Launching of the 2nd RNSF regional workshop in Lima: best practices in informal workers organization and mobilization in the spotlight.

The 2nd RNSF regional workshop, starting today in Lima,  will address various issues linked to informal workers organization and mobilization. Here are some approaches and best practices implemented by two partners of the IESF Group, SEWA and WIEGO.

Two types of actions may be distinguished toward the organisation of vulnerable populations: a first and important one, with the attempt to intervene at global (regional, national and international) and political levels in support of the recognition of informal workers’ rights. Another type of action toward organising informal workers refers to local or sectoral development projects – donor- or government-funded – that try to rely on or revitalise pre-existing self-help groups in order to help communities in self-financing or contributing to social protection schemes or more generally giving visibility and voice, confidence and self-esteem.

While the second type of action has already been illustrated in the last post on CafeCorrecto’s initiative in Peru and Bolivia, aiming at organizing local coffee producers into rural cooperatives, the first type of action will be addressed in the present article through the presentation of a successful initiative: the organisation of waste picker in Bogota.

For decades, recicladores (waste pickers) in Bogotá, have earned a living by recycling metal, cardboard, paper, plastic, and glass and selling the recycled material through intermediaries. Today there are an estimated 12,000 recicladores in Bogotá. However, the privatization of public waste collection threatened their livelihoods since the previous municipal administrations in Bogotá granted exclusive contracts to private companies for the collection, transport, and disposal of waste and recyclables.

In response, the Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá (ARB), an umbrella association of cooperatives representing over 2,500 waste pickers in Bogotá, began a legal campaign to allow the recicladores to continue to  collect and recycle waste.

The recicladores achieved a landmark victory in 2003 when the Constitutional Court ruled that the municipal government‘s tendering process for sanitation services had violated the basic rights of the waste-picking community.

The most recent ruling, in December 2011, halted a scheme to award US$1.7 billion worth of contracts over ten years to private companies for the collection and removal of waste in Bogotá. The court mandated that the cooperatives of waste pickers had a right to compete for the city tenders and gave the ARB until March 31, 2012 to present the municipality with a concrete proposal for solid waste management inclusive of the waste picking community.

The current Mayor of Bogotá honoured this mandate by de-privatizing waste collection, setting up a public authority to manage solid waste management and allowing ARB and other organizations of recicladores to bid for contracts. With the help of WIEGO and other allies, the ARB prepared a proposal, elements of which were adopted into the official proposal made by the district agency in charge of the city‘s public service.

In March 2013, waste pickers began to be paid by the city for their waste collection services. And, in June 2014, the national government mandated that the Bogotá model be replicated in cities and towns across the country. The ARB has seen success in convincing Colombia's government to adopt a waste management decree that includes the recicladores, and is working with 12 cities in Colombia in order to implement it. It has also inspired waste-picking movements in countries such as Ecuador, Argentina and South Africa.

The experience of waste pickers of Bogota is an exemplary case of how organising can play a key role in the defence of the rights of informal workers: prior to the privatisation of the waste management system by the Municipality of Bogota, the cooperatives of waste-pickers were excluded from a bid launched by the Municipality. The cooperatives introduced an appeal before the Constitutional Court that recognised their rights and the illegality of the bid.

These and other experiences and successful stories, will be at the center of the attention of the current RNSF regional workshop in Lima which will aim to clear a set of best practices, approaches and practical tools in organizing and mobilizing informal workers.