African home-based workers are at the bottom of craft supply chains. Through an increased understanding of those supply chains they could overcome some of the challenges they are facing and improve their livelihoods.
By keeping corporations accountable for the waste they produce and providing affordable goods and services to working class people, recyclers and vendors in NYC are demonstrating an alternative to the status quo model of city-making that favours a few elite interests to the detriment of the majority.
It is a myth that cooperatives, which put people at the centre, are not a viable alternative to the current economic system because they lack productivity. Improving working conditions and people’s well-being favour productivity – not the other way around.
How close collaboration between homeworker organizations and key allies secured a huge victory: for the first time, EU legislation on corporate sustainability will protect the human rights of all supply chain workers, including homeworkers.
If governments cannot create jobs, yet criminalize citizens who create their own jobs, they risk social instability. Yet governments routinely refuse to engage with informal vendors to discuss an enabling legal framework to regulate their use of public space. Instead, governments see vendors and other workers in the informal economy as a source of income only.
Dakar’s street vendors have united in the PASI platform to assert their rights and propose alternative solutions to the evictions and relocations imposed by the authorities.
