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ABSTRACT This paper examines the organisation of labour in Ghana's oil palm sector, focusing on how formal and informal employment relations are jointly constituted within contemporary agrarian capitalism. Drawing on a political economy perspective centred on labour regimes and differentiated labour categories, and semi‐structured interviews and focus groups with plantation workers, artisanal processors and officials of oil palm companies, the paper argues that formal‐informal linkages in the oil palm value chain are not residual or transitional arrangements but are systematically produced through capital accumulation strategies, weak and selective regulation and locally embedded institutional practices. This allows firms to casualise labour and externalise risk, while workers adopt diverse livelihood strategies. The resulting labour regime leads to unstable outcomes for different worker categories, affecting social reproduction and decent work. The paper contributes to debates on labour precarity and agrarian transformation by framing informality as a relational outcome of labour regimes, challenging simplistic formal‐informal characterisations.
Amoah et al. (Sun,) studied this question.