The introductory essay to this collection examines the possibilities that work-based collective organisation affords for transformative politics under precarity. We begin from the premise that precarity is experienced in different ways in the Global North and South, among stable workers and in ‘informal’ work. Recent scholarship has explored the relationship between precariousness in life and labor, but has paid less attention to labor relations. Contrary to some dominant theories of ‘the precariat’, we suggest that precarious workers are not always anomic and lacking in work-based political identity, but nor are they straightforwardly a ‘class in the making’. The papers in this volume show that there are multiple ways that people organise collectively to challenge and improve their conditions of work, from traditional trade unions, cooperatives, and union-like associations. All have different ramifications for politics and understandings of class composition; and of how informal and precarious economies are likely to develop in the future