Collective Bargaining for the ‘New’ Working Class: Putting ‘Personal Work Relations’ to Work for Street Vendors

Abstract Robert Hale’s famous proposition is that the propertyless man needs to eat and in order to eat, he exchanges his labour for access to property. Indeed, labour law is constituted by these property relations. Historically, most of the workforce (in the global North) has accessed property for livelihood purposes through an employment contract. However, in developing countries, most of the workforce is structurally unable to access property for livelihood purposes by means of an employment contract. These worker-citizens nevertheless need access to property to eat; street vendors need access to public space to trade. The question is 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.