Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the unpaid labour Burkina Faso vendors did to reproduce their workplaces and their self-representations as entrepreneurs while structural crises eroded their market's financial flows, questioning how decent work is reimagined and sustained at the edges of tenable livelihoods.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the work of a Burkinabè market vendor in (re)producing his workplace and working life, despite the eroded tenability of his livelihood. During the twelve months of fieldwork this research is based on between 2017 and 2018, this group of traders were dealing with an intensifying security crisis that eroded public confidence, resulting in a gradual but dramatic decrease in the market's financial flows. Yet still, the market continued despite a dearth of demand for many sellers' wares, with a critical mass of traders still coming to try to earn, but also to spend their days together.

This research takes as its point of departure a quote from François, a fish vendor who often told me "Overall it's OK, but in the details it's not OK". The details here were not inconsequential: depressed footfall and income, school fee dues that were no longer affordable, jihadi attacks in the city and intensifying violence in the country. This was all data that required vendors to continually recalibrate what was possible and plausible for their businesses and broader more worlds. This paper sheds light on the vital and fragile arrangements through which vendors maintained the structure of the market and their individual and collective self-understandings as entrepreneurs in the face of such details - the material, social and affective infrastructure of a (work)place that contribute to everything being OK in the face of constant "everyday disasters" through which crisis refracted into everyday livelihoods and lives (Ibanez-Tirado 2015).