New Books In Public Policy

Informal workers make up over two billion workers or about 50 percent of the global workforce, and yet scholarly understandings of informal workers’ political and civil society participation remain limited. In Why Informal Workers Organize? Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Calla Hummel finds that informal workers organize in nearly every country for which data exists, but to varying degrees. Why do informal workers organize in some places more than others? Hummel finds that informal workers organize where state officials encourage them to. Grounded in robust theory that builds on and advances canon literature on collective action problems, Hummel argues that when officials intervene with incentives in the form of cash, licenses, and access to the bureaucracy, they lower the barriers that keep people from organizing on their own. Once informal workers take these incentives and start organizations, officials can bargain over regulation and enforcement with repres