, social and political movements, and of capitalism itself (Bartlett 2013; Chitonge 2018). Africa is the continent with the largest percentage of informal workers in the world, and African informal workers are very rarely understood through class analysis (Bernards 2019; Werbner 2018). This approach is based on an implicit foundational assumption: the precarity experienced by informal workers in Africa is a product of their exclusion from global capitalism, not a product of their incorporation into it. I call this foundational assumption the ‘exclusion paradigm’.
Dominant liberal thought understands Africa’s informal workers as entrepreneurs needing integration into capitalist markets rather than workers already integrated into, and exploited by, the logic of capitalism. This translates into narrowly framed policy prescriptions, revolving around the priority of integrating these people into global capitalism by facilitating their ‘access to markets’ and to finance. These translate into a wide array of interventions, from microcredit initiatives to the entrenchment of market-friendly legal apparatuses, portrayed as the solution to underdevelopment and poverty associated with informality (Best 2013).
On the other hand, heterodox thinkers have argued that informal workers defy class considerations due to the prevalence of self-employment and lack of traditional employment relationships on the continent – understood as formalised, waged industrial employment relationships (Copans 2020). As Rizzo has rightly pointed out, heterodox scholars have largely confirmed the ‘exclusion paradigm’ applied by liberalism for understanding informality (Rizzo 2018), in some cases challenging the relevance of the concept of capitalism itself for understanding African political economy (Chitonge 2018; Ouma 2017). According to these perspectives, the excluded masses – or subalterns – are viewed as a non-class, comprised of entrepreneurs, subsistence farmers and the unemployed, and thus exterior to, and transcendent of, capitalist class relations.
This research takes issue with these approaches and is built on the assumption that Africa and the dynamics of its informal workers are not simply tangential to capitalism but are essential to our understandings of the complex nature of capitalism and are definitive of global capitalism today (Bernards 2019; Wallerstein 1979). Africa’s informal workers are tied in central ways to processes of global capitalist accumulation, in ways that are often overlooked by liberal scholars. Through an ethnographic study of informal workers in Sierra Leone, combined with data gathered by the International Labour Organization (ILO),1 the paper argues that almost all informal workers are tied to global value production, either directly or indirectly, and thus to profit accumulation. Informal workers meet their material needs according to a logic that is largely dictated by capital. The paper argues that a class-based understanding is analytically better equipped to understand the nature of work and capitalism in Africa today through the lens of African informal workers, and builds a theoretical contribution that draws on, but also transcends and challenges in key ways, Marxist political economy.
Theoretical framework
The three dominant conceptions of informal workers: neoliberal, heterodox and left liberal
The most influential understanding of informal workers is of the neoliberal variety, which continues to be the primary animating ideology behind international labour and developmental policy. Underlying the first-wave neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus era of international development policy in the 1980s and 1990s was an idea that informality (previously, and inaccurately, conflated with the ‘traditional sector’, a supposed holdover from pre-capitalist economies) would disappear as capitalism became further entrenched across the globe (La Porta and Shleifer 2014; World Bank 1995). Forty years later, virtually every corner of the planet has been integrated into the capitalist system via legal apparatuses imposed through structural adjustment and free-trade agreements, but without the attendant creation of the formal-sector jobs that liberal economists had anticipated (Round 2007).
In recent decades, a Post-Washington Consensus has emerged in international development policy. In 2014, the World Bank acknowledged that ‘even if economic growth rates are high, the formal sector cannot generate enough wage employment in the near future to absorb the majority of the labor force’ (World Bank 2014, 179). Concurrently, neoliberal scholars and policymakers have ‘offer[ed] up entrepreneurship in place of employment’ as the solution to global poverty and a lack of jobs (Dolan and Rajak 2018, 44). Entrepreneurialism is the new supposed key to integrating ‘excluded’ workers, displaced peasants and new generations of urban youth into the networks of global capital (Prahalad 2005).
The entrepreneurial myth that is fundamental to the Post-Washington Consensus plays, in part, an ideological role by placing the blame for poverty and the impetus for development on the heads of the world’s poorest citizens, thus deflecting responsibility from the logic of the system itself (Ochonu 2020). The entrepreneurial myth also rests on the belief that informal work is primarily chosen voluntarily by entrepreneurs seeking to avoid government regulation (De Soto 1989, 2001). While this may be the case in some instances, studies have shown that the vast majority of informal workers turn to the informal sector out of desperation due to a lack of employment opportunities (Meagher 2013; Williams 2017).
Yet, despite the huge barrier to human development that today’s rampant informality entails (ILO 2018), the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) only mention the informal sector explicitly once, in SDG 8.3, which calls for ‘development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, and encourage formalisation and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises including through access to financial services’ (UN 2021). The SDGs and the Post-Washington Consensus framework continue the legacy of first-wave neoliberalism by offering primarily market solutions to poverty and informality, with little substance or evidence of how ‘access to financial services’ and ‘foster[ing] entrepreneurial culture’ alleviate the precarity and poverty associated with surviving in the informal economy (Carroll 2010; GRI, UN Global Compact and WBCSD 2015).
The deficiency of recent policy emphasis on entrepreneurialism is perhaps best demonstrated by the proliferation of ‘microfinance’ programmes, which have been touted by philanthropists, policymakers and economists as a panacea for many of the ills of underdevelopment and inequality (Mair, Marti, and Ventresca 2012; Meyskens and Auch 2014; van Stel, Carree, and Thurik 2005). On the other hand, recent studies have shown microloans to be not only inadequate, but often disastrous and predatory, tending to enrich giant and ‘corporatised’ non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their stakeholders at the expense of the poor, with the spread of microloans coinciding with gross domestic product (GDP) growth but no attendant alleviations in poverty (Mannan 2009; Muhammad 2015). Microloans are largely distributed by NGOs using foreign state funds, with the three-part goal of market expansion, profit-making and supposedly empowering the poor, especially women and youth, to be entrepreneurs. The result is that ‘microcredit practices bring the poor into the exploitative process of marketization as deregulation facilitates the institutionalization of profit-oriented activities’ (Chowdhury and Willmott 2019, 123), with most borrowers often unable to repay absurd interest rates, thus becoming subject to shame and prosecution (Ahmed 2007). The misguided application of entrepreneurial strategies for development arises largely from the ideological inability to see informal workers as class actors and, more specifically, as workers who subsidise and provide value for the continuance of global capitalism.
On the heterodox side, one camp includes post-development and ‘subaltern studies’ thinkers. ‘Subaltern studies’ thinkers contend that the proliferation of informality also points to an exclusionary model of globalisation, but one wherein those in the informal sector are excluded not only from the beneficial aspects of capitalism, but also from the class structure and the logic of the system itself. The argument goes that as a heterogeneous assortment of peasants, the unemployed and self-employed workers, the majority of the world’s inhabitants are impervious to class analysis and cannot be understood as workers in the sense of belonging to an exploited, value-producing class, at odds with the interests of capital. Africa itself is often held to be only partially capitalist and is viewed largely as a continent of land-owning peasants, isolated from capitalist relations and production (Bartlett 2013; Cox and Negi 2010). Thus, class-based politics, ideologies and identities are irrelevant to most of the inhabitants of Africa. Alternatively, the research draws on the rich history of class analysis of Africa’s informal workers and their roles in circuits of global capital, from the foundational work of Henry Bernstein’s analysis of African peasants as commodity producers (1977) to more contemporary thinkers, such as the ‘Capitalism in Africa’ debates published by the Review of African Political Economy or Nick Bernards’ work on contemporary labour regimes and precarity on the continent (2018, 2019).
The idea that subsistence farmers, deemed immune from the dictates of capital, make up the bulk of Africa’s populace is an outdated yet stubborn assumption, perpetuated by influential thinkers (Scott 2010). These assumptions, however, are empirically flawed, as shown for example in the work of Bernstein (1977, 2010), Oya (2013) and many others. Even if we exclude farms wherein the ‘main intended destination of production’ is for own use (i.e. subsistence farming) in our estimations of rates of informality, nearly 72% of workers in Africa, 82% in West Africa and 92.5% in Sierra Leone remain informal workers, according to the latest ILO definitions (ILO 2018, 8).2 This means, as Bernstein has shown (2010), the small-scale farmers who do exist tend to produce goods for the market while simultaneously lacking any social protections, meaning we can categorise them as self-employed informal workers. Additionally, many more of those who work the land are not, in fact, owners, but are largely community and family workers, and thus can be categorised as informal employees and/or unfree workers according to the ILO definition.
Because ‘subaltern studies’ thinkers, such as Spivak, view informal workers as lacking a class foundation on which to act, the agency of the subaltern is largely reduced to cultural forms of resistance rather than economic or political ones (Mignolo 2007; Scott 2013), because ‘subalternity is where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognizable basis of action’ (Spivak 2005, 476). This formulation, in attempting to avoid homogenisation of the concept of informal workers, lends itself to a homogenisation of the subaltern as a ‘teeming mass of self-employed small-scale entrepreneurs’ (Rizzo 2018, 51).
By doing so, ‘subaltern studies’ subscribe to the ‘exclusion paradigm’ employed by liberalism. Where they diverge from liberal thought, however, is in their understanding of exclusion as inherent to the system, which is deemed incapable of integration, whether via entrepreneurialism or other development schemes. It follows that informal workers themselves, lacking any structural power or class location, are seen as unable to challenge the system, except by carving out autonomous spaces outside of it, often via ethnic, locally based political formations (Scott 2010). In other words, class politics are often viewed by subaltern thinkers as irrelevant or passé for informal workers.
Sometimes the subaltern’s exclusion is understood as a potential benefit. Given that subalterns (supposedly) exist outside of capitalism, they may be able to provide alternative and competing visions of the future and society, visions that tend to be understood as inherently opaque to outsiders, according to poststructuralist assumptions about identity and the primacy of cultural subjectivity. Adhering to what Ananya Roy and Matthew Gandy call a ‘neo-organicist’ framework, many subaltern studies thinkers tend to celebrate the sites of informality and poverty in the megacities of the South as ‘ingenious, critical alternative systems’ and spaces of emancipation, as renowned architect and urbanist Remi Koolhaas observed, thanks to their supposed existence on the outside of the confines of mainstream society and capitalism (Gandy 2005; Roy 2011). This position has been (rightly) critiqued for its aversion to political programmes, its conception of power which tends to individualise politics and eschew structural considerations, and its parochialism (Peet and Hartwick 2015).
Another more moderate camp within the heterodox framework comprises what I refer to as left-liberal thinkers (Carré and Chen 2020; Chen 2007; WIEGO 2021a). Although critical of the World Bank’s continued privileging of extreme free-market policies, left-liberal thinkers still believe that capitalism is ultimately capable of providing decent work for all and is preferable to more radical (i.e. non-capitalist) alternatives. In other words, they reject the notion that informal workers inhabit a class with interests opposed to the interests of capital but agree the present system must be changed to enable a decent life for all.
Like the neoliberal and other heterodox perspectives, the left-liberal perspective operates very much within the ‘exclusion paradigm’. Like liberal thinkers, however, the left-liberals call for integration of everyone into a properly functioning ‘free-market’ capitalism as a means of minimising precarity, following the lead of contemporary thinkers such as Guy Standing and his conception of the ‘precariat’ whose proliferation, he argues, is actually a symptom of a perversion of capitalism rather than an outcome of its inherent tendencies (Standing 2016, 2017). The left-liberal perspective calls for more empowered informal worker unions and membership-based organisations and for increased social safety nets, while simultaneously recognising the importance and necessity of informality for providing livelihoods for the world’s poor (Alfers, Lund, and Moussié 2018). The goal, in other words, is to make informal work more sustainable and recognised, not to eliminate it (WEIGO 2021a). The left-liberal perspective has been steadily growing in international influence in recent decades, having become influential on policymakers especially via international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), which have become essential in working with the ILO to measure informality and to define the parameters of informal policy (WIEGO 2021b).
Policy-facing left-liberal actors include the two major INGOs focused on informal work in the world today, namely Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) and Streetnet. Interestingly, the ILO itself can also be seen as taking a more progressive liberal stance on informality relative to the former Bretton Woods Institutions. Some key policy-facing left-liberal thinkers include academics Martha Chen and Kate Meagher, both of whom are associated with WIEGO and wield sizeable influence on international labour policy. Their aim is formalisation when feasible, and to blunt the worst deprivations associated with informality otherwise, but not necessarily to end informality itself, noting the key role and ‘opportunities’ the informal sector plays in global capital accumulation and development, and an overall belief in the desirability of capitalism itself (Chen 2007; Chen, Jhabvala, and Lund 2002). Thus, the left-liberal coalition of INGOs, scholars and the ILO mainly calls for the creation of informal unions, social safety nets and fair-trading practices while maintaining a general belief in the ability of capitalism to eventually provide adequate, dignified work for all and in the superiority of a market-based global society (ILO 2019). The work of innovative trade unionism and the expansion of social safety nets for informal persons is admirable, productive and necessary for building a foundation upon which informal workers can collectively fight for economic justice. The question of the scope, aim and purpose of INGO-created informal unions remains a contested one (Neal 2011), engendering a debate that mirrors previous debates on the divisions between radical unionism and ‘business unionism’ (Moody 1988), which in the case of the informal economy would be better termed ‘INGO unionism’.
Moving on to our study case of Sierra Leone, national politics are actually ahead of the curve in the recognition of informal-sector unions under the purview of the country’s labour congress. This advancement has been largely aided by the efforts of Streetnet. Like the traditional unions in the country, however, the informal unions remain a largely state-managed affair with the primary purpose of curtailing wildcat strikes and funnelling labour activism to the ‘proper’ institutional channels for purposes of neutralisation. This state strategy dates to legislative attempts to curb radical unionism and the efforts of socialist and labour organiser I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson by the British colonial administration in the 1930s and 1940s (Denzer 1982).
For informal workers to build and leverage class power, what is needed is a labour movement that transcends the efforts of INGO unions and subaltern rebellions, while still providing insight. The present research is built on the explicit rejection of the ‘exclusion paradigm’ and the dominant neoliberal and heterodox viewpoints. Connecting the empirical evidence of Sierra Leone’s informal workers’ lived experiences to contemporary global capitalism, the present article argues that a class-based understanding of informal workers offers the most explanatory power as to why informality persists, how it functions to enrich the few at the expense of the world’s poorest workers, and how we can end the deprivation and inequality associated with it.
Towards a class understanding of informal workers
Despite the arguments of those who subscribe to the exclusion paradigm, informal workers are integrated into the capitalist system, including its class hierarchy, and play important functions as a segment of the global working class for the continued accumulation of capital at the global level. In a vindication of Marx, twenty-first-century capitalism necessitates both the creation of the informal working class and the deprivation of informal workers. The result is a critical contradiction between a global need for the cheap labour and subsidisation informal labourers provide and the failure of the system to provide adequate resources for the reproduction and flourishing of those workers who provide it. The result is a growing crisis of informality, of inequality, of unemployment and of urbanisation that risks undermining the very system that creates all these processes.
The necessity of informal workers to the reproduction of the capitalist system is not entirely lost on neoliberal thinkers in their policy prescriptions, but it is largely unspoken in their terminology and conceptualisations. This omission seems to be due to primarily ideological motivations. The first function of informal workers is more or less admitted to; however, the deprivation of living in the informal sector supposedly fosters, via the struggle to survive, the entrepreneurial spirit among informal workers. This spirit, according to the Post-Washington Consensus, can lead to entrepreneurial innovation and discipline and, thus, economic development. Second, the informal sector enables ‘flexible’ markets, thus disciplining labour (i.e. keeping labour costs down) and enabling foreign investment (i.e. labour arbitrage); and, third, the informal sector subsidises the failure of the so-called formal market system to provide the means of survival for billions of people around the world and – more importantly, from the point of view of capital – to harness productive capabilities and surplus value and enable consumerism in the periphery. The World Bank acknowledges that ‘the informal sector remains the main contributor to GDP and to employment [in Africa and South Asia]’ (World Bank 2014, 179).
Drawing from the insights of the Italian Autonomous Marxist school, especially the work of Silvia Federici and Mario Tronti, this work employs an understanding of capitalism, and of value creation, as a totality not limited to narrow understandings of class or value, while also recognising the centrality of class and value and the relationship between workers and capitalists to understanding and hopefully changing the world (Federici 2020; Tronti 2019). Also drawing on the work of Marxist feminist thinkers such as Bhattacharya (2017) and Federici, this research recognises the centrality of class and the logic of capital to what have been traditionally viewed by mainstream economists as aspects of social life (such as care work, family life and the home-based economy) that exist outside of the purview of class and capital (Jones 2020). This approach seeks to overcome many of the shortcomings of orthodox Marxism, especially its privileging of European and Western formations of the working class, by drawing on Samir Amin’s (and similar thinkers’) formulations of value production, the global division of labour and global surplus value, especially regarding Africa (Amin 2010; Suwandi 2019). To do so, it proposes a broader definition of the working class as comprising all the people who make social reproduction and the general reproduction of the capitalist system possible, whether via their reproductive (i.e. family and care) work or via the creation and realisation of value. This approach necessarily identifies the potential of worker power in those locations where workers perform labour necessary for the reproduction of the system. This broader understanding of worker power overcomes the narrowly analytic strands of contemporary analytical Marxism, such as the Erik Olin Wright-inspired ‘power resources approach’, with its understanding of ‘structural’ power and other forms of social power wielded by workers as isolatable variables, a methodology that recreates the overly narrow understandings of capitalism, value and class perpetrated by the exclusion paradigm and that theorises informal workers as lacking power (Kabeer, Sudarshan, and Milward 2013; Kurtz 2004; Schmalz, Ludwig, and Webster 2018). The power resources approach entails the ‘implicit transformation of class power as a relation into compartmentalised capacities of workers and workers’ organizations’ (Gallas 2018, 348). It is the assumption of compartmentalisation that perpetuates the informal/formal dichotomy and undermines more holistic notions of value and work within the capitalist system.
These limitations hold political ramifications for Marxist analysis, as explored by Harry Cleaver in his classic Reading capital politically (Cleaver 2019; McDermott 2020). Challenging the misguided equation that sees the working class as limited to formalised wage work, this approach proposes a more complex and nuanced understanding of the reality of global capitalism, with the primary aim of showing the relevance of class, value and exploitation to lived reality of informal workers in Africa. Informal workers are part of the global working class and represent the emergence of a novel class formation in the periphery of twenty-first-century capitalism. Seen under this light, Africa is integrated in the global capitalist system, namely as a primary locale whose political economy exposes fundamentals of the capitalist system, rather than aberrations from it (Bernards 2019). In the second part of the paper, I will illustrate this argument through the case study of various kinds of informal workers in Sierra Leone and their creation of value for expropriation by international capital.
Methodology
The article employs a global ethnographic methodology, as developed by Burawoy (2000), which recognises the confluence of global and local forces in shaping local conditions, and which enables one to garner globally relevant insights via ethnographic inquiry embedded within broader historical and macro-level contexts. Thus, although this work draws primarily on Sierra Leone, the global dynamics of capital and geopolitics driving informality are especially relevant to West Africa and possibly to the whole continent.
In 2015, spending two months in the far east side of Freetown, I lived with members of the African Socialist Movement (ASM), a Sierra Leone-based socialist organisation that primarily organises informal workers. I carried out ethnographic work while living with a group of young, male informal workers from September 2019 to March 2020 in the Murraytown neighbourhood on the west side of Freetown. Research included extended stays in other parts of the country including Bo, the second largest city, Kabala, the centre of cattle and timber production in the far north, and in the small Limba village of Konta-Madina in Kambia District.
My ethnographic work, based on participant observation, included approximately 60 semi-structured interviews, carried out largely in the national lingua franca of Krio, with informal workers across many industries and professions, as well as a few high-ranking government and labour union officials. This latter group included the head of the national drivers’ union, a government accountant working on a project to determine how best to tax informal entities, and the coordinator for the informal-sector unions of the country’s Sierra Leone Labour Congress. Ethnographic data were integrated with archival sources and statistical reports, especially those published by the ILO.
Case study: informal workers in Sierra Leone
By the numbers
Informal workers make up the largest segment of the global working class and are especially prevalent across the global South. In Africa, informal workers make up nearly 85% of all workers and 72% of workers if we exclude the agricultural sector (ILO 2018, 27).3 The ILO draws a distinction between employment in the informal sector and informal employment, the difference being employment in the informal sector is defined in terms of the type of workplace of the worker, while informal employment is defined in terms of the characteristics of the employment situation. In other words, not all informal workers work in the informal sector (Ibid., 7). The West African region has the highest rate of informal workers on the continent. In Sierra Leone, a small country in the Mano River Region of coastal West Africa, 92.5% of total workers are informal while 86% of non-agricultural workers are informal, putting it among the countries with the highest share of informal workers (see Tables 1 and 2). In terms of gender, in lower income countries, a higher proportion of women than men are in informal employment. In Africa, 89.7% of women are informal, compared to 82.7% of men, with informal women workers tending to occupy ‘the most vulnerable situations … as domestic workers, home-based workers, or contributing family workers’ (Ibid., 21, 127), highlighting the central role of gender in the dynamics of informal work.
Share of informal employment in total employment (%).
| Total | Men | Women | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 85.8 | 82.7 | 89.7 |
| West Africa | 92.4 | 89.8 | 96 |
| Sierra Leone | 92.5 | 92.9 | 92.1 |
| World | 61.2 | 63 | 58.1 |
Data source: ILO (2018, 24–27, 85–131).
Share of informal employment in non-agricultural employment (%).
| Total | Men | Women | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 71.9 | 67.7 | 78.6 |
| West Africa | 87 | 81 | 92.3 |
| Sierra Leone | 86 | 86.4 | 85.7 |
| World | 50.5 | 53.1 | 46.4 |
Data source: ILO (2018, 24–27, 85–131).
The emphasis on entrepreneurialism and the failure of policymakers and scholars to fully appreciate the true class nature of informal workers, according even to popular conceptions of the ‘working class’ as waged employees, is challenged by the fact that nearly two-thirds of all employees in West Africa are informal (see Figure 1) and that approximately one-third of all informal workers are employed by someone else, which makes them informal wage workers (see Figure 2). In West Africa, this applies also to the industrial sector, where informal wage workers make up over 90% of industrial-sector workers (see Figure 3).
West Africa: type of employment by occupation category (%). Data source: ILO (2018, 27–30).
West Africa: share of total informal workforce by occupation category (%). Data source: ILO (2018, 27–30).
Given the prevalence of informal workers engaged in wage work and in industrial production in West Africa, the notion that informal workers are somehow excluded from capitalist relations and the production and extraction of value becomes untenable. Even then, however, over half of all informal workers are self-employed workers engaged in petty trade and/or production (what the ILO refers to as ‘own-account workers’). In the following section, I explore further the connections to global value chains entailed in the prevalence of waged work among informal workers while also challenging assumptions that petty traders are somehow irrelevant and external to processes of capital accumulation and exploitation by exploring the key roles petty traders play in value production and how their lives are shaped by capitalism. This leads to an understanding of Africa’s informal workers as a distinct segment of the global working class whose shared structural location and relation to global value production, while heterogeneous, is still cohesive enough to build a common foundation upon which to enact class struggle and to challenge the capitalist system.
Petty traders: from Kukuri shops to mining services to wholesalers
Since the 1960s, more and more Sierra Leoneans have turned to petty trading, home-work and own-account work, three largely overlapping categories of informal work, for survival (Kamara 2018). In the 1980s and 1990s, Sierra Leone suffered the imposition of neoliberal free-trade agreements and structural adjustment programmes that decimated local industry, along with a brutal civil war that lasted from 1990 to 2002. With these crises, more and more Sierra Leoneans were pushed into the informal economy. In the twenty-first century, a renewed rush for natural resources and arable land in the country and continued massive levels of debt and corruption have entrenched informality even further.
In all major cities, but also in smaller towns and roadside villages, petty traders/own-account workers are omnipresent in the country of seven million people. Nearly two million people live in the country’s capital and major urban centre, the coastal city of Freetown, where petty trade is the sole source of income for many of its inhabitants. Most goods produced, exported, imported and consumed in the country pass through Freetown at some point.
Many petty traders in Freetown deal in foodstuff. Small, informal restaurants – known as kukuri shops – exist on sidewalks, in homes, in parking lots and at road junctions across the city. Women and girls tend to be the ones who work in kukuri shops, many of which are managed directly out of homes by families. It is common for women and girls to spend their time doing work at friends’ and relatives’ kukuri shops some days and to have the favour returned on others.
Girls and women also tend to hawk other foodstuff, usually out of buckets and baskets, in markets and at busy locales throughout the city. They often sell fried goods, fruits and vegetables, or crafts made at home and toted to market on their heads or on the back of motorcycle taxis (okadas), largely driven by informal wage workers employed by bike owners. Food preparation and domestic work is especially labour-intensive in the country due to an almost universal lack of reliable electricity or cooking and cleaning appliances. Virtually all cooking is done in large iron pots over an open flame which is fed with small bundles of bought wood, charcoal and bits of plastic and garbage conducive to fire-starting, all of which are also bought at market from other petty traders. In other words, lots of income-producing labour is done in the home by women and girls, including children. For those women involved in food business, their foodstuff usually also doubles as meals for themselves and their family. Commodified domestic work is not limited to food preparation, but also includes laundry washing and house cleaning for neighbours, especially male bachelors, but also wealthy expats, government officials and businessmen in the wealthy neighbourhoods such as Imatt and Regent in the Western Area of the city. One domestic worker spoke of making the equivalent of US$30 a month for 12 hours of work a day for a wealthy Sierra Leonean family in Regent, including having to pay her own transportation across town to get to the wealthy neighbourhood, far below the national minimum wage of roughly US$50.
Because food preparation is labour intensive, also due to a lack of refrigeration and electric appliances, many informal workers do not cook at home regularly. This pattern is heavily gendered, and it is especially male informal workers who tend to pay for food preparation, for culturally gendered reasons, and thus resort to kukuri shops and street food on a regular basis, although kukuri shops also cater to female informal workers. Kukuri shops feed the informal workers in a context where sit-down and formal restaurants, even modest ones, are usually too expensive. Through the kukuri shops, the food labour undertaken by many women and girls in the country is central to social reproduction, not only at the household level in terms of care work, but also in terms of providing affordable sustenance for the majority of workers outside the home.
In Sierra Leone, the mining sector comprises 80% of the country’s exports, and is known for its large diamond, iron-ore, rutile and bauxite deposits (International Trade Commission 2020). In the country’s small-scale alluvial mining sites, women provide the food necessary for the miners to work. In a context of proliferation of mining sites, often managed by small-scale foreign miners (from Lebanon, Israel, India and Nigeria), informal workers increasingly migrate to remote localities to work in the new mines. Working conditions are hazardous and taxing, while the job is low paying; often workers only get paid if they find a diamond, for instance, and even then they receive only a small portion of the diamond’s market value. Forced labour and child labour are not uncommon.
While a new mining concession is being productive, miners survive through makeshift housing, informal markets and kukuri shops, worked by women who follow the mining camps. Without them, miners would not have the transportation or financial means to live and eat while continuing to work at the mine. In this way, petty traders directly subsidise the extraction of natural resources and rely on natural resource extraction to survive. Major multinational mining operations – usually European, American or Chinese in origin – tend to be capital intensive and require relatively fewer workers. These mining sites are difficult for petty traders to gain access to. Still, kukuri shops and petty traders set up shop near large mines to feed workers, both formal and informal, come lunchtime and the day’s end. While an estimated 30,000 people are formally employed as miners in the country, an estimated 300,000 people in the country work in the sector informally or indirectly, such as petty traders who survive by selling food, domestic services, daily necessities, transport and shelter to miners (International Trade Commission 2020).
Increasingly, petty traders and own-account workers have also become personally incorporated into value extraction via the ‘financialization of poverty’ (Mader 2015, 78), i.e. the proliferation of microfinance schemes supported by UN and World Bank policy and funded by wealthy foreign states via INGOs (Mader 2015). A case study of Building Resources Across Communities (BRAC), the world’s largest INGO, and its practices in Sierra Leone is illustrative of the shortcomings of the entrepreneurial framework of development pushed by the UN and the World Bank. BRAC has turned microloans (85% of the charity’s portfolio) into a financial windfall by charging outrageous interest rates and engaging in deceptive borrowing practices with often financially illiterate individuals, most of whom are women and petty traders. BRAC charges 30% interest rates, even higher than the already outrageous average rate of 22% in the country. The first payment is required only one week after disbursement. Under this model, BRAC’s pre-tax profits in the impoverished country were US$700,000 in 2017. Those unable to pay the steep interest rates are reported to police and arrested (Kardas-Nelson 2019).
The rise of microfinance in development policy has led to a ‘transformation of value into globalized value’, which renders the labour of many petty traders ‘accessible to global capital’ (Amin 2010, 84; Muhammad 2015). The result has been that, in 2010, nearly US$20 billion was paid by microfinance borrowers. In other words, the poorest workers on the planet are paying profits to the microfinance industry (Ibid.; Mader 2015). This fact is not lost on locals in Freetown. BRAC has gained a reputation as a predatory lender, with many local traders wary of working with them, and talk about BRAC as a scam is common among the chatter of the streets.
Aside from their role subsidising social reproduction and value extraction via offering cheap goods and services, and their role as debtors in microfinance schemes, petty traders play another essential role in global value chains as key players in the realisation of profit, a fact that has been little explored. Petty traders often the play the role, in essence, of sales workers and serve as the point of sale of commodities.
Typically, petty traders buy their goods from wholesalers, many of whom are themselves foreign nationals – in Freetown, largely Lebanese and Nigerian men, although Sierra Leoneans, especially members of the ethnic Fula group, can also be found working as wholesalers. Wholesalers tend to own or rent shop space out of which they buy imported goods in bulk and sell to traders. Many wholesalers lack a formal licence, relying heavily on bribery to obtain their goods at the port and to avoid scrutiny by state officials. Because of this, wholesalers were especially hesitant to speak with me during my research. The three central components of being a wholesaler are having connections at the country’s Port of Freetown, the capital necessary to procure the imported goods, and the connections abroad to arrange the transactions.
The internationally connected markets for clothing, processed foods and cell phone services are especially prevalent in Sierra Leone, and petty traders are key to the realisation of profit for these consumer goods (Shivji 1975). Most of the realised profit winds up in the foreign countries where the goods are produced, namely East Asia, the Middle East, and the West. Petty traders function in much the same way as precarious salespersons forced into a pyramid scheme: they survive solely off what they sell and they must buy their own inventory, thus taking all the risk on themselves, in exchange for the smallest of profit margins. Just because they are salespeople does not mean they are ‘unproductive’ labour in the classical political economy sense (Smith 2016); indeed, as the point of sales and realisation for consumer goods, petty traders are essential – not excluded or surplus – labour. For instance, the major telecom giants active in West Africa, such as AfriCell, QCell and Orange, use armies of informal workers – largely young men – to sell data (‘top-up’) in the streets to consumers. Top-up can be bought by informal wage workers specialised in top-up vending in very small increments that make it accessible to the majority of the working poor, who are unable to afford monthly payment plans.
In the Sierra Leone clothing trade, much clothing is procured from charities and the second-hand clothing industry in the US and Europe. Often unspoken in talk of clothing donations to Africa, however, is the fact that donated clothes (or jonks in Krio) are sold by the charities and clothing companies to wholesalers who then sell the clothing, usually in barrels or large bundles, to the traders themselves – the traders are often not allowed to look inside the barrels or bundles before buying them – meaning many of the clothes they purchase are unsellable. The flooding of cheap clothing – which is usually originally manufactured in Asia – from the US to Africa has decimated African countries’ textile industries since the rise of neoliberal free-trade agreements in the 1980s and 1990s (Traub-Merz and Jauch 2006). When Rwanda attempted to raise tariffs on imported clothing to protect local industry in 2018, for instance, the US retaliated by raising their own tariffs on Rwandan exports to the US. At stake, the Trump administration argued, were 40,000 US jobs and nearly US$124 million in annual exports that comprise the second-hand clothing industry in the US (John 2018). Fearing similar retaliation, other African countries are afraid to challenge these types of imbalances in the global textile trade.
Extractive labourers: from fishers to timber workers
Informal workers in West Africa also play key valorisation roles in global value chains. Valorisation, or the adding of labour value to a commodity during its production, does, in fact, apply to many informal workers, especially those who work in the extractive sector.
Like much of West Africa, manufacturing for export is practically non-existent in Sierra Leone. What lite manufacturing does exist is mostly done for domestic use – namely, the production of bottled water, gravel and mattresses. In this sense, a very small domestic capitalist class does exist. Thus, the real significance of informal workers to processes of global capital arrives in the extractive and the growing agro-industrial sectors, as Sierra Leone is home to extreme mineral wealth, fish and forest reserves, and rich farmland. Thus, the national ruling class in Sierra Leone tends to be composed of a comprador class of politicians and wealthy investors – although these groups largely overlap – that live off kickbacks, corruption and personal holdings related to the extraction of natural resources in the country. This form of corruption has been exacerbated by deregulation under neoliberalism and integration into global capitalist markets. The ethnic Lebanese, some of whom have been in the country for generations, make up a large portion of small and medium-sized business owners in the country – the petite bourgeoisie, although they lack any real political clout and are largely self-segregated from the Sierra Leonean ethnic groups except as their employers and supervisors. Certain ethnic groups – especially the Fula – and foreign nationals tend to dominate small holdings in the mining, timber and cattle industries, while large multinationals tend to hold the most sway, money and power over these industries at large.
In either case, it is informal workers who tend to do the actual labour required to do the mining, cut down the trees, catch the fish, work in the shops, or grow the palm oil. Chinese fishing boats have become known for overfishing and illegally fishing off the coast of the country, where they informally employ local workers for weeks-long voyages to catch the fish that are eventually shipped around the world, while often being mislabelled as a product of China. The overfishing has led to a decline in fish available for local fishers, who catch for the domestic market. According to fishing-boat workers on Chinese vessels, voyages tend to last several weeks. On voyages, workers regularly endure abuse, overwork, lack of sleep and poor-quality food. For four weeks of work, a worker can expect to make 500,000 Leones (approximately US$50), provided that they avoid becoming sick or working too slowly, both of which lead to pay cuts upon returning to shore.
The working conditions in the timber industry are even more dire. Kabala, the bustling and remote city in the far north of the country, is home to the country’s timber industry. From Kabala, large, unmarked trucks – owned or rented either by small independent investors, largely of foreign origin, or by large multinationals trying to keep their role in the trade as discreet as possible – barrel out into the mountainous jungles of Koinadugu District and the Northern Province to collect freshly cut trees and bring them back to the large timber yard in Kabala for arrangement of shipment to Freetown and, eventually, overseas. One local company, Leadway Trading, was granted a monopoly over timber exports in 2018 by the newly elected president, the Sierra Leone’s People Party (SLPP)’s Julius Madaa Bio, although the presence of other exporting multinationals was still very much a reality in 2019 at the time of writing. However, the mysteriously and newly formed Leadway Trading was later discovered to be owned by Bio himself, along with damning revelations, which the author helped to uncover during this research, that massive amounts of timber revenue had gone unreported to the government, with millions of US dollars unaccounted for.
The timber industry is completely unregulated in Sierra Leone. One of the most common sights one experiences when travelling into the interior of the country from Freetown is trucks loaded with timber. In small villages and in the jungle, the sound of chainsaws in the distance is common. Timber investors rely heavily on bribery of national, regional and local officials to gain access to forests for cutting. The whole industry relies exclusively on informal wage workers who go deep into the forests to fell huge swaths of trees. Other workers then follow on immense trucks, load the logs, and take them back to Kabala for preparation for shipment. The work is incredibly dangerous, with a high rate of work-related injuries and incidents, sometimes fatal ones. Fatalities and maiming among the log loaders and the cutters are common, while drug and alcohol abuse are omnipresent among the workers to deal with work-related stress, the need to face work-related dangers and the dismal pay. Every single timber worker I spoke with worked the job due to a lack of other employment opportunities. ‘This work is not easy’, said one. ‘In less than three days we had three people die recently’, said another. Because of the physically demanding nature of the work, the timber workers are young men who work only a few years in the industry. Workers are paid piecemeal, usually making about US$2 a day: ‘We negotiate the pay, but they will pay me Le8000 or Le9000 [less than one dollar] to load this trailer’, one worker said, pointing to the large piles of timber on the ground awaiting loading onto a truck bound for Freetown.
Conclusions
In these brief sketches of the economic lives of both petty traders and extractive workers in Sierra Leone, we can see the working-class nature of informality in West Africa. Informal workers are essential for the existence of their communities, their countries and the world-system, and are the primary workers of contemporary neocolonialism and imperialist exploitation. Further research and elaboration on the nature of the informal working class is desperately needed, and it is to the shame of policymakers and scholars that the bulk of the world’s workers continue to be under-studied and written off as largely impervious to class considerations.
The relation of informal workers – both waged and unwaged – to capital accumulation looks different from that of formal workers associated with the idea of the ‘working class’ in popular Western imagination and scholarship. These differences, however, do not mean that informal workers live on the outside of capitalism and its law of value. As such, they are to be understood as part of the global working class, which also means that their relation to the processes of capital accumulation is paramount to understanding their political, cultural and material lives.
The example of Sierra Leone’s petty traders’ and extractive workers’ economic lives, and thus many aspects of their social and personal lives, is dictated by the reality of the entrenchment of capitalism as the primary economic logic of the societies of Africa. They play a key role as workers who enable the reproduction of the extractive sector and its low-paid workers and also the reproduction of the mass of surplus workers (the reserve army of labour) that exists in Africa. This role is realised thanks to their subsidisation (i.e. offering of extremely cheap and accessible goods) in an otherwise untenable system. They also play a key role in the realisation of profit via the buying and selling of consumer goods, and thus ought to also be understood as labourers engaged in the valorisation of global commodities. Following the insights of Marxist feminist theorists, a clearer and more inclusive understanding of the necessity of other forms of work (beyond direct commodity production) for the realisation of value and the perpetuation of global capitalism is a necessity if we are to comprehend the diversity and the potential power of the global working class today.
Millions of informal African workers are engaged in the extractive sector and other waged work, through a mechanism of hyper-exploitation that continues to enable a system of global apartheid wherein Africa, the poorest continent on earth, experiences a net loss of billions of dollars a year in its dealings with the rest of the world (Curtis and Jones 2017), and wherein a handful of investors and chief executive officers own more wealth than all the rest of the earth’s inhabitants combined.
Petty traders and informal wage workers, then, make up the informal working class, a segment of the global working class that is exploited and expropriated by capital, and that is, at the same time, necessary for its functioning on the continent and around the world. Thus, informal workers ought to be understood as a primary component of the global working class. They are a class whose interests are opposed to capital, and who, one day, may realise their collective revolutionary potential.
Capitalism in Africa has very specific characteristics, and African informal workers are a highly diverse group, with a relation to capital that is not analogous to that of formal wage workers. The point is that as a global system, capitalism takes on specific forms grounded in the historical, cultural and geographic particularities of a given place and time. Africa has always been central in the development of capitalism and has always taken on peculiar characteristics within the capitalist system because of its unique cultural, geographical and historical place in the world. As such, Africa’s role in global capitalism is both unique and essential, and it is, above all, defined by the informal working class.
It is only by recognising the key role Africa’s informal workers play in capitalism, and the key role capitalism plays in shaping their lives, that we can achieve an accurate understanding of the nature of the world of work today. To avoid the reality of class in Africa is to continue not only to misunderstand informal workers, but also to misunderstand capitalism and Africa. Such misunderstandings hinder our ability to effectively challenge the inhumane, inequitable and exploitative aspects of our contemporary world.