Stretching to informal workers: The Ghana Trades Union Congress’s hand and social protection

Abstract

Trade unions have adopted various ingenious strategies to reach out to groups of informal workers who were once considered beyond organisation. The unions claim this move is meant to offer protection to the unregulated workers. Drawing largely on secondary data (i.e. through the review of relevant documents) this paper shows that organisational coverage of unions to date lacks the substance of meaningful and genuine representation of their fluid affiliated informal workers. The voices and interests of affiliated informal workers are excluded from the mainstream activities of the formal traditional unions due to structural rigidities. It requires unions to temper its narrow focus on collective bargaining and embrace a much wider conceptualisation of their functions within the domain of social protection. This forms the central position of the paper. The paper also demonstrated that where unions are institutionally responsive, they can achieve some level of social protection for their associate informal worker groups.