No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Approaches to social protection for informal workers: Aligning productivist and human rights-based approaches
Abstract
There has been increasing recognition of the growth of informal employment in the global South and North. Most informal work is precarious and low paid, with workers having little or no access to social protection. It is sometimes suggested that an approach that moves away from productivism – the idea of work as a pathway to access social protection – and towards a universal human rights-based approach is important. However, this article argues that a large and growing informal economy does not provide justification for abandoning certain key productivist ideas. Key ideas that should not be abandoned include the focus that this approach has on establishing a link between workers and capital and the importance of social services within a social protection discourse that is presently dominated by cash grants. Also important, productivist ideas emphasize the economic contributions of informal workers as a means by which to complement a human rights-based argument for the extension of workplace protection to all workers, regardless of employment status. Overall, the hard binary that is sometimes drawn between human rights-based approaches and productivist (or “instrumentalist”) arguments may not always be as definitively delineated as some might suggest.
Due to their enormous impact on stakeholders and the entire community, both academics and practitioners have been giving closer attention to societal marketing initiatives recently. In the context of Afghanistan's banking industry, this study investigates the relationship between societal marketing and corporate reputation. The purpose of the current study is to see if Afghanistan's banking industry's societal marketing activities help improve the bank's reputation among stakeholders and the community or if they want just to increase profits. The data were collected through an online survey from the banking industry stakeholders based in Kabul. The findings of empirical research are presented, and the relevant findings are discussed.
The study is done with an aim of exploring the factors of rural- urban migration in Cumilla city. 106 randomly selected migrants were interviewed and for this task we have used both open and closed-ended questionnaires. With the help of SPSS 21 Statistical tool we have analysis this raw data and describe the statistics. The well decorate data results show that the flow of movement of people from different areas of Bangladesh to Cumilla city area are mainly for living a better life, to earn more money, for employment opportunities educational facilities etc. The result shows that 80 % people who migrate their ages is between 20 to 40 years. Most of the migrated people come to Cumilla city from nearer district and urban villages of Cumilla. Here also found that both pull and push factors are causes for migration.
The rapid spread of large-scale and innovative social transfers in the developing world has made a key contribution to the significant reduction in global poverty over the last decade. Explaining how flagship anti-poverty programmes emerged, this book provides the first comprehensive account of the global growth of social assistance transfers in developing countries. Armando Barrientos begins by focusing on the ethical and conceptual foundations of social assistance, and he discusses the justifications for assisting those in poverty. He provides a primer on poverty analysis, and introduces readers to the theory of optimal transfers. He then shifts the focus to practice, and introduces a classification of social assistance programmes to help readers understand the diversity in approaches and design in developing countries. The book concludes with an analysis of the financing and politics of the emerging institutions and of their potential to address global poverty.
The Informal Economy Monitoring Study (IEMS) seeks to provide credible, grounded evidence of
the range of driving forces, both positive and negative, that affect conditions of work in the informal
economy over time in 10 cities. Three sectors are being explored: home-based work, street vending
and waste picking. This report examines street vending in Durban, South Africa.
Both qualitative and quantitative methods are used in this study. The qualitative component consists
of a participatory informal economy appraisal (PIEA), an innovative method designed to capture
systematically the perceptions and understandings of 75 informal workers, in their own words, in a
focus group setting. The quantitative component consists of a survey questionnaire administered to
the focus group participants, plus another approximately 75 workers who did not participate in focus
groups. The questionnaire is designed to supplement the data collected through the focus groups by
collecting information on the household profile and income sources of the workers; the asset profile
of the workers’ households; detailed information on the workers’ enterprises; and linkages between
the informal economy and the formal economy. The Durban sample was comprised of women and
men who trade in the Central Business District, but also in outlying areas. The fieldwork was done
between August and November, 2012.
Social rights are like paper tigers, fierce in appearance but missing in tooth and claw. 1 I INTRODUCTION In The Great Transformation, the political economist Karl Polanyi showed how during the Industrial Revolution British "society protected itself against the perils inherent in a self-regulating market system." 2 Polanyi's "double movement" captured the dynamic relationship between market expansion and social institutions. First published as World War II was ending, The Great Transformation also provided a way of understanding the relationship between Keynesian economic expansion and the emergence of the welfare state. Today, it can be used to explain the increased interest in social rights, which has been "one of the side effects of globalization." 3 Supra-national trade agreements combined with and supported by neo-liberal values and political arrangements have resulted in the transformation of the welfare state and an emphasis on the market as the best mechanism of distribution and of service provision. The shift from a Fordist to a digital economy has restructured global and local Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law, University of Victoria.
This paper uses power analysis and the notion of hegemony to enquire into the historical neglect of unpaid care in the international development sector. In the light of that analysis the paper looks at how to exploit the hegemonic contradictions that provide openings for getting care onto development policy agendas. Addressing feminist practitioners and scholar-activists, the paper proposes a strategy of a succession of small wins in naming, framing, claiming and programming care. These can contribute to a change of mindset among citizens, think tanks and policy-makers about the significance of care.
The reduction of poverty after the demise of apartheid is attributed largely to South Africa's expansive social protection program. A key driver of this growth has been the Child Support Grant established in 1998. Although the grant was not intended only for women caregivers of children, it is accessed mainly by women. This presents a rich opportunity to examine the gendered nature of poverty and to assess the contribution of the program to poverty reduction from a gender perspective. This article draws on household survey data in one of the poorest urban communities in Johannesburg with the highest uptake of the grant. It provides insight into the gendered impact of the grant and identifies key challenges in the development of gender-sensitive social protection strategies.
This paper reviews social protection trends and policy responses in Latin America as part of a global scoping study on social protection commissioned by Ford Foundation (See Appendix One for ToR for this paper). The paper is organised as follows (following the paper contents as described in Appendix One): Section 1 identifies the main trends in poverty and vulnerability in the region, with particular references to rural-urban and life course poverty incidence. Section 2 provides a review of social protection trends. It discusses the two main areas of change and innovation in the last two decades: the reform of social insurance provision and the rapid expansion of social assistance schemes. Section 3 identifies some potential points of engagement between Ford Foundation work and the social protection policy agenda in the region.
The electronic version of this book has been prepared by scanning TIFF 600 dpi bitonal images of the pages of the text. Original source: Social security in Latin America : pressure groups, stratification, and inequality / Carmelo Mesa-Lago.; Mesa-Lago, Carmelo, 1934-; xix, 351 p. : graphs ; 25 cm.; Pittsburgh :; This electronic text file was created by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). No corrections have been made to the OCR-ed text and no editing has been done to the content of the original document. Encoding has been done through an automated process using the recommendations for Level 2 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines. Digital page images are linked to the text file.
The second edition of this classic text substantially revises and extends the original, so as to take account of theoretical and policy developments and to enhance its international scope. Drawing on a range of disciplines and literatures, the book provides an unusually broad account of citizenship. It recasts traditional thinking about the concept so as to pinpoint important theoretical issues and their political and policy implications for women in their diversity. Themes of inclusion and exclusion (at national and international level), rights and participation, inequality and difference are thus all brought to the fore in the development of a woman-friendly, gender-inclusive theory and praxis of citizenship.
Examines the latest IMF government spending projections for 187 countries between 2005 and 2020; (ii) reviews 616 IMF country reports in 183 countries to identify the main adjustment measures considered by governments in both high-income and developing countries; (iii) applies the United Nations Global Policy Model to simulate the impact of expenditure consolidation on growth and employment; (iv) discusses the threats of austerity to welfare and social progress; and (v) calls for urgent action by governments to adopt alternative and equitable policies for socio-economic recovery.
International corporate tax issues have now risen to prominence in public debate. But while there is considerable empirical evidence for advanced countries on the crosscountry fiscal externalities at their heart, there is almost none for developing countries. This paper uses panel data for 173 countries over 33 years to explore their magnitude and nature, focusing particularly on developing countries and applying a new method to distinguish between spillover effects through real decisions and through avoidance, and to quantify the revenue impact of the latter. The results suggest that spillover effects on the tax base are if anything a greater concern for developing countries than for advanced---and a significant one.
This article focuses on an action-research project which is attempting to extend occupational health and safety to a group of street traders in Durban, South Africa, using a variety of different (and sometimes unconventional) institutional actors. The article is written from the perspective of key people who have played a role in conceptualizing and administering the project and is intended to deepen the conversation about what it means to extend occupational health to the informal economy. It explores this question through a reflection on three key project activities: the setting up of a trader-led health and safety committee, an occupational health and safety training course, and a clinical health assessment. It concludes with a discussion of the issues that emerge from the reflections of project participants, which include the need to bring occupational health and urban health into closer conversation with one another, the need to be cognizant of local “informal” politics and the impact that has on occupational health and safety interventions, and the need to create greater opportunities for occupational health and safety professionals to interact with workers in the informal economy.
The quotation marks that are placed around ‘the economic’ and ‘the social’ alert us to the fact that this is an abstract duality. In the ‘real’ world people do not live their lives in two separate domains. The aspects of life that we label ‘economic’ and ‘social’ are intertwined. The policies we label ‘economic’ and ‘social’ each have ramifications for both the dimensions we label ‘economic’ and those we label ‘social’. As Barbara Harriss-White points out in her contribution, ‘social policy is economic policy’. But at the same time, as pointed out in Elson and Cagatay (2000), economic policy is social policy.
This article is a critical reflection on the Phephanathi Platform, an ongoing collaboration among organizations of informal traders working in the Warwick Junction markets in Durban, South Africa and their support organizations. The purpose of the Platform is to experiment with the extension of occupational health and safety to informal workers working in urban public space through the establishment of an integrated urban health platform. The article is concerned not only with the practical aspects of the Platform, but also assesses the Platform as a political strategy. It focuses on two key pieces of work – the design and rollout of first aid stands into the markets, and the attempt to institutionalize occupational health and safety for informal workers within the local municipality. The article concludes with a meta-reflection on the work, elaborating on some of the important questions that are raised and drawing out the implications for integrating occupational health and safety into the urban environment.
This article addresses the influence of the International Labour Organization (ILO) on other international organizations and global agencies which resulted in their endorsement of the Social Protection Floor (SFP) concept. By 2012 the concept had been endorsed by the United Nations in the shape of the UN Chief Executives Board's SPF-Initiative, the World Bank in its new Social Protection and Labor Strategy and by the G20 at the Cannes Summit. Furthermore the IMF had agreed to work with the ILO to explore the options for creating fiscal space within countries to fund SPFs. Special Rapporteurs for the UN Human Rights Council had also in 2012 called for the setting up of a global fund for social protection to enable poorer countries to develop their floors. By 2012 a new coordinating authority, the Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B), had been ushered into existence to facilitate inter-agency cooperation. This article describes and explains how these developments came about. It asks if the reality of increased global social governance cooperation in the field of social protection is as effective as it seems or whether there are new contradictions, overlapping and competing mandates and policy disagreements at the global level.
The Article critically examines the adaptation of citizenship rights to industrial relations and labor law. Starting with T.H. Marshall's discussion of industrial citizenship, the Article examines the coupling of industrial citizenship with trade unions. While Marshall's concept of industrial citizenship may seem to be in decline, other labor market institutions are trying to bridge the divide between citizenship and labor rights: workplace democracy, which assumes the constituency of workers in the corporation; and corporate citizenship, which is used to entrust corporations with obligations that are traditionally expected of human citizens. Citizenship's contribution to the analysis of labor market institutions lies in the emphasis on the public nature of workers ' rights, in the association of rights with obligations, and in the emphasis on active participation. However, citizenship also has "blind spots" that other theories address more coherently. Human rights are a preferred concept for distinguishing fundamental rights (including rights of citizenship) from "ordinary" rights. Labor rights are more effective in identifying power structures that citizenship rights may overlook. Consequently, the concept of citizenship may compromise workers' capacity to negotiate fair remuneration, protection from dismissal and the dignity of labor.
Among the many ways in which welfare regimes differ, one is how they articulate the demands of work and welfare. Such a framework not only renders more coherent the familiar ‘three worlds of welfare capitalism’ but also highlights another option: a ‘post-productivist’ welfare regime, which combines generous social benefits and a relaxed attitude towards work requirements, aiming at ‘autonomy’ as its core value. Analysis of OECD data circa 1993 shows that a work–welfare classification successfully locates most of the countries in their traditional regime types. It also shows the Netherlands as an instance of the new regime type, effectively promoting the three key components of post-productivist autonomy: income adequacy, temporal adequacy and minimimal conditionality.
A large and growing number of labor law and industrial relations scholars have argued that labor rights ought to be understood and conceptualized as fundamental human rights. In a parallel movement, a growing number of labor rights organizations have begun to deploy human rights discourse and methods, while some international human rights scholars and organizations have also, although to a lesser degree, begun to direct some of their attention to questions of labor rights – an issue long left to unions and labor law scholars.Few scholars have challenged this move to human rights discourse, however. In this essay I argue that there are important and salient differences between labor rights and human rights, not only in how these rights operate conceptually, but also and perhaps equally importantly, in how these rights are actualized by their respective movements. I argue that the strategies, politics, culture, and ideologies that inform human rights and much of the U.S. human rights establishment are quite at odds with those of labor rights movements, and a hard human rights turn by labor rights advocates risks eviscerating the fundamental commitments to economic justice and worker democracy in which the labor rights movement is grounded.
Edmund Burke argued that abstract or universal rights to food and medicine were less valuable than the aid of ‘the farmer and the physician’. His point remains unanswered. Human rights receive universal lip service, but their status and justification remain murky. From one view they are universal requirements matched by counterpart universal obligations: but if so they cannot be defined or created by international Covenants. From another view they are defined by convention and have force only when states ratify international Covenants: but if so, they are not universal. This matters particularly for rights to goods and services, such as rights to food and health care. These rights require the active collaboration of those who are to deliver needed goods and services: yet this active engagement is endangered by imposing overly complex requirements in the name of compliance with human rights. Excessive demands for compliance, and excessive emphasis on complaint, compensation and blame as remedies for non-compliance, endanger the effective contribution of the farmer and the physician, and of others on whom the provision of needed goods and services most depends.
With the public finances of many developing and emerging market countries still heavily dependent on trade tax revenues, further trade liberalization may be hindered unless they are able to develop alternative sources of revenue. Against a background of, and to inform, heightened theoretical controversy as to the appropriate balance between trade and other taxes (not least the VAT), this paper uses panel data for 117 countries over 32 years—cleaned for a variety of problems in standard data sources—to address a central question of fact: Have countries recovered from domestic taxes the revenues they have lost from past episodes of trade liberalization? For high income countries, the answer is clearly ‘yes.’ For middle income countries, there are robust signs of strong replacement both concurrently with the revenue loss and—essentially dollar-for-dollar—in the long run. Signs of significant recovery by low income countries are flimsier, however, and their experiences appear to have varied widely. The picture that emerges for low income countries is thus that replacement has been (and become) higher than previous studies have suggested, but sufficiently incomplete in many cases to give cause for concern.
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5165-precarious-liberation.aspx
Innovations in extending social insurance coverage to independent workers: Experiences from Brazil
- F Durán-Valverde
Durán-Valverde, F. et al. 2013. Innovations in extending social insurance coverage to
independent workers: Experiences from Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Costa Rica,
Ecuador, Philippines, France and Uruguay (ESS paper, No. 42). Geneva, International
Labour Office.
Fiscal space and the extension of social protection: Lessons learnt from developing countries
- F Durán-Valverde
- J F Pacheco
Durán-Valverde, F.; Pacheco, J. F. 2012. Fiscal space and the extension of social protection:
Lessons learnt from developing countries: Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Costa Rica, Lesotho,
Namibia, Thailand and South Africa (ESS paper, No. 33). Geneva, International Labour
Office.
Cash transfer programmes, poverty reduction and empowerment of women: A comparative analysis: Experiences from Brazil
- E Fultz
- J Francis
Fultz, E.; Francis, J. 2013. Cash transfer programmes, poverty reduction and empowerment of
women: A comparative analysis: Experiences from Brazil, Chile, India, Mexico and South
Africa (GED working paper, No.4). Geneva, International Labour Office.
Welfare regimes and social policy: A review of the role of labour and employment
- J Heintz
- F Lund
Heintz, J.; Lund, F. 2012. Welfare regimes and social policy: A review of the role of labour and
employment (UNRISD research paper, No. 2012-4). Geneva, United Nations Research
Institute for Social Development.
A phased approach will make a 'basic income' affordable for India
- R Khera
Khera, R. 2016. "A phased approach will make a 'basic income' affordable for India", in The
Wire, 20 December.
- L Lavinas
Lavinas, L. 2013. "21st century welfare", in New Left Review, No. 84.
Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing. Approaches to social protection for informal workers
- F Lund
Lund, F. 2009. Social protection, citizenship and the employment relationship (WIEGO
working paper (social protection), No. 10). Cambridge, MA, Women in Informal
Employment: Globalizing and Organizing.
Approaches to social protection for informal workers
International Social Security Review, Vol. 70, 4/2017
Chains of production, ladders of protection: Social protection for workers in the informal economy
- F Lund
- J Nicholson
Lund, F.; Nicholson, J. (eds). 2004. Chains of production, ladders of protection: Social
protection for workers in the informal economy. Durban, University of Natal.
Are labour rights human rights? (UCL Labour Rights Institute online working papers
- V Mantouvalou
Mantouvalou, V. 2012. Are labour rights human rights? (UCL Labour Rights Institute online
working papers, No. LRI WP X/2012). London, University College London.
The nature of the South African informal sector as reflected in the Quarterly Labour Force Survey
- M Rogan
- C Skinner
Rogan, M.; Skinner, C. 2017. The nature of the South African informal sector as reflected in
the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, 2008-2014 (Working paper, No. 28). Cape Town,
REDI3x3.
Approaches to social protection for informal workers
International Social Security Review, Vol. 70, 4/2017
Guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights (A/HRC/21/39, 18 July). Geneva, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
- M Sepúlveda Carmona
Sepúlveda Carmona, M. 2012. Guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights
(A/HRC/21/39, 18 July). Geneva, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Statistics on the informal economy: Definitions, regional definitions, and challenges (WIEGO working paper (statistics
- J Vanek
Vanek, J. et al. 2014. Statistics on the informal economy: Definitions, regional definitions, and
challenges (WIEGO working paper (statistics), No. 2). Manchester, Women in Informal
Employment: Globalizing and Organizing.
Gender-responsive public services and young urban women's economic empowerment: A report on research in Ghana and South Africa. Johannesburg, ActionAid. Approaches to social protection for informal workers
- E Zambeli
Zambeli, E. et al. 2017. Gender-responsive public services and young urban women's economic
empowerment: A report on research in Ghana and South Africa. Johannesburg, ActionAid.
Approaches to social protection for informal workers
International Social Security Review, Vol. 70, 4/2017
Kasinomics: African informal economies and the people who inhabit them
- G G Alcock
Alcock, G. G. 2015. Kasinomics: African informal economies and the people who inhabit them.
Johannesburg, Tracey McDonald Publishers.