| Social exclusion and Africa south of the Sahara: A review of the literature |
| Chapter 4: EXCLUSION FROM FORMAL AND INFORMAL EMPLOYMENT |
  
Labour market research in SSA is characterized by (i) a relative neglect of rural and agricultural labour markets, and (ii) a dualist framework which divides urban economies into a formal and informal sector. It is generally assumed that it is possible to find some work to do in the informal sector, even if it is poorly remunerated, insecure and intermittent. Thus, exclusion is not manifested in open unemployment (which exists and is an increasing problem, but which affects, particularly, relatively welleducated young people, especially secondary school leavers - see Sandbrook 1982, pp. 168-172). Rather it is evident in the way in which certain population groups face restricted options within labour markets.
Within the literature, some studies help in identifying factors facilitating and restricting access to more or less remunerative types of jobs. The factors identified include, as Rodgers (1989) has observed for Asian and Latin American cities, both universalist criteria (such as educational qualifications, access to capital for self-employed) and particularistic social affiliations and identities (membership of groups, nationalities and categories). The main social identities for which information is available refer to: gender, ethnic group and nationality.
 4.1 Patterns of Labour Absorption
The way these factors work is best seen against the background of patterns of labour absorption and the worsening employment situation in Africa.
Ghai (1988) surveys trends in 21 Sub-Saharan African countries (those with over 5 million people in 1979) over the period 196085. He finds that "there has been a steady deterioration in the employment situation in most sub-Saharan African countries in the 1970s, with marked deterioration in the 1980s" (p.20). Significant structural change occurred over this period according to aggregate indicators - "the share of agriculture in total output fell from 49 to 32 percent between 1960 and 1980, agricultural labour force fell from 81 to 71 per cent and the proportion of the urban population nearly doubled from 11 to 21 percent" (p.5). But the share of manufacturing in total output "rose only marginally from 7 per cent in 1960 to a mere 8 per cent in 1982" (p.5). The structural change was not associated with economic growth in most countries. With continuing growth of the labour supply combined with economic stagnation and decline, the employment situation inevitably declined.
Ghai argues that the burden of labour market adjustment which has been occurring since the mid-1970s has fallen on the urban sector. Urban labour markets have adjusted "through sharp reductions in real wages which have helped sustain employment in the formal sector and a rapid expansion of the informal sector with falling wages and earnings, resulting in work-sharing and increasing underemployment" (p.20). The rise in open unemployment has been limited, even though rural-urban migration has not reduced significantly.
The fall in real wages, which has been particularly sharp in the 1980s, is confirmed and extensively documented in Jamal and Weeks(1993). Vandemoortele (1991) also provides further details of trends in the 1980s, which have occurred in association with World Bank/IMF adjustment programmes. He indicates that during the period 1980-86, for 27 countries for which data are available, real wages declined in 26 of them, on average by approximately 30%. There was also a compression of the wage structure, particularly in the public sector. "Formal sector employment in 36 countries, representing 95 per cent of the sub-Saharan labour force, accounted for only 9.9 per cent of the labour force in 1980" (p.92), and up until the early 1980s, the public sector was the principal employer, "responsible for 50 per cent or more of modern sector wage employment" (p.92). In the 1980s retrenchment of public sector workers has occurred, but formal sector private employment has not expanded concomitantly. With the stagnation of modern sector wage employment, labour markets have, he argues, become increasingly informalized. "About 60 per cent of the urban labour force are in the informal sector, either as proprietors, paid employees, unpaid family workers or apprentices" (p.91). Vandemoortele says that the two main labour sponges, the informal and agricultural sectors of the economy, are becoming saturated, and unemployment is mounting. "The number of urban unemployed is currently growing by 10 per cent or more every year in many countries" (p.94), but the main category is secondary schoolleavers. Echoing Ghai, he argues that the informal sector 'lis increasingly operating as a refuge which eases the extent of unemployment by converting it into underemployment" (p.99).
Projections into the future are also bleak. The ILO has estimated that in 1990 there were 9 million unemployed in sub-Saharan Africa and that the number will increase to 28 million during the 1990s, with urban employment rising to 31% (ILO/JASPA 1991). The World Bank, in its long-term perspective study on Sub-Saharan Africa, estimates that even if population growth slows down to 2.75% a year, 380 million jobs (more than twice the current number) must be created between 1985 and 2020 if the unemployment rate is to be less than 10 percent. It states that "only a fraction of the new workers who come on the job market each year will be able to find employment in the modern sector, even under the most optimistic scenarios" (World Bank 1989:41), and, in an indicative scenario, postulates that only 22 million new jobs will be created in the modern wage sector by 2020. The informal sector ("small and micro enterprises") is projected, as a statistical residual, to absorb almost half of the new entrants to the labour market.
4.2 Poverty, Education, and Job Access - Formal Sector
Educational qualifications above primary school level are a key determinant of relative wages and salaries within formal sector employment The fullest recent exploration of the relationship between education, work and pay is an analysis of wage and salary -earners in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam based on surveys conducted in 1980 (Hazelwood 1989). The Eastern African case is interesting in that it allows comparison of two countries in which postprimary education has been expanded to different degrees. "Fifty per cent of the Nairobi labour force and 66% of those not more than thirty years of age have post-primary education in Nairobi as compared with 38% and 41% in Dar es Salaam" (Hazelwood 1989, p. 280). Analysis of the two situations indicates the extent to which equalizing access to secondary education is likely to have an equalizing effect in labour markets, in terms of access to high-level jobs.
The main results of the survey are as follows:
1. Wages rise with education, and the rise is particularly large for employees with secondary over those with primary education, and again for those with post-Form IV [senior secondary] education ... The premium paid to employees with post-IV education over the uneducated in Nairobi is twice that in Dar es Salaam--500% compared with 250%" (p. 280).
2. With increases in the supply of the educated, a "filteringdown process" takes place in which "educated persons are absorbed into jobs lower in the hierarchy of occupations than was customary for persons with those particular educational qualifications to enter in the past" (p. 282). For example, "a much higher proportion of junior secondary educated enter manual occupations among recent than among earlier recruits" (p. 282).
3. Family background is an important variable affecting educational qualifications in the sense that "the easiest way, in both Kenya and Tanzania, to ensure a secondary education is to have secondary-educated parents" (p. 282). With expansion of secondary education places, there is a higher probability that children of less-educated parents will gain access to secondary education. But as long as there is selection by academic performance at various steps on the educational ladder, the advantages of family background are felt at some point, with more the children of more educated parents achieving better results at higher points on the ladder.
4. "The process of filtering down ensures that the 'underprivileged' will not rise in the occupational hierarchy simply because more of them move up the educational ladder. They are, in effect, running up the down-escalator; more education does little more than keep them in their father's jobs" (p. 286). The greater premium paid to employees with post-IV education over the uneducated in Nairobi as against in Dar es Salaam is somewhat paradoxical given the greater expansion of secondary education in Kenya. The difference is attributed to the relative effectiveness of pay policy designed to narrow the distribution of earnings. The effectiveness is higher in Dar es Salaam as a higher proportion of employment is in the public sector. The process of filtering down has also occurred in Nairobi to a much greater extent than Dar es Salaam. The effect is that educational expansion has failed to lead to intergenerational job mobility. As Hazlewood puts it, "the much greater expansion of secondary education, drawing in many more, and a much higher proportion, of the children of the uneducated in Kenya than in Tanzania, has made access to secondary education more equal in Kenya, but it has not had a similarly equalizing effect on the labour-market, on the access to higher-level jobs" (p. 286).
These findings are likely to replicated elsewhere.
4.3 Poverty, Education, and Job Access - Informal Sector
In early conceptions, the informal sector was seen to consist of self-employed artisans and traders, whose enterprises drew principally on household labour. School education was not an important entry qualification; and a basic characteristic of enterprises within the sector was "ease of entry". A common view was that employment in the informal sector was less desirable than employment in the formal sector, and only chosen because of the labour market imbalance arising because of the slow growth of formal employment opportunities and the rapid increase of those seeking work. Thus, Kitching (1980), analyzing the situation in Kenya, writes that:
With the significant but untypical exception of a narrow stratum of employers and the self-employed in certain occupations, the so-called 'informal sector' in Kenya, just as in other parts of Africa, is a collective description of a motley assortment of activities which the reserve army of the unemployed undertakes in order to keep itself alive whilst wanting and hoping for the economic system of which it is part to provide the more remunerative occupations which will make upward mobility a possibility" (p. 405). And for Elliott (1975), the urban excluded in Africa were "those who cannot find jobs in the formal ... enumerated sector ... the relatively under-educated and unskilled who are squeezed out of the formal sector. (p. 278).
This view must now be refined in the light of empirical studies, of what was traditionally regarded as the informal sector, the decline in real wages in the urban formal sector (documented most fully by Jamal and Weeks 1993); and the emergence of highly profitable "informal" distribution activities (magendo in Uganda, kalebule in Ghana) in the so-called parallel economy, which have become major new sources of capital accumulation in conditions of crisis and recession (see MacGaffey 1982, and Roitman 1990 for overview of literature). Certain categories of work within the informal sector remain as employment opportunities of the last resort, which, to repeat Kitching's phrase, "the reserve army of unemployed undertake to keep itself alive", whilst other categories are highly remunerative.
Recent studies which indicate patterns of differentiation within the informal sector labour markets include House (1984), House (1987) and Widner (1991). House (1984) reports that the results of a survey conducted in 1977 in Nairobi in which 577 heads of informal sector activities, defined as those operating out a temporary physical structure or no structure at all, were interviewed. House noted that incomes within the informal sector varied widely, with the lowest rewards accruing in those activities with low capital and skill intensity, for example, tailoring, shoemaking, and all service sub-sectors except vehicle repairing. The most important determinants of income were availability and employment of capital, and access to subcontracts through which informal sector artisans in, say, furniture-making and metal goods supplied the formal sector.
The differentiation within the informal sector is such that House argues that the informal sector can be dichotomized into an intermediate sector ("a reservoir of dynamic entrepreneurs", "where a firm commitment has been made by the operators to their enterprises") and the "community of the poor". The latter is described as 'la relatively stagnant group engaged in menial employment with subsistence returns to their efforts" (p. 281) and "a large body of residual and underemployed labour" (p. 298). Significant numbers live in the "community of the poor", which includes both proprietors of activities for which entry is easy and competitive fierce and a large number of informal sector employees. House estimate that "42% of proprietors and perhaps 50% of employees receive less than the legal minimum wage" (p. 298).
House (1987) reports the results of a survey of 536 informal sector enterprises conducted in Juba, Southern Sudan, in 1983. From this survey, he concludes that: "In general, the unskilled and relatively low skilled labour market in Juba appears to have three major segments. The first entails the majority of proprietors, other than petty traders, who earn more than they would expect as unskilled or semi-skilled labourers in government; the second includes those earning between S£30 and S£50 per month who also enjoy the advantage of job security; and the third segment embrace the two-thirds of wage employees in the informal sector and almost one-half of petty traders who fall near to or below the government minimum wage, and who are exposed to great income and job insecurity. A minority of other proprietors, outside of petty trade, also fall in this category" (p.184). As in the Nairobi, the more remunerative enterprises are those in which competition is less fierce because of higher initial capital requirements. These requirements vary considerably, being highest in transport (S£12,000), medium in construction(S£3000) and auto repairs (S£1000), and lowest in petty trade. There was a tendency for proprietors in more remunerative operations to have higher levels of formal education, and, extending the data to estimate the income of the households of informal sector proprietors, House finds that there is a strong relationship between incidence of poverty and lack of education.
Widner (1991) summarizes the results of a survey of 412 entrepreneurs in three secondary cities in Kenya, Kisii, Nyeri and Embu, in the mid-1980's. As in House's surveys, different types of activity are more and less remunerative. Using estimates of the level of initial capital requirements as a differentiating criterion, Widner identifies four main categories of entrepreneurs: (i) fruit and vegetable hawkers, newspaper salesmen and shoe polishers; (ii) "tinkers" (vendors of plastic containers, enamel ware, used clothing and the odd item of hardware; (iii) tailors and shoemakers; and (iv) metalworkers, mechanics and furniture makers. Category (iv) activities have the highest initial capital requirements and proprietors of these activities have the highest level earnings. These activities are almost exclusively owned by people who had current access to land and the capital used in them was often derived from agricultural production. They also were more likely to receive subcontracting orders from formal sector. A majority of the proprietors interviewed had completed primary level education, but a quarter of those in crafts such as furniture construction only left school after reaching Form 4, the cut-off point for university level education. The other categories of activity are regarded as equivalent to what House identifies as "the community of the poor", in which fierce competition restricts sales and earnings.
From these studies it may be suggested that the critical requirements for access to more remunerative jobs within the informal sector is access to capital. Apprenticeship, which some Nigerian evidence suggests is undertaken as a second-best alternative given inability to pay for secondary education (Meagher and Yusuf 1991), provides the main way in which commercial and artisanal skills are acquired. Apprentices work as unpaid labour during the period they are being trained, and surveys show that their earnings are almost inevitably below the legal minimum wage. But the critical problem arises if they do not have the financial means to establish an independent self-employed proprietors. One solution is to work as journeymen for their master, taking a proportion of earnings. Another is to raise money through friends and relatives, or a brief period of wage employment.
Other requirements for access to more remunerative jobs within the informal sector are access to inputs and access to customers.
In both, networks of friends and relatives may be important. Gerry (1975), in an early study, identified the "miserable fringe of petty production" as that of recuperation and "bricolage", which involved a range of activities including the salvaging of "rubbish" from dustbins by itinerant collectors who make very low incomes by "reselling old shoes to shoe makers, plastics bags and wrappers to women peanut sellers, plastic mineral water-bottles to restaurants (cut in half, they make an effective funnel, the lower half serving as a receptacle for salt, pepper, sauce, etc.), newspapers for small shops for wrapping paper and so on" (p. 22). Competition for customers is potentially intense in activities where barriers to entry are low.
Perhaps the major conclusion is that (i) the informal sector as a whole is a zone in which there are high levels of uncertain and insecurity and an absence of legally recognized contacts and government recognition of property rights; (ii) within the sector significant proportion of jobs are very unremunerative; and (iii) the critical determinant which denies access to the few remunerative jobs is poverty.
4.4 Job Access and Social Identity - Gender
Women's opportunities to find jobs are restricted through (i) household-level decisions and (ii) discriminatory practices in labour markets.
Sender and Smith (1990) provide detailed micro-level statistics for the West Usambaru district in Tanzania which indicate the importance of the household as an exclusionary mechanism. Sender and Smith are concerned to explain two paradoxes about the nature of labour supply in the district. The first paradox is that although extreme poverty was widespread in the district, small holder and estate employers growing tea emphasized that labour shortage was a major constraint on tea production. The second paradox is that whilst some very poor households are not supplying wage labour, some households which are simply poor are. Sender and Smith's data indicate that "amongst very poor households with negligible access to non-wage sources of income, participation in manual agricultural wage labour is determined by the capacity of men to resist the proletarianization of their wives and children" (p. 63). Sender and Smith view the household as an arena of struggle in which men control both land, and the allocation of female labour, and women's share of current consumption is the outcome of a distributional struggle. The labour of a woman cannot be appropriated if she is not married, has never been married, or is divorced or deserted, or is a widow whose deceased husband did not leave adequate resources. Sender and Smith divided households into "male/female" (when husbands are resident, or even if not full-time resident, made regular visits and financial contributions) and "female-only". They found that "female-only households constituted 66% of all poor households supplying manual agricultural labour" and "almost 89% of female-only households in the survey contained at least one person employed as a manual wage-labourer, compared with 41% of male/female households".
Sender and Smith emphasize the role of power relations within the household, including the threat of physical violence, in restricting women's participation in labour markets. Similar exclusionary outcomes have been explained by authors who view the farm-household as a more consensual unit within which decisions are made to allocate the labour-time of different household members between farm and off-farm employment according to their wage-earning potential. From this "comparative advantage approach" to labour migration, which has been elaborated in detail with both a literature review and a compilation of data in southern Africa by Lowe (1986), it is argued that "in the prevailing wage employment market in southern Africa, young educated and adult male members have the best off-form job prospects. It will then be the older, less well-educated and female members of the household who are left to do most of the farm work" (Lowe 1986, p. 127).
Labour market discrimination against women is evident in wage discrimination, which is evident when, within particular occupations, there are wage differences which cannot be explained entirely by personal characteristics and credentials; and in job discrimination, in which there is unequal access to higher paying occupations for non-economic reasons.
Two statistical studies of formal sector employment look at the prevalence of these two forms of discrimination in a statistically sophisticated way. They suggest that whilst women suffer from both wage and job discrimination, the latter form of discrimination acts as a more important restriction on their earning capacity. Knight and Sabot (1982), using a 1971 establishmentbased survey of some 1000 randomly selected workers in the Tanzanian manufacturing sector, found that, at that time, "the mean wage of males is substantially in excess of the mean wage of females", but the difference could be statistically explained by differences between the two sexes in terms of level of education, employment experience, formal training and "other personal char~ acteristics" (p. 85). Males and females had similar levels of formal education, but very few women were in supervisory or skilled occupations. More men had formal learning; their experiences in previous wage employment was longer; and they were older. Knight and Sabot foresaw the possibility of increasing differentials between men and women in that the occupations within which women were clustered had more restricted options for accumulating human capital (and thus increasing earnings) in employment.
Cohen and House (1993) report the results of a survey of 7577 formal sector employees (of which 1624 are female) in Khartoum. They note that "labour force participation outside agriculture for Sudanese women is difficult and generally an option only for those with a significant amount of education" (p. 479). The average female wage is 0.77 of the average male wage in the whole sample. This difference is explained not by pay discrimination, but rather by occupation segregation. The women who work are generally better qualified and younger than the general female population. But they are clustered in particular low-paying and low-productivity jobs. Almost half the women in the formal sector are confined to lower level white collar jobs, such as typists or clerks, and women are "grossly under represented" in professional and managerial positions. "Virtually no women worked as skilled or even semi-skilled blue-collar workers" (p. 48), although some were messengers and cleaners. Cohen and House also found that "women require more qualifications to do similar work as men, or put differently, controlling for job characterization, women do the same work as less qualified men" (p. 474).
4.5 Job Access and Social Identity - Ethnic Identity
The extent to which ethnic discrimination occurs within labour markets is a very complex issue. Caste systems of stratification (defined as "occupational specialization of endogamous groups, in which membership is based on ascription and between which social distance is regulated by the concept of pollution" - Tuden and Plotnicov 1970, p. 16) are rare, though they exist in the west Sahelian zone for certain crafts, such as blacksmithing (see Vaughan 1970). Ethnic identities are mobilized in specific situations for specific purposes. Kinship networks are inevitably used in the search for jobs, and moral pressure, to support kin and individuals of the same ethnic origin, is put on those who have the power to hire people, in order to obtain jobs. But the precise outcome of such strategies is not predictable, not least because ethnic identities themselves are highly fluid.
In an important article, which is not primarily concerned with labour markets, Ekeh (1990) indicates the contrary ways in which access to different types of formal employment is affected by ethnic identity. The basis of his analysis is a discussion of the way the terms "tribe" and "tribalism" are used-not by social anthropologists, but by people in Africa. He argues that: "while tribalism seems now abandoned in academic scholarship in African studies, with some proposing and indeed using "ethnicity " as its replacement, paradoxically, the use of the term tribalism is enjoying unprecedented boom not only in everyday interaction among ordinary Africans but more especially among high-ranking Africans in government and university institutions" (p. 661). "Tribalism", as a term in everyday usage in Africa, is, according to Ekeh, a counter-ideology to "the body of ideas and practices that have enthroned kinship as a governing principle of private and public behaviours of individuals whose identity thus rests on their kinship associations" (p. 689). The counter-ideology of tribalism defines "appropriate rules of coexistence in polyglot and multiethnic communities" (p. 689), doing so in a negative way by postulating 'la set of behaviours that ought to be avoided in order to permit harmonious multi-ethnic existence" (p. 690). The counter-ideology "recognizes that although it is natural for individuals to be predisposed to enact behaviours that "reflect their ethnic background and may well indicate their loyalties towards their ethnic groups, the actor ought to avoid such behaviours and even suppress them in the new circumstance of multi-ethnic coexistence" (p. 690).
The counter-ideology of tribalism puts sanctions on "tribalistic" practices, behaviours which should not be enacted. But it does so in a situationally sophisticated ways. Behaviours which may be condemned in multi-ethnic circumstances are acceptable within ethnic "enclaves". Moreover, according to Ekeh, "post-colonial African communities have tagged certain elites in society as those who ought to uphold the new ethics of coexistence in multiethnic societies while sparing other actors at lower levels of society from the responsibility of upholding such ethics" (p. 690-691).
It is this situational variability, in which "society seems to allow a distinction between low-ranking individuals who may live within the norm of their ethnic community and those high-ranking members of society, especially, if they operate at the national level, who are required to uphold and promote supra-ethnic Africa rules of coexistence in the multi-ethnic communities and states of Africa" (p. 691), which leads to the contrary ways in which access to different types of formal sector employment are affected by ethnic identity. Illustrating with the example of Nigeria, he writes:
If the head ... of a department in a Nigerian University were to hire only persons from his own ethnic group, he would be labelled a tribalist by his colleagues and others in the university. Such a label would seriously lower such a professor's esteem and may well jeopardize his prospects for other major appointments ... On the other hand, if a lowerstatus person, say a foreman, were given the opportunity to hire persons in the university his first inclination would be to bring near to him as many people of his own ethnic group. He would not, however, be called a tribalist in the way that the head of the department would be labelled. Nigerians are more likely to laugh off such behaviour as expected anyway.(p. 691).
Ekeh's approach, which focuses on ideologies, norms and, in particular, sanctions against ethnic discrimination, offers a useful framework for examining how ethnic identity affects access to formal employment. Within the informal sector of trade and petty commodity production, the effect of ethnic identity on access to specific types of work is related to the issue of trust. The importance of building trust in an environment of great uncertainty, in which there is an absence of legally recognized contracts and institutions for enforcing contract terms, has been identified by various authors as a central problem affecting social relations of work in the informal sector. But the extent to which resolution of this, and other technical, problems of doing business, depends on occupational segmentation on ethnic lines, or networks based on an exclusive ethnic identity, is seen differently by different authors. Three possible positions with regard to this issue are exemplified by Cohen (1969), Hart (1988) and Berry (1986).
Cohen's classic study documents how Hausa migrants in the Yoruba town Ibadan in Nigeria, have sought to monopolize the economic opportunities of the long-distance trade in cattle and kola nuts. Control of these trades is seen by Cohen as an important political stake which has been an object of competition between ethnic groups throughout this century. The Hausa migrants have maintained control of it through sustaining their ethnic distinctiveness. A central aspect of this process is what Cohen describes as the retribalization of the Hausa migrants - "a process by which a group from one ethnic category, within the framework of a formal political system, manipulate some customs, values, myths, symbols and ceremonials from their cultural tradition in order to articulate an informal political organization which is used as a weapon in that organization" (p. 2). In this account, a fixed and given ethnic identity is not seen as a type of discriminating filter through which people of different ethnic groups are allocated to different jobs. Rather, the competition for certain highly remunerative opportunities, and the desire to restrict access to those opportunities to a limited circle of eligibles, leads to strategies in which ethnic identity is itself defined and redefined.
Cohen outlines the technical problems of long-distance trade in cattle and kola-nuts as: (i) "securing the continuous and rapid exchange of information between traders in the various centres about conditions of supply and demand"' (ii) speedy despatch, transport and sale as both kola nuts and cattle are perishable goods in the sense that their value deteriorates over time; and (iii) the organization of credit and trust "without which trade will not flow" (p. 19). These problems must be overcome in an environment in which "Because of the lack of a high degree of affective centralization, contractual relations cannot be easily maintained or enforced by official central institutions while modern methods of insuring goods in the various stages of transit between suppliers and retailers are not developed, since security of property is not very high" (p 20).
In these conditions, to which one may add low literacy, no exchange of documents, and no regular exchange of correspondence, Cohen insists that the formation of ethnic monopolies controlling trade in particular commodities is probable. As he puts it, "under these conditions the technical problems can be efficiently and hence, economically overcome when men from one tribe control all or most of the stages of trade in specific commodities" (p. 20) Thus, "Hausa northern dealers will entrust their goods and money into the hands of Hausa 'brothers abroad', who live within a highly stable and organized Hausa community" (p. 22). Which ethnic group controls trade in a particular commodity is an indeterminate question depending on a range of political, economic, cultural and historical factors, including, for example, the ethnic group which are the main producers or consumers of the commodity. But whichever group does control a trade, it needs to sustain control by defeating usurpation by other groups. "In the process", Cohen writes, "the monopolizing tribal community is forced to organize for political action in order to deal effectively with increasing external pressure to coordinate the cooperation of its members in the common cause and mobilize the support of communities for the same tribe in neighbouring towns (p. 20).
Cohen shows how customary norms and values are mobilized in this political struggle. He indicates how, with the end of colonial authority, which, on principles of Indirect Rule, recognized the Hausa community in Ibadan as a political entity, the basis of Hausa distinctiveness was threatened. He argues that community adopted the Tijaniyya mystical order (a particular Islamic brotherhood) and thereby maintained its exclusiveness, preventing the creation of primary moral relations between Hausa and Yoruba. Through this redefinition of social identity, the Hausa sustained control over the trade.
Whilst Cohen emphasizes the importance of ethnic exclusiveness to the successful organization of informal trade, Hart (1988), reviewing his field data from which he originally devised the concept of the informal sector, rejects the idiom of kinship and ethnic identity as a central model of building economic relations. Hart identifies uncertainty as a central feature of the live Frafra migrants in the Accra "slum" of Nima, and he suggests that "the central task of everyone [in Nima] was to find a reasonably durable basis for livelihood and even for accumulation, a stable core in the chaos of everyday life" (p. 177). In his earlier work, he identified multiple informal employment both with and without simultaneous wage employment as an individual strategy to survive and get ahead. In this later review he considers possible "models through which the Frafra migrants establish "durable relations of partnership and hierarchy" in building economic relations.
There are three: firstly, legal contracts freely chosen and entered into and sanctioned by state law; secondly, customary moral institutions, founded on identities of kinship, descent and family; and thirdly, "a zone of free-floating social relationships formed by choice in the expectation of mutuality" (-. 178). He argues the Frafra have no confidence in the first because state law does not apply l-except in the form of occasional punishment, people are not socialized into making legal contracts of this sort, and the erratic nature of markets makes substantive conditions of rational calculation largely absent,' (p. 189). But he also maintains that Iethnic solidarity found expression in beer talk and kinship was a domestic relationship of uncertain moral provenance" (p. 178). But customary moral institutions based on the identities of kinship, descent and family are also not the main model for economic relations. As he puts it:
The institutions do not travel en bloc to Accra, and some of the important public sanctions of domestic hierarchy are missing: lineages, ancestor worship, the security of the homeland. The migrant community... is not closed or powerful enough to shore up the authority and reliability of kinsmen. In any case kinship is a poor foundation for the reckoning Of two- sided economic relations, especially unequal relations, since its central postulate is identity, sameness, a collective self defined by opposition to a generalized other. The idea of shared but separate interests cannot be expressed through a kinship idiom. Not surprisingly Frafra migrants lose faith in their traditions as a viable framework for urban economic life (p. 189).
This leaves the key organizing model for economic relationship "association based or friendship", which Hart describes as "the negotiated order of free individuals joined by affection and shared experience rather than by legal sanction or ties of blood" (p. 178). In these relationships trust, which Hart defines as "the negotiation of risk occasioned by the freedom of others whom we know personally to act against our interests in the relative absence of constraints imposed by kinship identity or legal contract" (p. 191), is centrally important. And Hart, generalizing his argument, suggests that relationships based on trust (in his sense) are central to social life "in weak states or relatively lawless zones of publiclife and in the transition to capitalism, especially in the mercantile spheres of circulation where credit is so important--but not as a basis for industrial production and the division of labour" (p.191).
Hart's argument, whilst pointing to similar technical problems to Cohen, suggests that ethnic relations are not central to economic relations in informal trade. But is important to note that the migrants he studied included many who are very poor as well as some more successful businessmen, and that he also found that the successful entrepreneurs tended to have made a break with traditional religion and become Muslim and Christians. This act, he noted, both "created some social and cultural distance from the axioms of a society where personal freedom is hedged in by kinship obligations on all sides", and also conferred "membership of new associations which lend organization and sanctions to negotiated social relationships" (p. 190).
The work of Cohen and Hart exemplifies two positions with regard to the ethnic segmentation of informal employment opportunities. Another modulated position with regard to ethnic relations and job access is put forward by Berry (1986). Looking at motor mechanics in Ife, she suggests that kinship ties are important for getting started in self-employment (with kinsmen and home--neighbours providing contacts that enable young men to become apprentices, and also food, shelter, patronage and financial assistance during a young man's initial period of training and capital formation), but that "the personal relationships and loyalties through which mechanics seek to increase their returns and reduce the risks of doing business are not the same as they used in getting established". Mechanics do not, as a rule, do business with their relatives. Neither the Ife mechanics association, nor individual partnerships, are organized on kinship or community lines (p. 190). Thus, Berry concludes, "the growth of the informal sector in Western Nigeria would seem to have created new forms of social relationship and institutions which do not necessarily coincide with or draw upon preexisting ones" (p. 190).
4.6 Job Access and Social Identity - International Migrant Workers
With increasing international migration, nationality and the legal status associated with it has become an important axis of a labour market structure. Analyzing new forms of stratification associated with international migration flows, Cohen (1987; 1991) distinguishes between three subgroups of worker: "citizens", who include nationals by birth and naturalization, established immigrants and convention refugees; "denizens", or privileged aliens, who may hold one or more citizenship, are recognized asylum seekers, special categories of entrant or expatriates; and "helots", who consist of "illegal entrants undocumented workers, asylum seekers, overstayers and project-tied embedded workers. The different groups have differential access to the protection afforded by agencies of law and order, also to the social wage which is conferred on citizens--unemployment benefits, social security, housing allowance, tax credits, pensions and subsidized health care.
Within Africa, there are significant numbers of international migrant workers and refugees. One estimate suggests that these groups number approximately 35 million people, about 8 per cent of Sub-Saharan Africa's population (Ferris 1993:130). Omitting the case of apartheid South Africa and its "homelands", it is possible to suggest that international migrant workers within Africa face different problems identified by Cohen. These groups are not disadvantaged by the denial of rights to the social wage, and they are not necessarily clustered, as in North America and Western Europe, in the most unpleasant jobs, which nationals refuse to do. Rather, they are disadvantaged in terms of: (i) legal restrictions on access to particular types of job; (ii) discrimination, which may be intensified through lack of documentation; and (iii) vulnerability to changes in immigration policy, which are most vividly expressed in sudden expulsions of aliens.
There is little material on the first two forms of disadvantage. Studies of informal sector employees in Juba found that discrimination against foreigners occurred in respect of pay (House 1987, p. 891); and of formal sector employees in Khartoum found Ethiopian refugees to be clustered in the two lowest skill based occupations. Legal restrictions in access to particular types of job are also associated with indigenization decrees (see Collins 1975; Rood 1976; and Adediji 1981). A compilation on some of the restrictions to which non-nationals were subject in the early 1970's in Wet Africa, has been made by Ahooja-Patel (1974).
The phenomenon of expulsion of aliens has attracted more attention in the literature, and it has been theorized within the context of changing definitions of the "stranger" at the end of colonial rule (see Shack and Skinner 1979; Peil 1971; Aluko 1985; Brydon 1985). The studies provide some indication of the scale of international migration. For example, it is estimated that 3 million persons were expelled from Nigeria in January 1983 at short notice. The migrants included a million Ghanaians, approximately 10% of that countries' population. In December 1991, the Congolese government expelled Zaireans living illegally in the country, who were estimated to be as many as one million people (compared to the indigenous population of two million).
In general, it is unskilled labourers; the self-employed, particularly traders; and farm labourers, who are required to go. In the Nigerian expulsion of 1983, professionals such as lawyers, engineers and architects were allowed to stay and merely required to regularize their legal position. The studies indicate the expulsion orders may be related to economic recession. The Alien Compliance Order enacted in Ghana in 196? occurred in the midst of a liberalization programme and the Nigerian expulsion followed the introduction of an austerity package by 9 months.
Whilst the tendency towards economic regionalism may offer some countervailing trends, it is likely that nationality will become a more important focus of labour market discrimination in Africa in the future. In this regard O'Brien (1983; 1986; 1987) offers an important account of the historical development of the agricultural labour market in Sudan. In the early 1980's, the agriculture work force consisted of between 1.5 million and 2 million seasonal labourers, mostly peasant and pastoralists for the rest of the year, who worked in weeding and harvesting operations in State and private plantations, including in the Gezira scheme. O'Brien is particularly concerned to describe and explain changes in agricultural labour market which occurred in the mid-1970s. In the period from 1950-75, he argues that the labour market was very segmented, with a major difference between the labour force for cotton-picking, which was dominated by family groups, including women, children and old people migrating and working together, and the labour force for sorghum and sesame harvesting, which was dominated by individual male migrants. There was a system of recruitment (which had evolved from the earlier colonial period) in which representations of growers' associations, or (in the Gezira scheme) tenant committees, would travel to labour supply areas to make contact and recruit labour, making transportation arrangements for them and working through an influential member of the local community. Different sorts of people were attracted to the different segments of the labour market (depending on whether they were sedenterized or partially sedenterized nomads or peasants engaged in rainfed agriculture, and depending on the gender division of labour and location of the community of the latter). Thus a pattern of ethnic segmentation characterized the labour market until 1975 . As O'Brien puts it, "the boundaries between various segments of the agricultural labour market were defined in the first instance in ethnically identifiable terms, modified to a greater or lesser extent by geographical location. That is, knowing an individual's ethnic identity was the single most reliable indicator of the manner and type of their involvement in agricultural wage labour" (p. 27).
After 1975, this system breaks down. There is a rapid rise in wage rates after two decades of relative stability; wage rates in cotton picking and in small local markets increased faster than wage rates in sorghum and sesame harvesting and in the big schemes thus breaking down major differentials which previously existed; there is increasing individualization of the market for labour power as migrant families have not been able to mobilize large family-groups to work in cotton-picking as males aged 18-45 have sought work in sorghum and sesame harvesting; and the effectiveness of the recruitment system has declined as migrants elected to finance their own travel to the scheme areas to negotiate the highest wages they can find.
O'Brien describes the shift which has occurred as "a fundamental restructuring of the previous highly segmented labour market toward the formation of a truly national labour market" (p. 27). In this process, there is a shift away from the ethnic structure of the labour force. Now "structural unemployment" and underemployment together with increased competition among workers have begun to replace the recruitment system and other extraeconomic devices in regulating the supply of cheap labour to the agricultural schemes" (p. 32).
In this process, non-nationals have become a critical element in labour-force stratification. Thus, O'Brien writes:
Policies related to the Nationality Act of 1948 and its narrowly restrictive definition of Sudanese nationality have assumed a broader role in the stratification of the labour force. Access to government employment, trading licenses, charcoal-making permits, etc. is restricted to holders of valid Sudanese nationality certificates .... The effects of such policies [which apply to descendants of West African immigrants, members of a number of other non-tribal groups and resettled Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees] is to foster hostility between sections of the labour force and a primary stratification of the labour force into groups defined as "Sudanese" and "foreigners". In the process, the earlier ethnic structures of the labour force which integrated various cultural groups into different sectors based on their varied internal characteristics is replaced by a specifically social structure defined ideologically in the first instance by nationality. (p. 32).
This shift from ethnic discrimination to discrimination against non-nationals could represent a significant transformation which is occurring in Africa.
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