Description
The paper addresses the issue of whether the scope of labour law, particularly the institution of collective bargaining, can expand to include informal self-employed workers? The article discusses the capability, regulatory, human rights and personal work relations theories; it shows that Freedland and Kountouris’ theory of ‘labour law as personal work relations’ could incorporate informal self-employed workers and illustrates how it might be operationalized to realise collective bargaining laws for street vendors.
Informal self-employed workers challenge labour law to examine its assumptions of how property relations are constituted; and to re-theorise property relations to account for workers accessing property by means of an employment contract as well as accessing property based on worker-citizens making rights-based claims.