Revisiting Abandoned Ground

Abstract

Since the 1990s African trade unions have discussed and in part embarked on mobilization in the informal economy. Reports, however, rarely relate present unionists’ attitudes towards informal workers, on the one hand, to the history of their labor movement on the other. In this study ethnographic interviews with high-ranking Tanzanian labor leaders and their development partners are evaluated against aims and obstacles unions in other African countries see for engagement in the informal economy and against the specific Tanzanian union history. This approach reveals how in the case of Tanzania structural and historical problems (the latter mainly survivals from Ujamaa socialism) reinforce each other. As a result, labor leaders experience difficulties in addressing economic developments such as the informalization of work and in returning to more inclusive concepts of unions prevalent in the pre-independence era.