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The deepening levels of poverty in Zimbabwe have resulted in high numbers of Zimbabwean women migrating to South Africa in the hopes of securing better wages and job security. Most of these migrants end up working in the informal sector with limited income, high levels of insecurity, and a lack of protection against gender-based violence and xenophobia. Regardless of the adversities that these women encounter, they often display resilience and adaptability. Based on semi-structured interviews with 22 Zimbabwean migrant women, this article documents how these migrant women navigated some of the vulnerabilities and challenges they encountered. Instead of always being constrained by different structures of violence, this article unpacks the women's strategies to ensure their survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal globalization has resulted in the erosion of work in the core of the formal economy and the subsequent exponential rise of the informal economy in many developing countries. This is associated with a fragmented and heterogeneous workforce. This has challenged workers' collective solidarity. This article draws cases from Zimbabwe and South Africa to explore how trade unions have made attempts to forge new forms of solidarity with workers in the informal economy. It examines how trade unions have responded to the proliferation of the informal economy. The results highlight trade unions' ambivalent position toward informal economy workers. The trade unions passed resolutions and adopted strategies to organize workers in the formal economy. However, many of these strategies ignore the voices of the workers in the informal economy and are not designed to adapt to but to transform the informal economy. Hence, they have not been successful. However, there is potential in the conceptualization of new forms of solidarity between trade unions and workers in the informal economy, but this conceptualization demands the organizational and structural transformation of trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past two decades, governments in major industrialized countries have sought to restructure public sector agencies on broadly corporate lines. In applying the private sector solution to the public sector problem, new managerial practices were introduced into public sector agencies, including police organizations. These reforms were implemented with a view to restructuring and changing the internal culture of organization increasing operational performance, efficiency and cooperation and came to inform public and police administration in most English-speaking countries. Attempts to reform police agencies have given significant weight to transforming management and work structures and have had considerable implications for workplace relations; albeit in different contexts. Both police managers and their employee representative bodies have exhibited a traditional resistance to police organizational change and this includes attempts to democratize police organizations both in terms of their internal structuring and their external public interface. As a result there has been a renewed emphasis on performance monitoring, cost effectiveness and administrative accountability.