Organizing Precarity: Hustling in Ghana’s Informal Waste Management Sector

The precarity of labour has drawn significant interest in the sociology of work literature over the past decade or so. Many of the studies bemoan the trend towards unstable and uncertain work, while overlooking the fact that the majority of people around the world have never experienced the stability of labour that has facilitated this movement towards precarity. In fact, many in the Global South have known nothing but the conditions defined as precarious in contemporary Western society. Drawing on experiences of informal waste pickers in Ghana, this paper places precarity within the concept of hustle to demonstrate how precarity is operationalized by marginalized women and young migrants from Ghana’s north to its capital, Accra. We call for a rethinking of the current approach to reading precarity to consider that it may actually be a conscious means to overcome organized labour.