Unit 2: Gender issues in the world of work
Emerging gender issues in the Asia Pacific region
Women in the informal sector
The informal sector is especially important in developing countries but exists in most industrialised countries too. While providing much urban employment, it is also part of the rural environment. What is clear is that informal activities make an enormous, and in many countries, increasing contribution to the incomes of households and nations. It is also clear that as informal activities have expanded so¾ in the great majority of countries¾ has women’s share in them.
During the 1960s the idea took shape that outside the modern, organised, ‘visible’ sector of work lay another sector: here, people unable to get ‘proper’ work engaged in a variety of largely traditional activities to sustain themselves. This was the concept of informal work as failure (in terms of industrialisation) and marginal (in terms of contribution to the economy), an idea that has since been challenged but nevertheless persists. In 1972, the ILO introduced the concept of ‘informal sector’, defining its main characteristics as:
A new idea was that the sector had untapped development potential, and later concepts¾ especially in the face of stagnating growth and rising unemployment¾ have stressed the idea of the informal sector as opportunity rather than failure.
The ILO and the UN Statistical Office have attempted to refine the definition of the informal sector, with the aim of developing national statistics that can be compared over time and between countries. The ‘own-account’ nature of most informal employment is often stressed, although other analysts identify a spectrum of employment relations, from self-employment to both disguised and ‘true’ but insecure wage work. An increasing number of commentators and activists argue that the informal sector is not only linked to the formal sector but is part of it. Others challenge the whole concept. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), India, for example, deliberately prefers the term self-employment to emphasise the fact that women are workers and to enhance their dignity.
Measuring the informal sector is also difficult, though it is clearly growing in many countries in the face of stagnant or contracting employment opportunities in both manufacturing and agriculture. The I992 World Labour Report estimated that in Asia while the organised sector grew at 2 percent a year through the 1980s, the urban informal sector managed 4 percent and more, providing between 40 and 66 percent of employment. Another key factor in informal sector growth has been the plummeting value of wages.
Some division of labour exists between formal and informal sectors on the basis of gender. The extent to which the sector is a ‘female’ sector varies geographically and over time. Nevertheless in most countries women’s possibilities for entering the formal sector remain even more limited than men’s, and the informal sector may be their only option, not simply the last resort.
A sexual division of labour, reinforced by poverty, also exits within the informal sector. Women in self-employment rely on the skills and experiences they already have, and so food processing and trading, sewing, domestic and personal services, are all important. Women are especially numerous in the lowest-paid and most exploited categories of work: in small enterprises, as outworkers, in the simplest types of self-employment, as unpaid family workers, in domestic work, and in commercial sex work.
Homeworking takes place not only in the informal sector. Frequently the last stage in the subcontracting chain, it is a common form of employment in both urban and rural areas and in industrialised as well as developing countries. Homeworking may be directly connected with manufacturing and even services, but it often takes place on terms and conditions that must be considered informal. Some 90 percent of homeworkers are women.
Homeworking has increased in recent times, in part reflecting changes in the organisation of work: as production processes have fragmented, work has been contracted to smaller units of production, giving employers greater flexibility but reducing the protection of workers. Homeworking has also increased because of the pressure on women to contribute to family incomes, without neglecting their domestic responsibilities. The lack of child care, in particular, ties women to the home. Many women work at home on their own account, but working on a piece rate basis is more common.
Regulating the informal sector and promoting employment
The strategies adopted in planning for this sector depend on whether it is seen as a ‘safety net’ or an ‘engine of growth’. Neither view is necessarily exclusively right. And though women are particularly vulnerable, their strengths must not be overlooked, not their role in distributing resources through the household.
It is harder to reconcile calls to regulate the informal sector (introducing registration and standards to protect workers) with arguments that the sector should be unregulated to encourage ease of entry and entrepreneurship. The particular vulnerability of workers outside the reach of labour legislation or the trade union movement is neither an acceptable nor a necessary price to pay for informal employment opportunities. Another question is the extent to which the informal sector is linked to the formal. Can the informal sector mop up excess labour indefinitely? Evidence suggests that the informal sector is not infinitely elastic; employment opportunities may even decrease in parallel with opportunities in the formal sector. The importance of structural factors is demonstrated by the fact that the transition form self-employment to small enterprise is everywhere more difficult for women than for men.
The diverse occupations, ambitions and needs of people working ‘informally’ means that programmes designed to reach them will also need to adopt a range of strategies. Both training and credit, together and separately, are seen as ways of increasing women’s productive capabilities and bargaining power. An evaluation of the impact of credit on petty commodity producers in India found that loans with the most positive impact were those made within a framework of other activities designed to replace existing exploitative relations of production and to improve productive capacity. These include:
"The real issue", says the study, "is not women’s organisations making the loan programmes work but, instead, the loan programme facilitating organisational development among women petty commodity producers."
[Source: Susan Bullock, Women and Work, Zed Books Ltd., London and New Jersey, 1994.]