Alessandra Mezzadri: Informal labour, the majority world and the need for inclusive theories and politics
The majority of people
on this planet labour in the informal economy, or are subject to labour
relations that are greatly informalised. According to the International Labour
Oganisation, 85.8% of total employment in Africa, 71.4% in Asia and the
Pacific, 68.6% in the Arab States and 53.8% in the Americas is either informal
– located in the informal economy – or informalised – in formal production
realms but still de facto based on informal relations.
The
total estimate of informal employment for the whole emerging and developing
economies bloc is set at 69.6%. Given the considerable weight of this bloc
vis-à-vis the world’s total workforce, even at a world level (i.e. including
developed regions) 61.2% of total employment is classified as either informal
or informalised. This huge world of informal and informalised employment
includes casual labourers and the self-employed, who can either be highly
vulnerable petty commodity producers or
various disguised forms of wage labour, also known as ‘classes of labour’. Once
upon a time wrongly considered one of the key features of ‘backwardness’, and
of the domestic ‘traditional’ socio-economic fabric of developing regions,
informality has not only reproduced itself exponentially during the neoliberal
global era, but it has also found new channels of transmission.
These
channels are systematically continuing to reproduce labour as a highly
precarious relation in developing contexts, and are now also doing so in
developed regions, with the rise of the gig economy, crowd-work and what has
been called, rightly or wrongly, the ‘precariat’. The rise of global
commodity chains and production networks, in particular, has produced endless
circuits of propagation, redefinition and expansion for informal labour
relations. In surplus labour economies like India or China, global commodity
chains can rely on labour being informalised in myriad different ways.
Informalisation can be based on rural-urban mobility and mediated by legal
status, as in the case of China and its reliance on the hukou system, which
mediates the movement of around three hundred million migrants from villages to
cities every year...
The first is through
their ability to deepen labour control far beyond work-time. Evidence from
China, Vietnam, the
Czech Republic, and
also, more selectively, India, suggests
that the rise of dormitories and industrial hostels is expanding the ability of
employers to control labour well beyond the actual labour process. The
tightening of labour control, on the basis of what Pun Ngai and Chris Smith
have defined as the ‘dormitory labour regime’, has direct effects on the
expansion of exploitation rates. In these contexts, any distinction between
work and reproductive time becomes blurred, as social reproduction becomes
fully individualised and subsumed into the value-generating process. Moreover,
as noted by Hannah Schling with reference to the Czech Republic, in dormitories
‘non-waged time’ becomes fundamental to the production of compliant labouring
subjects.
read more:
