Rachael Mattson
Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO)
Dakar, Senegal
My name is Rachael Mattson, and I am a first year MA student at Gallatin with a concentration in “political ecology of urban infrastructures and development studies.” This summer, I will intern in Dakar, Senegal, with Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a global action-research network that aims to help secure livelihoods of workers in the informal economy, especially women. One of WIEGO’s main focuses in Dakar is to explore advocacy efforts and organizational strategies with waste pickers at the Mbeubeuss dump as a result of recent state plans funded by the World Bank to upgrade the dump, which presents a significant threat to waste pickers’ livelihoods.
Urban informal workers are frequently labeled as disposable, and their voices get obscured by a lack of recognition or legal protections for their work, so I hope to fill in this gap by exploring the relationship between labor rights and the informal economy. While interning with WIEGO, I will be working closely with a group of women food waste pickers who are the most marginalized group of workers at the dump due to the nature of their work and their status as minority Christian women. They likely have the most at stake in the face of the uncertainty of the future upgrade.
Going into my internship this summer, I am interested in asking how informal labor organizations use the language of human rights to make claims about the value of informal labor and to protect their livelihoods. Building from preliminary research I did in Dakar in January and in line with my MA thesis research, I am interested in studying how the labor of women food waste pickers is valued in terms of worth and dignity, voice and visibility, and according to their own self-perceptions. By taking a closer look at what labor is considered “valuable,” I will grapple with the intersections of gender, informality, and notions of “disposability,” allowing me to better understand the structural factors that impact the work of women waste pickers at Mbeubeuss, what is at stake, and possible trajectories or implications for the future upgrade.
A significant challenge is anticipating the status of the upgrade, since it is currently unclear exactly how the site will change, what new infrastructures will be built, who will have access to them, and when these plans will start being implemented. Despite these uncertainties, I look forward to better understanding the lived experiences of waste pickers in order to unpack the potential gains and limitations of using the human rights framework in this particular context along with building on alternative approaches advocating for informal workers already underway.