Chapter one
THE INFORMAL SECTOR AND INFORMALISATION OF WOMEN’S LABOUR
Introduction on Informal Sector:
According to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector(NCEUS), 2007 the definition of informal sector is as follows: “The unorganized sector consists of all unincorporated private enterprises owned by individuals or households engaged in the sale and production of goods and services operated on a proprietary or partnership basis and with less than ten total workers” (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector). It has been observed that about 92 % of the total work force has been employed in the unorganized sector(2004-2005). In India, the unorganized sector has been denoted as ‘informal sector, and the unorganized workers as ‘informal workers. Therefore, in this paper the words informal sector and unorganized sector are used interchangeably.
Unorganized sector contributes some 60% of GDP (White and Gooptu). In terms of employment in the unorganized/informal sector, there has been a distinction in the kind of employment in the rural and urban areas. “In the rural areas, the unorganised/informal sector mostly comprises landless agricultural labourers, small and marginal farmers, sharecroppers, persons engaged in animal husbandry, fishing, forest workers, toddy tappers, workers in agro-processing and food-processing and artisans such as weavers, blacksmiths, carpenters and goldsmiths. In the urban areas, it comprises mainly of manual labourers in construction, carpentry, trade, transport and small and tiny manufacturing enterprises as well as those who work as street vendors and hawkers, head load workers, garment makers, rag pickers and others” (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector). All the casual workers and unpaid family workers in all enterprises are being considered as unorganized workers irrespective of the sector.
The informal sector has the largest workforce in the country. There are two important characteristics of the informal sector: Firstly, there is no permanent or secure jobs in this sector, thus it is perilous to work in. According to Jan Breman, there is increasing casaulisation of the mass of workers at the bottom of the economy. Secondly, there is high level of indebtness since the employment is irregular and unreliable( (Neve).
Informal Sector and Precarity:
In the European context, precarity is characterized by precarious labor, in which the availability and conditions of work are unstable. “In its most ambitious formulation, precarity would encompass not only the condition of precarious workers but a more general existential state, understood at once as a source of “political subjection, of economic exploitation and of opportunities to be grasped”. Hence, it is not only the disappearance of stable jobs but also the questions of housing, debt, welfare provision, and the availability of time for building effective personal relations that become aspects of precarity.” (Arnold and Bongiovi)
According to Lourdes Beneria, during the 1970s and 1980s, the informal sector was viewed in developing circles as a transitory form of employment whose significance would decrease as the formal sector grew with employment and absorbed the marginal working population. In this sense, the sector was viewed as “backward” and problematic: The formal sector was the “modern” solution to the low productivity and poor working conditions prevalent at the informal level. These initial formulations emphasized the sector’s connections with the marginality of the urban poor as well as their unstable working conditions and their precarious location within the economy. It has been seen that the informal sector has largely expanded, not just terms of the production process but also in terms of the labor force participation. However, in the legal context, in the developing countries despite the growth of the sector, the informal sector tends to lack legal status. Also, since the work that takes place under this sector is under precarious conditions, it has traditionally been associated with this sector. The informal economy is characterized by low productivity, low pay, unstable working conditions, absence of any social security measures, denial of worker rights. Nevertheless most people work in the informal economy due to poor social conditions and lack of opportunities, there is no other means of livelihood and therefore it would be wrong to assume that their entry into the informal economy is a choice. It could be inferred that the sector is informal, therefore it is precarious.
In broad terms, the informal labour force includes the self-employed in informal enterprises (that is, small and unregulated) as well as the wage labourers employed in informal jobs (that is, unregulated and unprotected) in both urban and rural areas (Chen, 2008).
The nature of construction work(being a part of informal sector) is highly exploitative. A significant number of people are a part of the construction work. However, this sector has failures of protective legislation covering wages, degrading working conditions, and long working hours. The nature of work in the sector tends to be physically demanding and exhausting on the body of the workers. It has been observed that women on the construction projects are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-skilled and lowest-paid jobs(generally, that of carrying earth or bricks) (Chaudhary).
With globalization, there is increasing casualisation, flexibilisation of labor. Labor flexibility according to World Bank’s annual report Doing Business is the “employers’ ability to hire or fire the workers, or increase or lower their wages according to business needs and worker performance.” (Arnold and Bongiovi) According to D.O. Chang(2009), the growth of informal employment and in particular informal economy is the growing forced integration of the population into the capitalist social relations which involves massive rural-urban migration and thus it produces an increasing informal sector. “The growing power and reach of global capital has exceeded the ability of nations and labor movements to regulate it, exacerbating inequality and precarious work.” (Arnold and Bongiovi) .
Women and Informalisation:
Rameshwari Pandya and Sarika Patel(2010) has focused on the contribution of women to the nation’s economy, specially by women in the unorganized sector. They have always played a necessary and important role in the economic structure of the country but their efforts have not been recognized and hence, they remain invisible. However, it also becomes important to note that in the pre-industrial society, where family was the basic unit of production, all members of the family including women were engaged in it. Women have always worked on farms in rural India. In India, the informal sector plays a vital role in the employment and production front. A vast majority of India’s working population is in the unorganized sector. According to National Sample survey Organisation(1994) as reported in Shramshakti report, of the total number of women workers in India, around 92% of the workforce are in the unorganized sector, whereas merely 8% are in the organized sector (Pandya and Patel). The unorganized sector of the economy is labor intensive but the efforts put by workers in the process and the rewards which they receive are comparatively less. Women who engage in these activities and also contributing to the family income are not considered as workers. Within the large, growing, amorphous segment called unorganized economy within which a significant portion of women work as ‘unpaid family workers’. It has also been evident that the sexual division of labor in production is rooted in natural differences between women and men. The patriarchal prejudices account largely for the ways in which sexual division of labor in production is maintained (Swaminathan). Even though some women working in the informal sector are getting paid, it couldn’t necessarily be seen as emancipatory. The relationship between paid work and empowerment is limited; economic value might give them some sort of self-worth but it didn’t enhance their legal status as citizens, their right as a worker; there was lack of realization of such rights( (Kabeer, Sudarshan and Milward).
The NCEUS emphasized on the marginalized position of women workers in the informal economy. Women have to face the double burden of production and reproduction which is more ardous but their economic contribution is rarely recognized. Even if there is absence of recognition, their work is important in order to sustain the family and the economy as well. “Wage workers in the unorganized sector are distinguished into regular and casual workers. Among the women wage workers, less than half or 47 per cent were casual workers. The casual workers were mainly engaged in construction and manufacturing sectors, 39 per cent and 29 per cent respectively. A smaller proportion (20 per cent) was engaged as domestic workers in private households. These women were clearly undertaking manual work in these sectors. Regular workers formed about 53 per cent of the women wage workers” (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector).
Women in the capitalist setting are exploited and their labor is appropriated for economic gains. With the interplay of both patriarchal ideology and the capitalist relations of production, the wage earning women experience exploitation and oppression (Swaminathan)
With the increasing labor force participation, there has also been significant debate around the concept of ‘feminization of the labor force’ during the past three decades. “The marked increase in women’s labour force participation worldwide has given rise to the notion of the feminization of the labour force”. But this notion has been defined and used in two distinct ways. First, to refer to the situation in which the ratio of women’s labour force participation rate to men’s labour force participation rate increases over time. Second, to refer to a situation in which the structure of the labour force itself is “feminized”: that is, when jobs take on features associated with women’s work such as low pay, drudgery, uncertainty and precariousness” (Chen). Whether or not there is a causal link between the increase in women’s labour force participation and the growing precariousness or informality of work is not clear—and has been hotly debated. The question then arises is: Are the expansion of women’s labour force participation and the informalization of labour markets over the past two decades linked in some way, or do they represent parallel but distinct processes?
With the expansion of the process of production, “the process is often reproduced with tighter margins that provide lower remuneration for worker. One result is the increasing difficulty for workers and their families to manage and maintain the social reproduction of labor” (Arnold and Bongiovi).
Silvia Federici has given a feminist critique of precarious labor developed by Italian Antonomist Marxists, particularly Antonio Negri, Paola Virno, and Michael Hardt. According to them there have been changes in the organization of work within globalization. They call this change “precariazation of work”, that is, work relations are becoming discontinuous. They presented a new perspective to capitalist development. The precariazation of work is a capitalist response to the class struggle of sixties(struggle centered on the refusal to work), they argue (Federici).
With the restructuring of production there is shift from industrial labor to “immaterial labor”. They are talking about the dominant forms of work which has changed, work now produces information, ideas and state of being relations. The industrial labor is replaced by different types of work. Immaterial labor is essentially cultural work, cognitive work and information work. “The precarity of labor is rooted in the new forms of production. Presumably, the shift to immaterial labor generates a precariazation of work relations because the structure of cognitive work is different from that of industrial, physical work. Cognitive and information work rely less on the continuous physical presence of the worker in what was the traditional workplace. The rhythms of work are much more intermittent, fluid and discontinuous.”
Silvia Federici critiques this theory of precarity. Firstly, say says they fail to see the tremendous increase of exploitation at the other end of the process that is taking place by the categorization of work. Secondly, precarious labor theory presents itself as gender neutral. In their assumption about the reorganization of production, they are doing away with the power relations and hierarchies that exist within the working class.
They had argued that all divisions within the working class are gone. However, some feminists have pointed out that precarious labor is not a new phenomenon. Women always had a precarious relation to waged labor. Their theory had ignored the contribution of feminist theory on the redefinition of work. They have ignored women’s unpaid reproductive labor as a key source of capitalist accumulation. The feminist redefinition of housework as work that produces and reproduces labor force, are brushed aside in the understanding of organization of production. Reproductive work has lost its significance by labeling it as “affective labor” and affective labor being included in the theory of immaterial labor.
Capitalism as a system of production relies on the immense amount of unpaid labor within the household and it is not built primarily on contractual relations but the wage relation which “hides the unpaid, slave-like nature of work” upon which capital accumulation is premised (Federici).
A background to Brick Kiln Industry as one of the examples from informal sector:
Brick kiln industry is one of the important industries in the construction sector and bricks are an important component of the construction activity. India is the second largest producer of bricks (Eco Brick). Due to the basic characteristics of the industry, brick kilns are located on the outskirt of urban areas. Since the work in brick kilns is seasonal, it attracts migrant laborers from surrounding rural areas (John). It is a highly labor intensive industry. The production process is based on the manual labor and there are varying estimates of the number of workers in the industry. Workers in brick kilns constitute one of the poorest, weakest and marginalized sections of the rural society. Most families migrate to work in brick kilns due to several conditions like, poverty, landlessness, unemployment etc. Among the families that migrate, a significant portion is of women. The process of brick making involves several steps, such as, moulding, firing, drying, loading, unloading etc. The labor is performed by men, dominantly. However, women and children also contribute in the process but there is no formal recognition for them. Family based work is performed at the kilns. Women are mostly involved in the process of moulding of bricks, which is done in pairs. The payment is paid to the head which is on the basis of per piece-rate. Bricks kilns are also known for its precarious living and working conditions (Das).