“Together We Can”: Redefining Work in Nairobi's Urban Transportation Sector

Abstract

Workers in Kenya's informal transportation sector are employed in what anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and organizational scholars call “dirty work,” or occupations that are tainted morally, socially, or physically. Although the operators of matatu, minibus taxis, carry a large portion of the Kenya population daily, they face stigmatization and discrimination, which can result in a decrease in lifechances and in some cases even death. In this article, I focus on the outcomes of the occupational stigma that matatu workers experience, and I argue that although the informal transportation workers of Nairobi's matatu sector are stigmatized symbolically and institutionally, they are also increasingly able to contest these perceptions of their work in ways that are having a powerful impact on the workers personally and collectively. The way that workers are reframing the meaning of their labor using a worker‐run union is having an impact on worker identity and sociability leading to an inclusiveness, characteristic of what theorists describe as cosmopolitanism. This process is important for anthropologists to understand as more people are finding work in undesirable and/or informal employment sectors due to the global economic crisis.

Transportation and Change through an Anthropological Lens

“…This opened trucking options for Blacks, Latinos, and women (Gardner 2002). In Nairobi, Kenya, (Ference 2016) and Hawassa, Ethiopia (Mains and Kinfu 2017) informal transport service providers were characterized as criminal, immoral and unclean by officials seeking to control their mobility.…”

The risk of sliding down

“…Unlike domestic workers in other contexts (Geymonat, Kyritsis, and Marchetti 2017) or stigmatized workers in informal sectors who have been able to contest their marginalization thanks to labor unions (cf. Ference 2016), Malagasy domestic workers must bear the weight of stigma and exploitation alone. They have not reappropriated their stigmatized status as a political weapon, as some slave descendants of the bas quartiers of Antananarivo did in the 1970s (Gardini 2015; Randriamaro 1997), nor have they found in the “neoabolitionist” rhetoric an empowering tool.…”

Placing Transport Workers on the Agenda: The Conflicting Logics of Governing Mobility on Bishkek's Marshrutkas

“…Transport workers' mobilisation and precarity has so far been most extensively studied by labour anthropologists (Bedi 2016;Ference 2016) and scholars of social movements (Gentile and Tarrow 2009) and development (Rizzo 2011). Discussion of labour struggles involving Uber and its cognates is only just starting in legal studies (Rogers 2017), technology studies (Wallsten 2015) and the computing sciences (Gl€ oss et al 2016).…”