Applying International Labour Standards to the Informal Economy – Introduction

By WIEGO, International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network on March 01, 2024

To provide workers and workers’ organizations, including unions, the tools to use existing ILO conventions and recommendations creatively to elicit new interpretations from the ILO supervisory system which broaden their scope to the obstacles confronting workers in the informal economy, the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) are producing a series of guidelines on a convention-by-convention basis. These guidelines identify the specific issues that workers in the informal economy face that are relevant to that convention and provide recommendations as to how workers and organizations should frame their comments or complaints to obtain a favourable outcome from the supervisory system. We hope that workers and organizations, through consistent use of these guides, will help to develop a robust set of jurisprudence, which can be used to advocate for legal and institutional reforms at the national and regional levels.

The series will begin with guides on the ILO fundamental conventions. Subsequent guides will focus on the governance and technical conventions and recommendations. We do not intend to cover every convention and recommendation; rather, we will focus on those with the greatest relevance for workers in the informal economy. This introduction sets the stage for such exploration.

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