A New Social Contract Inclusive of Informal Workers
- Authors: Chen, Martha A , Plagerson, Sophie , Alfers, Laura C
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/478172 , vital:78161 , ISBN 9780198887041 , 10.1093/oso/9780198887041.001.0001
- Description: When countries experience fundamental changes to their economy and society, there is often a call for a new social contract—a new bargain—between the state, capital, society, and labour.¹ The public health and economic crises brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the inequality between, and within, countries around the world. It has also exposed that, in many countries, the social contracts of the mid-twentieth century were never firmly in place and, in others, have broken down or are in serious crisis: both the social contracts between states and society (e.g. the welfare state) and between capital and labour (e.g. minimum-wage and collective-bargaining agreements).
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COVID-19 and the Informal Economy: Impact, Recovery, and the Future
- Authors: Chen, Martha A , Rogan, Michael , Sen, Kunal
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/473905 , vital:77692 , ISBN 9780198887041 , 10.1093/oso/9780198887041.001.0001
- Description: A key challenge for the post-COVID-19 global economy is whether the disproportionate impact of the crisis on informal workers, who form the majority of the world’s workforce, will be acknowledged. Or whether harmful and negative stereotypes will persist. Today, despite the role of these essential frontline workers — producing, processing, selling, cooking and delivering food, providing cleaning, childcare, eldercare, healthcare, transport, waste removal, and other essential services — many observers consider the informal economy to be non-compliant (resisting registration and taxation) and associate it with low productivity (a drag on the economy) or with crime (illegal activities) and grime (blight on modern cities). Yet, most informal workers are working poor trying to earn an honest living in often hostile environments. Most suffered severe declines in work and earnings during successive waves of the COVID pandemic, and related restrictions and recessions, and have gone deeper into debt and depleted their savings and assets in order to survive. This book explores and informs answers to that key challenge. It presents findings on the impact of the COVID crisis on informal workers in Asia, Africa and North and Latin America. The chapters of the volume analyse the impact of the COVID crisis on informal workers, interrogate whether and which economic recovery plans and schemes include informal workers and explore what a more inclusive economic recovery and reforms might look like.
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Social Protection, the COVID-19 Crisis, and the Informal Economy: Lessons from Relief for Comprehensive Social Protection
- Authors: Alfers, Laura C , Juergens-Grant, Florian
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/478228 , vital:78166 , ISBN 9780198887041 , 10.1093/oso/9780198887041.001.0001
- Description: One of the overarching lessons from the COVID-19 crisis has been the need for universal social protection; social protection which covers everyone, including the so-called ‘missing majority’ of workers in the informal economy. What was clear from the hard lockdowns of 2020 wasthat the lack of adequate social protection coverage exacerbated the economic fallout of the crisis, with many informal workers—over 60 per cent of those sampled in the first round of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing’s (WIEGO’s) COVID-19 and the Informal Economy Impact Study—unable to access even the most basic relief measures extended by governments whilst earning little to no income.
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South Africa’s Informal Economy and COVID-19. COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
- Authors: Rogan, Michael , Skinner, Catherine
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/478007 , vital:78146 , ISBN 9780198887041 , 10.1093/oso/9780198887041.001.0001
- Description: Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been recognized that informal workers would be among the most severely affected (ILO 2020). This is a departure from the past, where it has often been assumed that the informal sector absorbs jobs which have been lost in the formal sector due to greater flexibility in the ability to respond to downturns and to make adjustments at the intensive margins (Ohnsorge and Yu 2021; Verick 2010). However, not only is the current crisis fairly unique in the way it has impacted on labour markets in particular and economies in general, but also the effects of the crisis have been experienced most acutely in the sectors of the labour market in which women, young people, and informalworkersaremostheavilyconcentrated.Togetherwithawell-documented gendered component to the crisis (Alon et al. 2020), this has meant that informal economies in middle- and low-income countries have been left exposed and with few resources to recover. The fact that the majority of employment in these economies is informal (ILO 2018; Ohnsorge and Yu 2021) then translates into a vicious cycle of reduced demandandlimitedfiscalspacetostimulatetheeconomy (Mhlana et al. 2023).
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What Is Missing from National Economic Recovery Plans? COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
- Authors: Mhlana, Siviwe , Moussié, Rachel , Roever, Sally , Rogan, Michael
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/478139 , vital:78158 , ISBN 9780198887041 , 10.1093/oso/9780198887041.001.0001
- Description: At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the first half of 2020, there was nearuniversal acknowledgement that employment losses, globally, would be borne disproportionately by vulnerable workers, in general, and informal workers, in particular (ILO 2020a). Of the world’s 2.2 billion informal workers, it was estimated that 1.6 billion would be among the most severely affected by job losses and reduced working hours (ILO 2020b). The result of this impact has been the reversal of decades of progress in human development. For example, the number of people living in extreme poverty in emerging markets and developing economies was expected to increase by 100 million by the end of 2021 (World Bank 2021a). Similarly, the gendered burden of job losses has threatened progress towards gender equality, as evidenced by the highly uneven recovery of employment between women and men throughout 2021 (ILO 2021a). Country-level data on job losses provides support for the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) initial projections about the vulnerability of informal workers to the global ‘pandemic recession’. Most informal workers in the world are located in low-and middle-income countries and are in self-employment. Data from ILOSTAT shows that working hours in lower-income countries in 2021 were about 7 per cent below their pre-COVID (2019) levels, while the corresponding decrease was only about 4 per cent in high-income countries (ILO 2021c). Data from Peru in 2020 suggests that the difference in the decrease in labour income between employees and the self employed (who are largely in the informal sector) was 21 percentage points (ILO 2021b; see also Chen and Vanek, Chapter 2 in thisvolume).
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