ABSTRACT
Dominant narratives within labour law scholarship reflect and give legitimacy to post-war regulatory mechanisms and institutions of labour relations, and also shape which types of employment relationships are deemed suitable for regulation. Thus, traditional regulatory frameworks for governing work relations have taken as their starting point and as their main subject of regulation, the post-war ideal type of the 'standard' employee within the 'standard employment relationship', buttressed by institutions of social citizenship. As a discipline, however, labour law is sufficiently expansive to reach beyond the confines of a narrow model of 'employment' and of formal regulation which evolved at a particular historical juncture. More than 60 per cent of the world's employed population earn their livelihoods in the informal economy, with the preponderance of those in informal work located in emerging and developing countries; for instance, the vast majority of employment in Africa, 85.8 per cent, is informal.
