Social Protection Programme: Past Activities & Accomplishments

Conceptual Paper and Framework for Social Protection for Informal Workers

The Programme started with the preparation of a background conceptual paper which posed the core question for the programme: “Under what circumstances can which kind of workers in the informal economy (especially poorer working women) secure access to what core measures of provision, which can be incrementally improved upon in the future?”

Core elements of this framework were, and remain:

• It sees social protection as an inalienable part of work.
• It focuses on women, but not to the exclusion of men.
• It differentiates between workers in different status in employment, showing a continuum from more informal to formal workers.
• It keeps open a role in social protection for all interest groups.
• It advocates principles of equity and redistribution.

The framework paper was presented at the WIEGO – ILO STEP joint workshop “Social Protection for Women in the Informal Sector” in December 1999. The paper was extended and developed into a book titled Learning from Experience: A Gendered Approach to Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy.

Research and Policy Dialogues on Social Protection for Informal Workers in Global Value Chains (GVCs)

Working collaboratively with the ILO and the World Bank, WIEGO developed a framework for and commissioned comparative case studies on risks and access to social protection of workers in two GVCs in two countries each: garment GVCs in Thailand and the Philippines; and horticulture GVCs in Chile and South Africa. As far as we know, this was the first time that value chain analysis had been used as a medium to explore social protection. We developed a methodology which added three layers of analysis to the standard “mapping” of workers/units/value-added under GVC analysis: the depth of labour legislation and social protection coverage in the chains; the identification of key institutions and stakeholders, including those governing production and employment relations along the entire chain; and identification of key pressure points in the chain, including: existing downward pressure points (currently leveraged by big companies) and potential upward pressure points (to be leveraged by workers and their organizations). Case studies were used as the basis for a dialogue between representatives of three international organizations – the ILO’s Social Security Division, the World Bank’s Social Protection Network, and the WIEGO network – to scrutinize their own social security/ social protection approaches, to identify the extent to which they addressed the social protection needs of informal workers. For more information, read Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy  (Lund and Nicholson 2003).

Research and Policy Dialogues on Social Protection for Informal Workers in Different Countries by Region

In order to test out the emerging WIEGO social protection framework, to heighten the visibility of the social protection needs of informal workers, and to build and strengthen networks of researchers and activists in this field, WIEGO organized regional research and policy dialogues in a selection of countries in Latin America and in Asia.

Latin America

A pilot seminar “Social Protection, Informality, and Gender” hosted by the Center for Women’s Studies (CEM), and the ILO-Latin America regional office, was held in Santiago, Chile in 2001, followed by dialogues in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru. Now, ten years later, social policy dialogues and exposure dialogues are embedded in the new “Voice” project in Peru, Mexico and Colombia, in which WIEGO brings together officials and policy influencers on the one hand, and organizations of informal workers on the other, with a view to exploring how best to include voices of informal workers in social policy development in the region.

Asia

WIEGO’s Social Protection Programme entered into a partnership with Homenet Thailand, in order to plan and undertake a regional initiative in Asia. This led to the Asia Social Protection Dialogue, held in Bangkok in May 2004, involving participants from Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Participants came from worker organizations, universities, government departments, and non-governmental organizations. Core themes around which the APSD was organized were child care as a core component of social protection; internal and cross-border migrants’ needs for social protection; and global value chain analysis as a methodology for identifying exclusion from and access to social protection for informal workers in different sectors. Read the Asia Social Protection Dialogue Report.

A series of popular brochures has been developed and is being translated into five Asian languages. Read the English version of the set of brochures by Francie Lund and Jillian Nicholson, Tools for Advocacy: Social Protection for Informal Workers.

Partnerships around Policy Issues

The Social Protection Programme has been commissioned by various agencies to do specific research, case studies, or synthesized research. Typically we choose case studies or empirical examples that show positive potential for institutional change in favour of the status or working conditions of informal workers. For example, in 2005 DFID commissioned a study on Occupational Health and Safety for the Poorest (Lund and Marriott 2005). Three case studies, of SEWA health insurance, the Durban health education programme for street vendors, and the ship-breaking industry in India, helped identify quite precisely how formal OHS excludes informal workers entirely, that this has to be tackled at local, national and international levels, and that informal workers themselves would need to form alliances with others, for example in the environmental movement. Another example comes from a more recent engagement with the OECD initiative on the informal labour market and poverty reduction. The POVNET Task Team asked for a study on The Informal Economy, Social Protection, and Women’s Empowerment: Linkages and Good Practices for Poverty Reduction. Read this report.  

WIEGO Social Protection has worked extensively with the ILO. This has included technical partnership collaboration (ILO-STEP, the World Bank and WIEGO), collaboration on a book on Reconceptualizing Work (SES – Socio Economic Security), collaboration in the Building Decent Societies initiative, commissioned research and involvement in policy advocacy work with the Social Security Division, and being a lead participant in a month-long virtual discussion on social protection (ILO-STEP), among other activities.

In 2007, through SEWA, WIEGO’s Social Protection Programme participated in the world Health Organization’s World Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, in the Knowledge Hub called EMCONET.