Occupational Groups in the Informal EconomyHome-Based Workers

Driving Forces and Working Conditions

• Lack of Visibility and Recognition as Workers

  Although recent statistics show that 260 million people do home-based work for a living, policymakers tend to overlook home-based workers when they design policies, regulations or services. Labour force surveys and censuses do not always include questions on “place of work”, which would make this form of work more visible and allow for greater understanding of the sector through better data. The result is that most sub-contracted home-based workers are not covered under labour or employment law, most self-employed home-based workers are not covered by commercial law regulating contracts and transactions, and the homes-cum-workplaces of home-based workers often lack basic infrastructure services. Further, policymakers do not understand how wider economic trends impact home-based workers. Home-based workers tend to remain isolated from other workers in their sector, which limits their ability as individual workers to bargain in the market for more favourable prices and piece rates or to negotiate with the government for basic infrastructure and transport services.

• Low Earnings and Long Hours

  Several factors, including financial need, drive home-based workers to do this work. Home-based workers’ earnings play a critical role in meeting basic household needs.

  However, home-based workers earn very little, on average – particularly sub-contracted homeworkers, who are paid by the piece and depend on contractors or middlemen for work orders and payments.

  The WIEGO statistical brief on home-based work globally found that those in developing and emerging countries generally worked longer hours than those in developed countries. In fact, while only 15% of women and 28% of men in developed countries worked 49 or more hours per week, in developing countries, 31% of women and 44% of men worked such long hours. In emerging countries, the percentages were even higher at 32% of women and 54% of men. (It is important to note that the data looked at only remunerative work; in most instances, women also have the child care and domestic responsibilities.)

• Women’s Participation in Home-Based Work

  More women than men are home-based workers globally: 57% of all home-based workers are women.Women turn to home-based work for reasons including a lack of formal training for formal-sector work, absence of child-care support, and social and cultural constraints on mobility. It is often argued that in megacities, the demands on women’s time – for care work and allied activities like collecting food rations or accessing basic services like water – reduce their participation in the economic sphere. In these contexts, home-based work provides a vital source of income for women and their families.

• Challenges When Your Home is Your Workplace

  For home-based workers, their home doubles as their workplace – and therefore their home is an essential productive asset. This means that inadequate housing and poor infrastructure is a major challenge that impacts their health, earnings and productivity.

  A small house hampers productivity, as the home-based worker cannot take bulk work orders because she cannot store raw materials and she cannot work continuously as there are competing needs for the same space by other household members and activities. Further, occupational health and safety is a critical issue for home-based workers, including ergonomic risks relating to poor posture from sitting on the floor or at low tables.

  Urban service-related hazards that take a toll on the health and productivity of home-based workers include problems of sewage, open drains or non-existent drains, and poor waste management. Additionally, the time workers spend collecting water or disposing of garbage is time spent away from their market activities.

• Urban Policies & Planning

  Home-based workers’ lives and work are deeply impacted by city policies, plans and practices, yet these are often not designed to support and protect homes as sites of work or the home-based workers themselves. Many municipal governments fail to recognize that many economically productive activities are situated in private houses and that most slum or squatter settlements and many informal houses are sites of production and distribution. Traditional urban planning and policy are reliant on a binary understanding of home and workplace. This traditional planner’s vision of strict separation between residential spaces and work spaces is fundamentally challenged by the home as a place of work. It is imperative that city planning integrates all informal workspaces to support the economy of work in domestic spaces.

• Global Pandemic and Economic Crisis

  COVID-19 restrictions led to a dramatic increase in working from home. Workers who used to commute to an office, both professional and clerical workers, began working from home using information and communications technologies (ICTs). But the traditional self-employed and (more so) industrial outworkers, as well as the contributing family workers who depend on them for work, saw a dramatic loss of work during COVID-19 and were left with no income for months.

  A WIEGO-led study on the impact of COVID-19 found that most home-based workers were the least able to work during the peak lockdowns and restrictions in April 2020 and the slowest to recover by mid-2020, compared to domestic workers, street vendors/market traders and waste pickers in the sample. COVID-19 was not the first crisis to hit home-based workers hard. The global economic crisis that began in 2008 made it harder for home-based workers to make a living due to disruptions in global value chains and increased competition. The current cost-of-living crisis has exacerbated issues brought forth during COVID-19, including reduced demand for home-based workers’ services, a rise in the cost of raw materials and inconsistent work orders.

• Homeworkers in Global Value Chains

  Many multinational firms based in the Global North outsource production to factories and homeworkers scattered across countries. Links between the homeworker and the lead firm are usually mediated by suppliers and their contractors and, thus, remain obscure. This can make it difficult to negotiate rates or receive payment for completed work.