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Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy explores the emergence of an alternative repertoire among women working in the growing informal sectors of the global South: the weapons of organization and mobilisation. This crucial book offers vibrant accounts of how women working as farm workers, sex workers, domestic workers, waste pickers, fisheries workers and migrant factory workers have organized for collective action. What gives these precarious workers the impetus and courage to take up these steps? What resources do they draw on in order to transcend their structurally disadvantaged position within the economy? And what continues to hamper their efforts to gain social recognition for themselves as women, as workers and as citizens? …

Whilst there are numerous cases where women workers experience a regressive double marginalization (as workers and as women) in globalized export agriculture, it is important to investigate cases where gendered working practices have given rise to more complicated, and possibly, more progressive outcomes. This chapter takes the case of women workers in export horticulture in North East Brazil to explore what these new sites might sometimes offer women workers, and whether they have been able to increase their bargaining power. The study looks at the context in which the rural trade union Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais (STR) was operating, the ways in which women workers have engaged with the union, and the extent to which they have won benefits as workers through this engagement. The chapter places this case study in the broader Brazilian context; explain the reasons for, and extent of women’s employment in the São Francisco valley, documenting how women have become increasingly active in the valley’s rural trade union and how this has, in turn, resulted in important changes both within the trade union and to women’s working conditions in the grape sector; and finally offers some preliminary conclusions to this study. …