From Informal Sideline to National Business in Tunisia

Mohammed Yahya is an entrepreneur engaged in the production and sale of essential oils. Getting his enterprise established was not easy. However, things improved when he started receiving support from Youth Participation and Employment (YPE) programme partner the Local Initiative and Development Forum (FIDEL). FIDEL was instrumental in facilitating business grants and business development support. With this more focused approach, Mohammed managed to register his business, participated in national fairs, and opened new market segments. He successfully graduated from the informal labour market to the self-employed category. The training he received from FIDEL helped him to increase the sale of his products. In the future, he hopes to explore the international market and reduce his imports of raw materials by growing ingredients locally.

COVID-19 AND INFORMAL LABOUR IN CONSTRUCTION: A NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF WEBINAR DISCUSSIONS

Many countries after a remarkable spike in COVID-19 cases, opted to lockdown and quarantine curfew that restricted the movement of people. Construction is one of the main sectors experiencing a clear impact due to COVID-19. As a significant growth driver of the economy, the domestic construction industry employs nearly one million of the population directly in various trades. Unfortunately, almost every project has been severely hampered. It is, therefore, prudent to address the impact of the pandemic on construction labour at the outset and end of the crisis to prepare for any future challenges or opportunities that it may undergo. This study aims to investigate the effect of COVID-19 on the construction industry's survival and possible measures to be taken in both the short and the long run. This paper summarizes using a narrative analysis of the key takeaways of 15 webinar discussions on the COVID-19 impact and outlook of the construction sector in Sri Lanka. The impacts and fallouts have been addressed by key industry personnel. The study found the most prominent impacts of COVID-19 are the suspension of projects, labour impact, and job loss, time overrun, cost overrun, and delay in payments. The findings of this study shed light on the consequences of the sudden occurrence of a pandemic and raise awareness of the most critical impacts which cannot be overlooked. The findings also help project stakeholders prepare for any future worst-case scenarios.

Import Tariffs and Informal Labour Market: A Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Analysis for Turkey

From the 1980s to onwards trade liberalization policies have been widely used in many countries. This process has significant impacts on many economic aspects one of which is on the labour market. However, the direction of the relationship between trade reforms and the labour market is controversial. This study aims to analyse the effects of a specific trade reform of import tariff changes on the formal and informal labour market for Turkey. For that purpose, we benefit from Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model that relies on nonlinear simultaneous equations. We construct an updated Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) which is compatible with our model. Our findings indicate that while there is a positive relationship between formal labour employment in total and import tariff rates, the negative relationship occurs between informal employment and tariff rates.

Trade Union Transformation and Informal Sector Organising in Uganda: The Prospects and Challenges for Promoting Labour-led Development

Despite celebrations from governments, corporations and international financial institutions around increasing economic growth, the majority of the world’s urban labour force continues to work under informal conditions, lacking enforceable contracts, adequate earnings, democratic representation, secure employment and social protection. The pervasiveness of informal labour globally has given rise to numerous calls to adopt a wider and more diverse understanding of what constitutes labouring classes and what is required to organise them. Our case study assesses the outcomes and effectiveness of informal sector organising in Uganda, focusing on the transportation, market and textile sectors. Drawing on Guy Standing’s distinction between “business” and “community” unions and Benjamin Selwyn’s contrasting of “capital-centred development theory” (CCDT) and “labour-led development” (LLD), we argue that community unionist approaches are most effective in addressing the decent work deficit in the informal economy. Simultaneously, the trade unions face constant barriers to successful community organising in the informal economy that cannot be easily overcome without wider changes to the structural conditions under which union organisers must operate. KEYWORDS: Trade unionism; informal labour organising; labour-centred development; Uganda; decent work

Classes of Labour in India: A Review Essay

From the very beginning of my writing on the regime of informality I have rejected the notion of a dichotomy between formal and informal labour relations. The fracturing solidifies a differentiated absorption in the labour process – own-account workers versus waged labourers, regular against casual employment, replacement of sedentary engagement in paid work by footloose mobility – and all of this culminating in divergent patterns of livelihood and lifestyles. It is along these lines that I have split up “informality” class-wise, following up on the contention that rather than juxtaposing the working class as an amalgamated lot, there are indeed diverse classes of labour with distinct identities. The way in which differentiation has come about cannot only be comprehended in terms of social class-based alignments but also finds expression in an axis of steep inequality. It is a ranked order taking the shape of a class–caste nexus and makes clear how corresponding trajectories of accumulation and dispossession operate in tandem. The backdrop to this essay is the process of informalisation pushed by the stakeholders of globalised capitalism from the early 1970s onwards. The shift away from the regime of formality which used to be enjoyed by a minor segment of India’s mega-workforce has in many instances ended their privileged employment, legal protection and social security, tearing up the domains in which labour moves around.

Barriers to Prisoners’ Re-Entry into Formal and Informal Labour Market

Aside from academics suggesting that low-physical-attractive prisoners may face difficulty reentering the labour market: permitting employers to access criminal history records aggravates the situation. The current study aims to alleviate this discrimination by generating more beauty premiums to prisoners through cosmetic surgery. The choice experiments (CEs) on hypothetical cosmetic surgery faces of 18 Thai male prisoners were conducted. In which every choice set, the respondents were required to make a tradeoff between beauty and criminal history records. The results show that cosmetic surgery generates beauty premiums to prisoners in both the formal and informal sectors with the odds ratio or increase of the utility of 1.75 and 1.754, respectively. Contrarily, the criminal history records result in discrimination to prisoners’ employments: decreasing job opportunities by 82.8% and 51% in the formal and informal sectors, respectively. The MWTP values show an additional salary to the cosmetic surgery groups for 2,600 baht approximately in both sectors. Besides contributing to the literature, the current study sheds light on the importance of physical appearance and criminal history records as one of the main barriers to prisoners’ re-entry. The findings could serve as new knowledge for policymakers to improve the success rate of prisoners’ reintegration.

Labour's Burden of the Epidemic COVID-19 and internal migrant workers: The case of India

The COVID-19 crisis in India produced severe disruptions in labour's life and pro-cess, while it offered the rulers an opportunity to push further the neoliberal re-forms. In this context, questions of economy became a matter of life for millions of petty producers, informal labour including migrant labour, peasants, and other sections of society. The metamorphosis of economic questions into biopolitical issues had been never as evident as it was in the time of the pandemic. In the all round atmosphere of neo-liberalism where the state had retreated from public ed-ucation and public health, the priority for migrant workers was found to be absent. In this background the question of justice emerged as the backbone of rights. In-deed, one may ask: Will a rights-based approach to defend the existing entitle-ments of workers be enough? Or is there now an overwhelming need to centrally situate the issue of informal workers, of whom a significant section belongs to mi-grant population?

Egypt’s COVID-19 Response through a Gender Lens

Across every sphere of life—health, economy, social security, livelihood and education—the impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbated for women due to persisting gender inequalities. Women are not only more likely to contract COVID-19, but also lockdowns have affected women’s economic and social security disproportionately due to increased unpaid care work at home, women’s high representation in vulnerable employment or employment in the informal labour sector. Upon the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, the Egyptian Government adopted a variety of public health measures to contain the widespread of the virus on 14 March 2020, accompanied by certain mitigation measures to reduce disproportionate impacts on women. Against this backdrop, this article examines the existence and scope of an international obligation to adopt mitigation measures to reduce disproportionate impacts on women and analyzes Egypt’s COVID-19 response against such obligation.

Dampak Pandemi Covid-19 terhadap Tenaga Kerja Formal di Indonesia

Even though the informal labour still dominates Indonesia workforce, the trend of formal labour increases each year. BPS data shows that in 2015, the percentage of formal labor reached 42,25 percent. Then it increased to 44,28 percent in 2019. As a capital-intensive sector, formal sector supports economy of Indonesia, because it is relatively safe or less prone to shut down. However, the determination of the global pandemic status on March 11, 2020 due to Corona Virus Disease (Covid-19) has hit the world economy, including Indonesia. To suppress the spread of Covid-19, people are asked to work, study, or pray from home. This causes many companies suffer losses and even close their businesses, thus impacting workers. Based on data from the Ministry of Manpower 13 April 2020 as many as 1.2 million formal labour have been furloughed and 212.4 thousand have been laid off. This study aims to observe the trends of formal labour in Indonesia and the impact of Covid-19 on formal labour in Indonesia. This study uses secondary data obtained from various sources which are analyzed descriptively.