“More and more workers are competing for their sliver of a shrinking informal economy pie”
The global financial crisis has precipitated a global economic recession with significant impacts on employment – and workers - around the world. Policy makers and the media have begun to focus on the employment effects of the global crisis. But the attention is largely on rising unemployment among formal salaried workers.
Relatively little attention is paid to whether informal firms and informal workers are affected by the crisis, including the impact of new entrants into the informal economy. This is because there is a common misconception that the informal economy serves as a cushion for formal workers who lose their jobs. While it is the case that employment in the informal economy tends to expand during economic downturns, this does not mean that those working in the informal economy necessarily thrive. In fact, economic downturns often affect the informal economy in the same ways as they affect the formal economy.
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Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) is a global research-policy network that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy. It does so by highlighting the size, composition, characteristics, and contribution of the informal economy through improved statistics and research; by helping to strengthen member-based organizations informal workers; and by promoting policy dialogues and processes that include representatives of informal worker organizations. The common motivation for those who join the network is the relative lack of recognition, understanding, and support for the working poor in the informal economy, especially women, by policy makers, economic planners, and the international development community.
The Members and Associates of the WIEGO network, including the members of its Steering Committee and Advisory Committees, are drawn from its three constituencies:
- member-based organizations of informal workers;
- research, statistical, and academic institutions; and
- international development agencies (non-governmental and inter-governmental).
Informal Economy in the News
US: Santa Ana Neighborhood Locks Up Trash To Thwart Scavengers - Tony Barboza, Los Angeles Times June 16, 2009
They didn't hold up to the bears of Alaska, but they just might be enough to discourage the scavengers of Santa Ana.
Philippines: DOLE Said Informal Sector, Remittances Keeping RP Economy Afloat - VG Cabuag, Business Mirror
June 15, 2009
The government said the country’s millions of people in the informal sector, or those people who do not have formal employment in companies, and remittances from overseas Filipino workers are keeping the domestic economy afloat in times of global economic crisis., by
Philippines: Half of Employed in the Informal Sector - Survey - Business World Online, June 11, 2009
About 17 Million people — half of those employed — are working in the informal sector, according to preliminary results of a survey by the Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics (BLES) of the Department of Labor and Employment.
Mexico: Mexicans Turn to Street Economy in Recession - Jason Lange, Reuters
June 11, 2009.
A deep recession in Mexico is pushing hundreds of thousands of workers to take irregular jobs like fixing drains, repairing TVs or selling everything from underwear to furniture on the streets.
Colombia: Muck and Brass Plates: Entrpreneurs, Not Scavengers - Economist
June 11, 2009
For more than 20 years Carmen Lasso has scrabbled a living of sorts for herself and her eight children by scavenging at a rubbish dump in Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city. Her life has brought the occasional pleasant surprise, such as the silver ring crowned with a tiny light-blue stone that she gleaned from the trash, and now wears. Another came in April when Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that she and tens of thousands of her fellow wastepickers should be officially recognised as “entrepreneurs”.