WIEGO Senior Advisor Marty Chen recently participated in an Institute of Development Studies webinar, "The COVID-19 crisis facing informal workers – what can be done?" and said the pandemic provides an opportunity for a major shift in our thinking about structural injustices in economies.
At the 40-minute mark, Marty brings together “what we knew about informal workers pre-COVID, what we’ve learnt about informal workers during COVID and what informal workers really want post-COVID.”
The July 15 event was chaired by Peter Taylor, IDS Director of Research, and other speakers were Vanessa van den Boogaard, Research Fellow, International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) at IDS and Senior Research Associate, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto; Stephen Devereux, Research Fellow, IDS; Max Gallien, Research Fellow at International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) at IDS; Amrita Saha, Research Fellow, IDS; and Hina Shaikh, Country Economist, International Growth Centre, Pakistan.
Well over half of the global workforce and the vast majority of the workforce in developing countries work in the informal economy. Yet the informal workforce is not well understood, remains undervalued and is widely stigmatized.