"Promoting Decent Work: The Role of Civil Society"
 First Panel: Civil Society and the World of Work
  Renana Jhabvala - National Co-ordinator, SEWA, India; Steering Committee, WIEGO; and Trustee of HomeNet
Stefano Zamagni - Professor of Economics, University of Bologna; and President, International Catholic Commission for
Migration, Italy
Karim Dahou - Responsible for System and Prospective, ENDA Tiers Monde, Senegal
Renana Jhabvala - National Co-ordinator, SEWA, India; Steering Committee, WIEGO; and Trustee of HomeNet
I would like to divide my presentation into two parts: the first part is about the informal sector itself, and, in particular,
what civil society means in the context of the informal sector; in the second part, I would like to introduce the
organization I come from, SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association.
Let me begin with the size of the informal sector. When people talk about the informal sector, they tend to think of it as
small or marginal. But the figures tell a different story. In terms of total employment, between 45 to 85 per cent of the
workforce in developing countries is in the informal sector. In terms of non-agricultural employment, 50 to 85 per cent of
the workforce make their living through informal occupations, while 40 to 60 per cent of urban jobs are in the informal
sector. In addition to size in terms of employment, the informal sector has also proved to have great potential for job
creation. In many countries more jobs are being created in the informal sector than in the formal economy.
It is not surprising that low-income countries have a very high proportion of informal sector workers, while in middle-income countries it adds up to 40 per cent of the workforce. In high-income countries, where all the major social policies
originate, only 15 per cent of workers are in the informal sector.
It is clear that we are talking about a very important sector, of the economy which is not small or marginal. It we do not
address the problems faced by workers in the sector, we will not be able to combat with poverty or bring civil society into
our policies.
I would like to recall earlier assumptions that the formal sector is going to expand and as a consequence the informal
sector will contract. We now know that is not the case; the opposite phenomenon has been observed in many countries.
During the last 15 years there has been a major increase in informal employment.
There is another misconception. That is to say that the informal sector does not contribute much to the economy and
therefore is marginal, despite its size. However, a study by the Central Statistical Organization and the National Council
for Applied Economic Research produced some striking figures: 92 per cent of employment, 63 per cent of GDP, 46 per
cent of exports and 55 per cent of savings come from the informal sector. Which means that it is very important, not only
in terms of number of employed people, but also in terms of its contribution to the national economy. And yet, informal
sector workers are excluded from social protection, job security and decision making. And, of course, women are the
most excluded because they are paid much less than men. They are also the first ones to leave the labour force and, their
work is often not even recognized as work. This is the case of women who work at home.
Now we come to the question of what informal sector workers really need. We must remember that there is very large
variety of informal sector workers. In rural areas there are agricultural labourers, small farmers, forest workers, fisher
people and milk producers. In urban areas there are construction workers, rag pickers and home-based workers. There
are different types of work, different occupational sectors and different employment relations. This means that you need
many different types of intervention to reach workers in the informal sector.
Bearing in mind this great difficulty, we come back to the question of what informal sector workers really need? First and
foremost they really need work. What kind of work do they need? According to a conventional understanding of the
labour market, work means an employer-employee relationship: a job is based on a relationship between employer and
employee. However, this is not the case in the informal economy where most people have more than one job. We have
just finished a study which showed that 60 per cent of our members have two different jobs and 10 to 12 per cent work in
three or more different occupations within one day. If the survey continued over the year, you would find that people
work a few months in one occupation, then another few months in another occupation. In other words, we cannot talk in
terms of one person, one job. There is no clear employer-employee relationship; people work for different employers and
they work for themselves. Self-employment is very, very common. So, I think that the types of social protection and the
policies designed to achieve full employment for informal sector workers cannot but differ from those designed for
formal sector workers. This is not my topic, so I will not go into it here. I will continue with the next point, which is that
informal sector workers have no voice at local level, national level or international level.
There are two reasons for this. One is the difficulty they face in organizing, and the second is that the existing structures
exclude them. I'll give an example to make that clear. Let us take women who work in the forests. They pick minor forest
produce which they are supposed to sell to the forest department. The forest department decides how much they will pay
for the produce. But the women have no voice in the forest department to decide on the price. Their work is not open to
market forces, and they have no voice in decision making because they are not organized.
Nevertheless, I would like to point out that informal sector workers do organize in different ways. They organize as trade
unions, maybe registered, maybe unregistered. They organize as cooperatives and as self-help groups. They organize
around micro-finance and around markets, but there are many obstacles to their organizing efforts. First, the laws in most
countries do not encourage the organization of small numbers of people or the setting up of any kind of association which
would bring them into the larger decision making processes. And finally I think that informal sector workers are socially,
economically and politically very weak. There are many forces which divide them. However, they have to organize, if
their voice is to be heard in the decision-making process of civil society.
The second part of my talk will describe the Self-Employed Women's Association, SEWA. The Association is a trade
union of women in the informal sector, which was formed in 1972 and which now has 220,000 members. Membership is
on an annual basis so it changes from year to year. SEWA organizes in six states and our members are both urban and
rural women. SEWA has learned from experience, that without a joint strategy of trade union and cooperatives working
together, informal sector workers cannot make their voices heard or protect their interests. I will give an example. In a
district called Keira, many people work in the tobacco field as agricultural labourers and many are employed in tobacco
processing factories. We found that these people work in appalling conditions, and are paid less than the minimum wage.
We started organizing them a into trade union. There was no clear employer-employee relationship, so we tried to
organize them around the issue of a minimum wage.
Another point was that many children of these workers were going to the tobacco fields and processing plants. Our
members wanated care for their children, so that they did not have to go to the factories. Land was another issue. Many
of our members were very small farmers who had mortgaged away their land and they wanted credit to buy it back. To
meet their needs, we started child care activities, and we set up self-help groups for saving and credit.
Interestingly enough, we found that the same employers who resisted our efforts to raise the minimum wage, ready gave
money for child care. We also found that when the women were able to take a loan and buy their land back, they had
much better bargaining power, because they could choose whether to work in the tobacco industry or on their own land.
So, we found that the joint strategy of forming a trade union, on the one hand, providing of child care and setting up a
credit cooperative was very useful. The joint strategy was the only way to win a minimum wage for our members and
make it possible for them to become self-employed.
We have used this strategy over and over again in almost every field, and it has proved very positive. When they work
together, trade unions and cooperatives are a very powerful tool for development. SEWA's biggest cooperative is the
SEWA Cooperative Bank, which was founded in 1975 and currently has 120,000 women members. In addition, we have
promoted 85 other cooperatives, which range from land-based ones to agricultural to artisanal to service cooperatives
such as midwives and child care providers.
My final point is that in the new global economy, it is no longer enough to organize locally, because most decisions are
now taken globally. Our activities at grassroots level have taught us this and we have been more or less forced to organize
in a global way. One experience in this regard was our effort to organize home-based workers. As you know, these
people were never recognized as workers. The labour commissioners, would say: "These are not workers, they are only
doing it at home in their spare time". As long as this continues, we are not able to get protection for home-based workers.
We thought that if the ILO had a Convention on home workers, this would influence their situation. We also found that
there were many organizations all over the world which were organizing home-based workers. So, we helped to form an
international network called "Homenet". The lobbying effort of HomeNet helped the adoption of the ILO Convention on
homeworkers, which was passed in 1996.
The Women's World Banking is an international agency sponsored by SEWA. The WWB was a response to many
women's urgent need for micro-finance including saving, credit and insurance. The WWB is now working in 80
countries. Lastly, I would like to introduce another international network that we launched recently. Women in Informal
Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) is a network of grassroots organizations, researchers in leading
universities such as Harvard, and policy makers, especially in the UN agencies. We find that this is a very powerful
combination, for promoting the informal sector organizations and bringing them into the mainstream.
Top
Stefano Zamagni - Professor of Economics, University of Bologna; and President, International Catholic
Commission for Migration, Italy
Let me first of all congratulate the ILO on choosing the expression "decent work". I like it very much. So let me give my
personal interpretation of decency.
To me decent work is work which does not humiliate the worker. Which means that it does not make people feel
redundant or irrelevant. If we take this definition, we understand why decent work is much more than just work. You can
offend the dignity of a person even though you pay a normal wage or provide good conditions. In other words, the
decency concept is very demanding and it indicates much more than one simple idea. That's why I like this expression
and the whole programme behind it.
The thesis which I will defend in few minutes, is that today's unemployment is the consequence of a social organization
which does not make it possible to utilize all the available resources. It is a fact that the new technologies of the third
industrial revolution liberate more and more social time from production processes. The existing institutional set-up of
our society transforms this time into unemployment, or into new forms of social exclusion. The so-called working poor
are an example of this result.
In other words, instead of being devoted to a variety of different uses, time continues to be utilized for the production of
commodities and services which people could happily stop consuming if they had a real chance to spend their income on
other items such as "relational goods", or merit goods", or certain types of "public goods". However, the fact that we lack
entrepreneurs (or enterprises), which are willing and able to produce and offer such types of goods, brings us to a
paradox: we are "compelled" to consume commodities or services which we could do without. On the other hand,
nobody is producing those new services, particularly personal services, because we lack entrepreneurs capable of doing it.
How to account for the prevailing inability to solve the labour question without generating socially dangerous and morally
unacceptable trade-offs? Because that is the other side of the coin. It is obvious that we can produce full employment.
Economists nowadays know very well how to generate full employment. So, it is simplistic to say we cannot find ways to
full employment. The real question is the ethical and social price of full employment. Indeed, if we have to humiliate
people in order to create full employment, perhaps some of us would object to that. Again, if we have to move towards a
consumerist lifestyle which would jeopardize the ecological equilibrium, that would not be acceptable.
In other words, the labour problem today is not that we lack measures to generate full employment, but we lack measures
which, while generating full employment also create decent work, a work which does not offend the dignity of the human
person, does not deteriorate ecological problems, and so on.
If that is the situation, what is the remedy? The proposal, which I only advance for lack of time is that we need a new
economic space which does not yet exist in our societies. I refer to this space as the civil economy to stress its link to
civil society. When I talk of civil society I mean organized civil society, not just a civil society made up of individuals or
closed groups. Organized civil society is sometimes called the community at grassroots level; it requires a principle of
organization. As it is well-known, the economic institutional set-up of our societies rests on two pillars: the private
economy and the public economy. The private economy is driven by the profit motive: people, entrepreneurs, firms. The
public economic sphere is occupied by government intervention. In other words, state-owned enterprises of one type or
another, public monopolies and many other examples. The logic of the public economic sphere is that tipical of hierchies
and burocracies. What we lack is a third economic space, what I call the "civil economy". In this sphere the logic is
neither the profit motive, nor the political or administrative motive. In the most recent literature it is called the logical of
reciprocity.
If you consider the working of NGO's, co-operatives or non-profit organizations such as LETS (Local Exchange Trading
System), and if you ask yourselves what is the basic principle behind the working of these organizations, the answer is the
reciprocity principle, is a way different from both the profit motive and the purely philanthropic motive.
It is important to stress that the civil economy should stand on its own feet. I emphazise this, because in our Western
societies, the civil economy is not formally yet admitted. It is tolerated but not formally recognized. I am familiar with the
situation in Italy, in France, and Germany. If you read the economic rules of the game, the civil economy is not yet
formally admitted although it ispraised. In fact, the regulations on non-profit organizations such as NGOs are laws of a
fiscal nature, not of a civil nature. According to these laws which say that a non-profit organizations are exempted from
paying taxes of one type or the other, which is ok, but it is not enough. In other words, our economic culture has not yet
recognized that there is a way of producing wealth, net income surplus, which is different from either the private or the
public mode.
To what extent is the civil economy practised in real life? Statistics are not relevant here. Why? Because the figures are
wrong. In which sense? Because they are based on a methodology which was conceived under another perspective. That
is why the central statistical office of the United Nations has recently decided to start a new procedure to represent the
situation statistically. According to the theoretical scheme you have in mind, you can portray this type of reality one way
or another, which explains why statistics are not relevant. It is much more important to refert to facts, and the facts tell us
that this type of economic space, is flourishing everywhere especially so in the so-called developed countries.
Suppose one decides to put civil society to work, would that cause a crowding out of , the role of the State? That is a
question which worries many people. If we create a space for civil economy, does that mean that the State should
disappear? Of course it doesn't. In the model of social order I am advocating, the State keeps a fundamental role which is
different from the traditional role. Until now, for one reason or another, States have entered the economic sphere to
substitute the private sphere. They've been paternalistic and we know the damage this has caused. Damage not so much
in economic terms, but in political terms, because every time the government intervenes directly in producing
commodities and services it destroys trust relations, and when you destroy trust relations that is the end of the story. Our
economies can do without many things, can do without many raw materials, but they will never do without trust. Exactly
this is the strategical role played by the civil economy: to generate or to strenghten trust relations among agents. What
would be the role of the state in this new set-up?
Its role would be two-fold. First of all the State should recognize the self-organization of collective agents in all areas
where their members claim to have legitimate interests to protect. That is the meaning of the subsidiarity principle.
The second role of government would be to enforce the rules of this self-organization. Transparency is vital, otherwise
there is a risk that this organized civil society might create other types of problems. So there must be rules about access to
financing, tax schemes, etc. The role of the government would be very important, not in substituting for civil society, but
in fixing the rules of the game, in order to prevent new forms of monopoly, or rather oligopoly. That would be very
detrimental, because there is always a risk of an NGO becoming too powerful. It is the responsibility of government to
prevent this from happening.
To conclude. Indiscriminate admirers of the market as a social institution seem to overlook one fact. The hegemonic
expansion of markets will slowly but inexorably destroy the whole system of social norms and conventions which
constitute a civil economy, thereby paving the way for the success of new forms of statism. Today we must admit that the
hypertrophic growth of both State and private markets is a major explanation of the many problems of our societies. The
solution cannot be found in one or the other extremes of the public economy versus private economy, or neo-statism
versus neo-liberalism, but in the expansion of those forms of organization that shape a modern civil economy.
The most disturbing consequence of the narrow-minded notion of markets, that is predominant today, is the belief that
behaviour inspired by values other than non-truistic self-interest inexorably drives economy to economic disaster. By
encouraging us to expect the worst from others, such vision eventually brings out the worst in us. Moreover, it hampers
the possibility to take advantage of inclinations such as trust, benevolence, reciprocity. This vision perceives these
inclinations as merely inherent features of human nature, unrelated to civilization and social progress.
Actions motivated by the principle of reciprocity are as legitimate as those motivated by self-interest. A truly liberal
society should not prevent beforehand - that is, at the level of institutional design - the growth and dissemination of the
former to the detriment of the latter, as it is foolishly happening today. In the absence of competition between different
actors in the supply of varied categories of goods, the citizen-consumer will be left with less freedom. We might end up
living in a more affluent society, efficiently inundating us with commodities and services of all sorts, but more and more
"indecent" and, ultimately, desperate.
Top
Karim Dahou - Responsible for System and Prospective, ENDA Tiers Monde, Senegal
Firstly, I would like to talk about my organization, ENDA, and its work. I would also like to talk about the organization of
work and production, particularly in West Africa and Senegal.
ENDA began in 1972, focusing on environmental and development issues in the Third World after a meeting held by a
group of researchers and farmers trying to develop plans for rural production. It was founded by members of the
organization "Tiers Monde" and Jacques Bouguincourt, who is now the executive director of ENDA. The founders felt
far removed from the two extremes of Marxism and capitalism. They felt they had to look for alternative models which
would be relevant to the common people and which would involve them fully in the development process.
This explains the direction that ENDA has taken and the support it has received from a certain number of grassroots
organizations. ENDA has a consultative role with ECOSOC and is concerned with a certain number of UN Conventions
on the environment, and desertification. It is also active in questions of multilateral trade. Thus, our activities include
political advocacy and action campaigns. We work for the rejection of existing models, and attempt to bring together the
threads of our own new development model.
I'd now like to talk about population growth, poverty and low productivity in West Africa. The region has a very high
level of demographic growth and the urban population is rising fast. Between independence in 1960 and 1995 the
population of Senegal tripled from 3 million to 9 million, and it will probably be about 18 million in 2020. This situation
is similar in almost all of Western Africa. This demographic explosion has gone hand-in-hand with rapid urbanization.
The average growth of urban populations is 4.5 per cent a year, against 2.5 per cent for rural areas. But there is also a
restructuring of rural populations around large cities such as Dakar and Lagos. The cities and towns, want food, and this
is really changing production and increasing the value of agriculture close to cities.
I would like to present some figures. The urban population in Senegal is about half the total population and in 2020 it
will be about three-quarters of the total. It was only 30 per cent at the time of independence. This urban development is
going to affect the ways that working conditions will evolve over the years to come, particularly in the informal sector.
Urban work is very often informal; sometimes it is part-time work, low-level production, sometimes it's intermittent
employment supplemented by peddling or hawking. Other times we can see a certain amount of accumulation. Let me
explain what I mean by this. Re-distribution is obviously a very important question, but the problem is that there needs to
be an accumulated stock which can be redistributed. Now in some countries, particularly in Western Africa, this stock is
simply not there. There is a very, very small middle class, very few rich people and the vast majority are poor. Fifty-four
per cent are below the poverty line; they are living on less than 1 dollar a day. So, we have to distinguish between
subsistence, and accumulation. There is neither accumulation nor redistribution of wealth to rural migrants in urban
centres. There isn't enough to ensure sustainable development. So the problem is related to work: average production
per head is low, productivity is low, so people are poor.
We need to distinguish between informal activities which lead to redistribution and those related to subsistence. In a
number of cities in Western Africa there are people in the informal sector who are investing in urban agriculture or
buying land close to the city and playing a larger role in society. They are accumulating and this is very important for
improving living conditions and promoting decent work.
The organization of work and production is clearly linked to poverty. Anti-poverty policies have had limits and restraints,
but they might look better in the future. Up until now development has been driven by major principles clearly identified
by the World Bank. I think that the Bank has developed a shock therapy to sweep away the obstacles to business success.
People were held back by social norms and shock therapy was necessary to promote enterprise development. At the end
of the 1980s, and the beginning of the 1990s, this policy failed in a certain number of countries. So the Bank developed
the new theory of good governance. Thus, its economists studied Adam Smith and discovered that in order to develop,
the market needed institutions, since, without institutions, it would be difficult to predict and therefore to guide the
development of the market. The first example of this was the concept of decentralization, transparency, responsibility
and accountability. It was thought that institutional stability was necessary for markets to develop. Now, the problem was
that it was difficult to get these institutions working properly, because a foundation was required. Now, in many countries
civil society was restricted to a few lawyers or intellectuals, who they really weren't the roots of civil society.
Communities and grassroots groups really do constitute civil society in certain countries. Making sure that civil society
participated became one of the leitmotivs of good governance. Participation was a priority. Now the problem is that
participation is often reduced to functional participation, which is to say it is a simple question of ensuring that market
mechanisms work, and not really broadening the social base of power. But, we've seen that significant progress has been
made. In January 2000 the report of the Bank and the IMF developed a new strategy against poverty which really broke
with the past of the Bretton Woods Institutions. The framework of anti-poverty measures will not only be developed by
the technical and financial ministries in a country, but will also be developed by civil society, which means NGOs,
community-based organizations, stakeholders and players. We will not only have the institutional actors, but also the
groups that are in touch with the heart and soul of society. So, this will give rise to new policies to fight against poverty in
the future. I think this is a crucial step. Obviously, it's going to be necessary to look at the structure of civil society in
relation to production. This opening up to civil society is extremely important for the promotion of decent work. The
problem for many workers in the informal sector is that they have no access to the market. It's not just a problem of the
market but a problem of the overall situation. We could perhaps talk about political poverty, but poverty might be
identified by a number of factors.
What does poverty mean? Well, if you have rural producers, not connected to the market because they don't have access
to price information, they are then excluded from the possibility of changing prices or production techniques in order to
react to the market. And, in this way, the sustainability of production is threatened. So, a certain number of people are
excluded, and I think we mustn't lose sight of the political and technical criteria which lead to poverty. Alliances need to
be created. We are currently working with the finance ministry in the area of decentralization, we are working with
women on savings banks, and we are also working in rural areas. Last week the World Bank developed a financing
framework in collaboration with community-based organizations. This is all very helpful, but for implementation we need
flexible regulation framework, which enable all stakeholders to define policies. We've talked about anti-poverty
measures, but I think this framework needs to be extended to other areas, to improve the life of producers. The central
issue is to create producer associations, particularly in the informal sector, and help them define policies which will
determine their living conditions.
|
