Organising Beyond the Employment Relationship: Scaling Up and Institutional Power in Own-Account Unions

Sex workers lack structural power; they cannot withdraw their labour to stop production and most do not have a single employer with whom to collectively bargain. The absence of ‘wage-effort bargaining’ has led to conclusions that these workers cannot form successful unions. Yet own-account informal workers in the Global South have routinely organised outside employment relationships and wage-effort bargaining. Organisational forms amongst such workers are generally characterised as spontaneous and non-traditional, with demands focused on social welfare at the municipal scale. Drawing on 32 interviews in Guatemala and Colombia, we demonstrate that sex workers have established formal unions and accessed ‘institutional power’, including re-scaling contestation from the municipal scale to the nation state. We theorise formal union recognition as an enduring vital strategy, with direct material implications for the conditions of work inside the workplace.