28/8/2017

THE CHALLENGE IS TO ARRANGE AND ARTICULATE PUBLIC POLICIES

Informal economy is a phenomenon that is a persistent and structural characteristic of the new model of global production. As a result, we find workers who are involved suffering from lack of rights and their performance and evolution affecting labor standards in the formal sector.

The evolution in global production introduced a category that transgresses the employment model as a promoter of social justice: the working poor.
 Working conditions and precarious institutionalism these economic units were acquiring, by subjecting workers to sub standards of labour, social and trade union rights, placed the issue on the Agenda of the ILO.

In the International Labour Conference of 2015, arises from tripartite consensus, Recommendation N° 204, whose title shows the intended way: "The transition from the informal to the formal economy".

This tool goes beyond of identifying decent work deficits: it promotes the guidelines for the States to generate productive employment, the extension of social protection to workers who are not covered by traditional social security and the control on health and safety conditions at workplace.

Employment in the informal economy becomes invisible to protective legislation and under the rule of a model of financial accumulation - which tends to the concentration and fragmentation in the provision of inputs, as a dominant strategy – it is expected that the proliferation of economic units of smaller size to grow under the protection of illegal labor.

This fact makes more workers be forced to accept informal employment conditions as a way of life, outside labour institutions that were conquests as a result of trade union struggle, today with international range.

The situation is worsened in the case of young people who do not have opportunities to access quality and genuine works.
Unregistered work, from workers’ viewpoint, becomes a part of job insecurity, as the problems of  independent workers, monotaxpayers, related to small production units without tax registration which do not enjoy the protective rights of decent work. 

The challenge is to arrange and articulate public policies that, through social dialogue, seek to transform these production units and the workers to the working relations system; extend collective bargaining to various branches of activity; achieve extensive and universal coverage of Social Security systems.

 In this regard, CGT promotes strategic alliances with social sectors related to employment to make social justice the size to measure the standards of all workers, without disregarding the complexity and heterogeneity informality has.