Programme Areas: Social Protection*
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WIEGO Social Protection Case Study: This is a case study documentation of good practice examples of social protection for informal workers. Laura Alfers completed the draft of the case study of the Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme and held focus group discussions with members of the Streetnet Ghana Alliance to get their views on how far the new scheme is meeting the needs of informal women workers. |
Background and Problem Statement
The Social Protection Programme of WIEGO aims to investigate and highlight the specific risks of the working poor in the informal economy, and particularly of women workers. It aims to identify and document innovative approaches to providing social protection to informal workers, especially poorer women, including extending the coverage of existing schemes or developing new schemes.
The Programme started with the preparation of a background conceptual
paper which posed the core question for the programme: “Under
what circumstances can which kind of workers in the informal economy
(especially women living in poverty) secure access to what core
measures of provision, which can be incrementally improved upon
in the future?” This question continues to drive the research
and policy analysis of the Social Protection Programme; the paper
was developed to a book (Lund
and Srinivas 2000) published by the ILO in 2000, and subsequently
reprinted in 2005 – a ‘best-seller’, according
to the ILO.
The key problem is that, worldwide, millions of workers are losing
access to their rights to social benefits (such as retirement provision,
maternity benefits, compensation for work-related accidents and
diseases) through the workplace, or will never gain the kind of
jobs that will get them such benefits. In the industrialized North,
states are withdrawing from welfare provision, while employers and
owners of capital are offloading responsibility for social coverage
to workers themselves. In poorer developing countries, conditions
of work are hazardous and precarious, with little regulation of
the working environment, and very little social protection. Across
the globe, workers are denied what used to be entitlements through
work; poor conditions of work are associated with poor health and
lowered incomes; and there is cross-generational transmission of
poverty from the present generation of working people to the next.
WIEGO sees the lack of access to social protection as a long term
structural problem that will have especially harsh consequences
for women and children. The problem will not be solved by the creation
of short term ‘safety nets’. WIEGO has adopted an institutional
approach which sees a role for multiple interest groups: employers,
governments, workers themselves, and non-governmental organizations.
We seek to promote programmes that can go to scale, are sustainable,
and where appropriate include women workers themselves in the design
and ownership of programmes.
Medium- and Long-Term Goals and Vision
- Change in orthodox economic thinking about the informal economy,
and about social protection, so that it is recognized that economic
security and social security are indivisible; that many informal
workers cannot get access to affordable insurance, or to social
assistance; and that much more can be done to extend mainstream
social protection schemes to informal workers
- Improved country-level statistics about the social protection
coverage of informal workers
- Appropriate policy responses to the different ways that employers avoid employer-contributions to their formal and informal employers
Past activities and accomplishments
1) Publications
Two of the Programme Goals are to raise the visibility of the problem
of social protection for informal workers, and shift orthodox thinking
about it. To this end, a wide range of articles, chapters in books,
popular publications, policy briefs, and background papers for international
agencies have been written and/ or edited (see Publications by WIEGO
Members sidebar).
2) Research and Policy Dialogues on Social Protection for Informal Workers in Global Value Chains (GVCs)
Working collaboratively with the ILO and the World Bank, we developed a framework for and commissioned comparative case studies on risks and access to social protection of workers in two GVCs in two countries each: garment GVCs in Thailand and the Philippines; and horticulture GVCs in Chile and South Africa. As far as we know, this was the first time that value chain analysis had been used as a medium to explore social protection. We developed a methodology which added three layers of analysis to the standard “mapping” of workers/units/value-added under GVC analysis: the depth of labour legislation and social protection coverage in the chains; the identification of key institutions and stakeholders, including those governing production and employment relations along the entire chain; and identification of key pressure points in the chain, including: existing downward pressure points (currently leveraged by big companies) and potential upward pressure points (to be leveraged by workers and their organizations).
Case studies were then used as the concrete basis for a dialogue
between representatives of three international organizations - the
ILO’s Social Security Division, the World Bank’s Social
Protection Network, and the WIEGO network - to scrutinize their
own social security/ social protection approaches, to identify the
extent to which they addressed the social protection needs of informal
workers. A book (Lund
and Nicholson 2003) presented the framework, the case studies,
key themes of the discussion that followed, and the policy implications.
3) Research and Policy Dialogues on Social Protection for Informal Workers in Different Countries by Region
In order to test out the emerging WIEGO social protection framework, to heighten the visibility of the social protection needs of informal workers, and to build and strengthen networks of researchers and activists in this field, WIEGO organized regional research and policy dialogues in a selection of countries in Latin America and in Asia.
Latin America
A pilot seminar “Social Protection, Informality, and Gender”
hosted by the Center for Women’s Studies (CEM), and the ILO-Latin
America regional office, was held in Santiago, Chile in 2001. Some
26 persons from government, research agencies, and activist NGOs
participated, and the level of interest in the issues discussed
enabled the leveraging of a further grant from the Ford Foundation
in the region, for similar dialogues over the following two years
in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru. The aim of these
dialogues was to verify the framework, engage networking with researchers,
activists, and worker organizations, and identify priorities for
three or four modest research studies in each country, which were
then done by country researchers and organizations. In two cases,
internet discussion groups were set up to extend the dialogue to
a broader audience. It is hoped to raise funds for a regional Dialogue,
during 2006.
Asia
WIEGO Social Protection entered into a partnership with Homenet
Thailand, in order to plan and undertake a regional initiative in
Asia. This led to the Asia Social Protection Dialogue, held in Bangkok
in May 2004, funded by the Ford Foundation in Asia. It involved
participants from Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines,
Thailand and Vietnam. Participants came from worker organizations,
universities, government departments, and non governmental organizations.
Core themes around which the APSD was organized were child care
as a core component of social protection; internal and cross-border
migrants’ needs for social protection; and global value chain
analysis as a methodology for identifying exclusion from and access
to social protection for informal workers in different sectors.
There were a number of positive outcomes. Some of the researchers
involved were also involved in the broader Ford Foundation research
on social protection in the region, and these networks were strengthened;
the ASPD led to WIEGO being invited on a visit to China, in particular
to Shanghai University; ASPD participants presented their work at
a plenary panel of the Second Global Labour Forum meeting in Delhi
in 2005; a series of popular brochures has been developed and is
being translated into 10 Asian languages.
To view the Asia Social Protection Dialogue report, click here.
To read the popular brochure, please click below:
Lund, Francie and Jillian Nicholson. 2006. Tools for Advocacy: Social Protection for Informal Workers. Cambridge: WIEGO and Homenet Thailand. Also available in Urdu.
4) Involvement in international networks,
alliances and campaigns
The Global Labour Forum
The Global Labour Forum is an emerging group of (mostly) economists
in (mostly) Asian countries, who are developing new conceptual thinking
on labour markets and employment. WIEGO was asked to organize a
plenary panel on “Social Protection for Informal Workers”
at the Second Global Labour Forum, New Delhi, in December 2005.
The panel was chaired by SEWA’s Renana Jhabvala, and presentations
were given by SEWA’s Mirai Chatterjee, Homenet Thailand’s
Boonsom Wansomboon and their consultant researcher Donna Doane,
and WIEGO Social Protection Programme Director Francie Lund. The
panel was well received, and WIEGO was then invited to be a collaborating
partner in organizing the third meeting of the Forum, to be held
in Sweden in 2007, and to be hosted by the Swedish National Institute
for Working Life, which was one of the founder members of the GLF
initiative. WIEGO has been invited to participate in the first planning
meeting. The theme of the next Forum will be Mobility
of Capital and Labour. WIEGO is interested in using the occasion
to advance its work on a) the global migration of women in the health
care and other sectors; b) the overlap between informality and migrant
labour; and c) the relative immobility of labour (compared to capital)
in global value chains.
International Alliance for the Extension of
Social Protection
Initiative to extend social security in developing countries
In early 2005, WIEGO was approached by the ILO to become one of
the seven founding organizations of a new alliance, “the
International Alliance for the Extension of Social Protection”.
The Alliance was formally launched at a meeting in Geneva in September
2005. The members of the alliance include the International
Labour Organization and its STEP (Strategies and tools against social exclusion and poverty) Programme,
the International Social Security
Association, Association
Internationale de la Mutualité, International
Co-operative and Mutual Insurance Federation, International
Health Co-operative Organization, and WIEGO. At the September
2005 meeting, the members agreed upon a consensus
document that presents the shared vision of the participating
organizations with respect to the extension of social protection.