What are the greatest advances for global workers’ rights over the last ten to fifteen years? I would include, at or near the top of the list, the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 189, affirming the rights of domestic workers (Fish 2017), India’s national law codifying the rights of street vendors (Saha 2016), and the Rana Plaza Accord designed to protect the safety of garment workers in Bangladesh (Bair et al. 2020).

What is striking about these advances is that they all involve defence of the rights of informal workers, those not reached by standard employment laws. In this chapter, I argue that this is not coincidental: strengthening the rights of informal workers, especially by empowering these workers through self-organisation, is the most important frontier for improving labour standards today. Informal workers, long viewed as peripheral to the economy and incapable of taking collective action, have demonstrated that they can strategize, mobilise and win. They were never truly simply atomised objects, but after being viewed ghat way for decades, they have increasingly stepped forward as collective subjects, generating important lessons for formal workers and for the ways we organise work more generally.

The chapter proceeds in four sections. Firstly, I more thoroughly introduce the concept of informal work, including contrasting it with the related notion of precarious work, and discuss how the concept of informality has evolved over the past five decades. Secondly, I pose the question of ‘what’s new’ about informal employment and why informal worker organising has recently attracted considerable scholarly attention. Thirdly, I explore central patterns in informal worker organising. Finally, I close with conclusions examining broader implications for our conceptions and commitments regarding work.

Informal Work: The Evolution of a Concept

Informal work is employment that is legal in itself, but that is not regulated by employment laws and/or not linked to standard social insurance systems. In Zatz’s (2008) words, this work falls ‘beyond the reach or grasp’ of standard labour protections: ‘beyond the reach’ when laws or institutions simply do not cover the category of workers; ‘beyond the grasp’ when the law theoretically covers these workers, but is not effectively implemented.