Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
world's 184 million unemployed and 550 million 'working poor', particu-
lar attention has focused on the increasing numbers of informal female
workers who are trapped in part-time, insecure, home-based or output-
ting work linked to global supply chains (see Chapter 3.2).
Thomas (2002) argues that globalization has increased informal
employment in three main ways: through top-down processes such as
the removal of labour market protection and increases in part-time,
casual work; through jobless growth as a result of new technologies;
and via bottom-up informality, which results from increased numbers
of workers seeking informal jobs. As a result the livelihood strategies of
many households across the global South are increasingly character-
ized by risk and insecurity (see Chapter 3.1). Given recent transforma-
tions in global labour markets which have restricted well-paid,
regulated and secure work, there is evidence that working conditions
and labour relations once found in the informal sector have expanded
into much of the formal economy worldwide, a trend that has given rise
to a reconceptualization of the informal sector over the last decade
(Kabeer, 2008b).
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Reconceptualizing the Informal
Sector in the Global South
It was in the light of growing underemployment and the lack of 'mod-
ern jobs' that theoretical debates began to focus on the dualistic struc-
ture of Third World economies after the Second World War. In the
1950s, it was argued by economists such as Arthur Lewis that Third
World cities could be characterized by a dualist structure comprising
two separate economies: a 'traditional', 'backward' and 'unproductive'
economic sector and an 'advanced', 'modern' and productive sector.
Dualist interpretations provided the framework for the informal-for-
mal sector dichotomy in the 1970s and advocates regarded the tradi-
tional economic sector as the major barrier to development, one that
would be eradicated once prosperity had been increased by industrial
modernization.
A breakthrough in the negative interpretation of this traditional sec-
tor stemmed from a series of research 'missions' by the ILO in the
1970s. The mission to Kenya changed the focus from unemployment to
