Where have all the Workers Gone? Labour and Work in Ghana, 1951-2010
The project
This international project brings together scholars based in Germany, Ghana and the United Kingdom to research the contemporary history of labour and work in Ghana. It is funded jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the German Research Council. It involves seven researchers from four institutions: in Britain, the University of Cambridge; in Germany, Humboldt University in Berlin; and in Ghana, Cape Coast University and the University of Ghana.
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The project addresses two partly conflicting trends in history and historiography. One is the tendency to analyse work "beyond wage labour" and focus increasingly on "informal" and "precarious" labour. This matches a critique of older assumptions that Africa would reproduce European patterns by becoming "proletarianized", with wage labour as the dominant form. Instead, the argument goes, the number of regular wage workers in postcolonial Africa did not grow as expected, while it was the category variously known as customary, informal or precarious labour that grew. The second trend includes the finding that the incidence of wage labour especially in rural areas across the continent has been seriously underestimated.​
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This combination of observations is the starting point for an in-depth study of labour trends in decolonizing and independent Africa. Ghana makes an apt case study, because there is substantial labour historiography for the colonial era, and potentially excellent primary material for the post-colonial. It was in Ghana that the term "informal sector" was coined, and Ghana epitomises a broader African contrast in economic growth rates and labour relations between the earlier and more recent periods since independence. The project will develop a national overview but focus in detail on three areas - Accra, a cocoa-growing region, and a northern savanna region - selected to represent different aspects of the experience of labour. Research questions include the changing size and composition of the workforce, the changing structure of forms of occupations and employment, the real earnings of labour, labour market integration, the structure of informal work and entrepreneurship, migrant flows and regional inequality, and the relation between poverty, precariousness and work. All these issues are strongly gendered. Sources include interviews, official and unofficial archives, surveys, censuses, newspapers and court records.
Gareth Austin
Gareth Austin is Professor of Economic History (1928) at the University of Cambridge. He has previously worked for the University of Birmingham, the University of Ghana, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (London), the London School of Economics and the Graduate Institute of Geneva. He has numerous publications on Ghanaian, African, comparative and global economic history.
Andreas Eckert
Andreas Eckert is professor of African history at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His research focuses on the history of Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, in particular the history of the state, urbanization, resistance, historiography, the history of work, the history of colonialism, and the history of globalization.
The team
Akua Britwum
Akua O. Britwum is Associate Professor of Gender and Labour Studies at the Centre at the University of Cape Coast. Her teaching and research interests cover gender based violence, gender and economic policy as well as trade union democracy and informal sector labour force organization.
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Nana Yaw Sapong
Nana Yaw Sapong is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History at the University of Ghana. specialized in the 18th to 21st-century social history of West Africa, with particular reference to Ghana. He is also a poet/novelist/creative writer, and an alumnus of the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University.
Hedvig Lagercrantz
Hedvig Lagercrantz is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests cover development topics in Sub-Saharan Africa and focus on the changing forms and structures of employment in the Ghanaian cocoa sector.
News & Events
Final workshop
Accra, Ghana
TBD
Work in progress
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Funding
We are grateful to the following supporters, without which this project would not be possible:
