- The working poor, especially informal female workers, are not being recognized and considered enough by policymakers, governments and development actors, says Martha Chen who visited Sida recently.
Martha Chen is a lecturer at Harvard University and coordinator of the global network for women in the global economy – WIEGO and was in Sweden in December, 2011 to present a recent study showing that the number of informally employed is increasing globally.
- The informal economy is the dominant share of employment certainly in most developing countries. It is anywhere from 60-90% of total employment, Martha explains.
Today, many economies are hybrids between the formal and the informal sector, where formal firms are linked to informal firms and increasingly employ people informally, but it is only the formal sector and formal jobs that are protected by laws and regulations. Martha and WIEGO has reached a notable success in advocating for acceptance of the informal sector as an employer both with governments and donor organizations and also an increased recognition of the working poor, especially the informal female workers who are among the most vulnerable and often least prioritized by governments.
- We need to come up with models that allow the street trader to coexist along with retail shops and along with the large malls. But our models are tending towards encouraging the large retail and the malls and eliminating the street trader and I just don’t think that this is tenable for these countries, Martha argues.
Sida recently committed 32 million Swedish crowns to a five year support to WIEGO with a specific focus on research and lobbying on the specifically women in the informal sector.
- A majority of the people – mostly women - in our partner countries are informally employed, explains Ebba Aurell, Programme Manager at Sida. They might be self-employed, street vendors, waste pickers or domestic workers and they are in a most vulnerable situation.
Martha argues that globalization and local competition create disincentives for national governments to offer protections that they might have offered in the past in the interest of attracting foreign investment. Therefore, it becomes very important to promote regional and international initiatives to try to overcome these disincentives that national governments face.
- Globalization is associated with outsourced production through very long subcontracting chains, and the informal wage workers at the bottom of those chains are paid very low wages, she says. They also receive few if any benefits and are not assured steady work.
