Somethings cannot go on - the situation of women informal workers in South Asia

Wrote this for a webinar organised by  Duryog Nivaran and the Institute for Disaster Management and Vulnerability Studies at the Dhaka University on   Women and Work in Pandemics: resilience and recovery.  It was good to be back on a Duryog Nivaran  platform after several years , and as a founder member of the network, I was proud that it continued to be persistent in making sure that the need for gender equality is not forgotten in the discourse and practice of disaster risk management, resilience and recovery. Talking about  the rights of women in the informal sector provided provided the opportunity to highlight the situation of women workers who have are more often than not forgotten, and more often than not are invisible. 

photo by me: women cleaners at Galle Face, Colombo

 Who are these women?

The informal sector includes a  wide range of jobs and economic activities - street vendors, home-based workers in global and domestic value chains, waste pickers, domestic workers, women workers in informal enterprises,  sex workers.. Almost always these workers are at the bottom of a wage pyramid and have no work-related social protection.  The legal and regulatory frameworks that exist to protect workers’ rights are  irrelevant and sometimes even punitive. 

 Just to give you some indication of the magnitude of the informal sector, and  the degree to which it is feminised - let me share a few statistics: 

●     There are 2 billion informal sector workers in the world.  That is  61% of the total global workforce

●     The informal sector contributes around 50% of the GDP of several South Asian countries.

●     Large proportion of these informal sector workers are women.   In South Asia 95% of women in employment are employed in the informal sector. (UN Women)  

●     Large number of women workers are excluded from the statistics - their work is not paid, so they are invisible.  These include women’s unpaid work in family businesses or farms, and the work that women do as unpaid care work.  

●     ILO’s calculations suggest that the amount of time  spent in unpaid care work in any single day is  equivalent to 2 billion people working eight hours per day with no remuneration. In Asia women perform 80% of this work. 

●     In many countries, informal workers include migrants - internal migrants, or migrant workers from different countries with varying vulnerabilities because of lack of documentation etc. In India there were 139 million migrants (2011 Census) .We know that migrant domestic workers are vulnerable to all sorts of abuses

 So what happened/is happening during the pandemic?

 In South Asia the response to the COVID 19 pandemic has largely been authoritarian and almost militarised  - and this has impacted on women in the informal sector in multiple ways. The lockdowns and restricted movement has meant that many lost their livelihoods and their daily wages, ILO estimates suggest that  informal workers in Asia  lost 21.6% of their income in the first month of the pandemic. This loss  pushed these workers, who were already in a precarious situation to an even more precarious situation.  Staying at home also made care  arrangements more complex, and the prevailing sexual division of labour and the threat of domestic violence put added pressure on women.  Migrant workers not only lost their jobs, but were also stranded because of mobility restrictions and border controls, without money, food, shelter or transport to go back to their villages.

But women in the informal sector are not just victims of the pandemic.   A large number of them have also been active in contributing to society’s response to the virus. The frontline community health workers, the cleaners in health institutions and on the streets, the drivers and riders that distributed food stuffs and other necessities, the carers at home and in institutions - many of them are workers without long term employment contracts, with low pay and no social protection.  Many of them are women who, despite the health risk, despite the even heavier burdens of care, did the work that gave us the privilege to be in lockdown, stay safe, work from home.  In Chennai, somewhere towards the end of March, we heard the story of sex workers,, who despite being deprived of their livelihood, used their experience of creating awareness about HIV  to spread information about the corona virus in their communities. 

 So while we recognise the vulnerability of workers in the informal sector we must also recognise their active contribution to the response to the pandemic….

 What do we learn from this?

 “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members” - this is a quote that is attributed to Gandhiji  Unfortunately, long before the onset of the COVID virus,  the way we have treated our most vulnerable members is to exploit and devalue their labour and their contribution to the nation. Women’s work whether formal or informal, paid or unpaid, has been devalued and invisibilised since forever  

 The pandemic has exposed this quite dramatically.  In fact in some cases governments have used the pandemic to push back on progressive labour reforms and make life even more difficult for workers.   If we are to learn anything from this pandemic, it is that this cannot go on.

The responsibilities of our governments

 Our countries have signed up to several international treaties and conventions that commit our governments to treat women and workers in the informal sector with respect and to protect their rights. If we had made good some of these commitments, then the situation may have been quite different.

 For instance, the Committee that monitors state obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of discrimination against women  (CEDAW) has shown concern about the concentration of women in the informal sector (Sri Lanka 2017, Maldives 2015) and repeatedly recommended in their constructive dialogues that the state provides  for social security and other benefits to women working in the informal sector.  Nepal (2018) Bangladesh (2016) Maldives (2015) Pakistan (2013) and Sri Lanka (2011).

The ILO Recommendation 204 adopted by the International Labour Conference in 2015, calls for measures to achieve decent work and to respect, promote and realise the fundamental principles and rights at work for those in the informal economy  and to address unsafe and unhealthy working conditions that often characterise work in the informal economy.

Governments are faced with conflicting choices and despite nationalist and populist rhetoric have tended to follow the diktats of global capital .  Global trade regimes and the policy advice of the international financial institutions have pushed South Asian governments to relax labour rights protections, to allow the growth of unregulated contract labour and to  de-invest in social infrastructure and universal social protection schemes. 

 If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that this cannot go on. 

 Making most of this moment

 Some South Asian governments have already passed seemingly large stimulus packages to provide support to the most economically vulnerable.  In India the package amounts to some 2% of the GDP, in Bangladesh to 3.5% and in Pakistan 1.5%,  Discussing the merits and demerits of these packages is beyond the scope of  this blog,  but the overall concern is that they are insufficient to address the magnitude of the problems of the informal economy. 

 I would like to propose that there are ways in which we can push our governments to increase the financial resources available to them.  Selling out our natural resources to the highest bidder in a desperate attempt to attract foreign investment,  as is happening in Sri Lanka, need not be the only way out.  At a minimum I propose that civil society makes the following demands from our governments:

1.  A demand to implement a more just tax system that allows us to redistribute the wealth within our countries.  IN 2017, a study by Professor Mick Moore and others at IDS, showed that the unusually low levels of tax revenue in Sri Lanka is not the result of the 30 year war, but a consequence of a continuous series of policy decisions to exempt wealthier people, businesses, incomes and assets from taxes.

2. A demand to challenge the received wisdom of targeted social security systems (e.g. conditional cash transfers or workfare system) and to move  to universal lifecycle social security systems which  will provide the social protection for women in the informal sector that CEDAW has been recommending.

3. A demand to value the care economy, and increase the percentage of GDP investment in care services

4. A demand to recognise that most informal workers will not transition into the formal economy, but will grow in the informal sector as opportunities in the emerging gig economy increase, so making sure that these informal sector workers will all have decent jobs and social protection.