Organising and decent work conditions among informal stone quarry workers in Ghana

Abstract

Informal workers as active agents could use collective identity as a means to achieve better working conditions for themselves. This study thus examined organising and decent work conditions among informal stone quarry workers in Ghana. The interpretivist approach and exploratory qualitative research design were adopted. A sample of 121 respondents from a population of 39,536 was selected from four districts. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to sample waged and self-employed quarry workers, representatives from the Labour Department, Environmental Protection Agency, Ghana Trade Union Congress (TUC), and Minerals Commission for the study. In gathering data, unstructured interview guide, focus group discussion guide, and a non-participant observation guide were the instruments used. Forty-seven (47) individual in-depth interviews, three group interviews and 12 focus group discussions were conducted. The study found that membership-based organisation was a temporal organising strategy for formal trade union organising which had only started in one quarry firm. Workers have signed a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with management. Indicators of existing working conditions of quarry workers which had decent work deficits per the labour laws of Ghana and International Labour Organisation’s decent work framework were found to be decent under the CBA yet to be implemented, suggesting that organising leads to decent working conditions. It was recommended that TUC should capitalise upon membership-based organisation forms in other quarries and among self-employed quarry workers to organise and represent informal quarry workers as a move towards decent working conditions.