Economic Rights of the Informal Self-Employed

This chapter interrogates the economic rights of the urban self-employed through the lens of three groups of informal workers who constitute a significant share of the urban self-employed in the global South: home-based workers, street vendors and waste pickers. It opens with an overview of the conceptualization, classification and measurement of self-employment and then details the employment arrangements and working conditions of these three groups and provides a conceptual framework and a roadmap for realizing the economic rights of the informal self-employed. The chapter concludes with reflections on the way forward towards realizing the economic rights and freedoms of the informal self-employed. The key messages of this chapter are that, globally, nearly half of the total workforce and over two thirds of the informal workforce are self-employed; most informal self-employed cannot work their way out of poverty because they face a hostile legal and policy environment and lack access to public services, public space and public procurement; the realization of economic rights for the informal self-employed entails addressing these negative forces; and this, in turn, requires that organizations of informal workers are represented in the policy and legal reform process.