WIEGO is hosting a break-out session at The New Economies Gathering to explore collective power, and examples of how worker organizations in the informal economy have challenged and transformed economic rules.
The new economics field has generated powerful ideas about how economies could be organized differently, prioritizing care over extraction, democracy over concentrated power, and sustainability over exploitation.
This session will address how to build the collective power needed to turn these ideas from aspirations into reality, and to create institutions capable of delivering these outcomes.
It will consider how organizations of workers in informal employment have been able to help reshape the rules governing work, public space, social protection and economic participation, under conditions of exclusion.
Bringing together worker organizers and researchers
The panel will be hosted by WIEGO International Coordinator Laura Alfers and Naila Kabeer, Emeritus Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. They will bring together three speakers, including worker organizers and researchers.
Together, they will explore three ways in which organizations of workers in informal employment have helped reshape economic rules:
- Changing what counts: making workers, forms of work, and economic contributions visible through new forms of measurement, evidence and knowledge production.
- Changing who has rights: extending legal recognition, labour and social protections to workers who have historically been excluded.
- Changing who has power: building collective organization and institutional voice among workers facing fragmentation, insecurity and exclusion.
Speakers
- Adriana Paz Ramírez, General Secretary of the International Domestic Workers Federation
- Gayatri Koolwal, Statistics and Research Associate at WIEGO
- Mirai Chatterjee, Leader at the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA)
A critical discussion about the future of work and economy
As technological change, climate disruption and new business models reshape labour markets, increasing numbers of workers are confronting economic insecurity, fragmented work, weak protections and limited bargaining power.
As participants question how new economic ideas can counter rising authoritarianism, inequality, and ecological breakdown, workers in informal employment – who represent close to 6 in 10 workers worldwide – must be central to these debates.
The panel will challenge assumptions about where economic innovation comes from given workers in informal employment have already developed practical responses to many questions at the heart of these new economic debates, from representation and democratic governance to care and solidarity.
Their experiences offer not only examples of alternative practice, but lessons in how ideas are translated into institutions and lasting change.
About Partners for a New Economy
Partners for a New Economy is an international philanthropic fund that serves people and nature for future generations.
It was founded in 2015 by the MAVA, Oak, Marisla and KR Foundations to address the root causes of environmental degradation within the economic system.
The organisation hosts The New Economies Gathering annually, bringing together movement leaders, researchers, funders and activists to find and exchange ideas, practices and strategies that the new economy movement needs to address global issues.
