ABSTRACT
Informal workers do not generally have access to work-related measures of social protection, as formal workers do. An early initiative of WIEGO’s Social Protection Programme inserted social protection into global value chain analysis, which brought into focus the erosion of and possibilities for social protection in the changing world of work. Social protection cannot remediate all of the inequalities caused by labour, trade and other policies but can protect against core contingencies. Experiences of informal worker organisations in striving for better access to social protection have highlighted further areas of conceptual and strategic concern. First, while social protection or social security is generally dealt with as a national matter, the municipal level of government plays a crucial role in determining the everyday work conditions of most informal workers. Second, while preventive health care should be a foundational building block of universal health coverage, the privatisation of health insurance tends towards provision of expensive curative care. Third, the pervasive global influence of cash transfers may be “crowding out” and diluting the emerging focus on the social protection needs of poorer informal workers and on the need to combine social insurance and social assistance. Further cross-disciplinary work is needed in these and other issues, as also is sustained and authentic representation of informal worker organisations on policy platforms.
