PER: Social Protection for Informal Workers in the South and the North

Social Protection for Informal Workers in the South and the North: Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion by Francie Lund

Abstract

The numbers of workers, world-wide, who are in informal employment (as self-employed or wage workers) is increasing. Informal workers by definition have little or no access, as workers (as opposed to as citizens) to social protection.

Increasing numbers of formal workers are ‘contractualised’ into a status of employment where their former access to social benefits is eroded. Current labour market trends which impact on the erosion of, or increasing access to, social protection, will be presented, with a particular focus on the impact on poorer working women who are incorporated in global value chains which may offer some opportunities, but also little security.

A sectoral approach makes clear the differences between different types of occupational groups (such as street vendors, industrial outworkers, waste pickers, domestic workers). WIEGO – a global research and advocacy network that focuses on the conditions of work of poorer informal workers – has affiliates of informal worker organisations who have engaged with the state and the private sector in securing better work-related social services.

About the speaker

Frances Jane Lund is a South African based in Durban. She is the Director of the Social Protection Programme of WIEGO – Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing - a global research and advocacy organization that seeks to advance and improve the working conditions of poorer informal workers.

She is Senior Research Associate in the School of Built Environment and Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu Natal. She trained as a sociologist, and has a deep interest in social policy and social security, especially in the gendered effects of different forms of social assistance in poor households, and in the costs of unpaid care work done mostly by women in households.

She is presently directing a five-country project on occupational health and safety for informal workers (Ghana and Tanzania, Brazil and Peru, India). She has worked as a researcher and policy consultant for a wide range of international organizations, and also for local, provincial and national government in South Africa.

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Please contact Dr Andrew Fischer for more information.