Law Programme

Programme Activities Strengthening the Institutional Power of Workers in Informal Employment

• Expanding the Scope of Labour Law

  Labour law recognizes the unequal bargaining power between capital and labour. Accordingly, it extends specific protections to workers to counter capital’s power. This includes rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, which enable workers to negotiate better working conditions, higher wages, and social protection.

  Many workers in informal employment fall outside labour law’s protections because its scope is confined to an employment relationship. Numerous international laws recognize the need to extend labour rights to workers in informal employment. But many countries fail to translate these rights into domestic legislation.

  WIEGO’s Law Programme supports workers to use international instruments in legal advocacy for strengthened protection of their labour rights. Projects include Making Convention 189 Real for Domestic Workers and Domestic Workers Legal Empowerment Training. Also, we engage labour law scholars and practitioners – in trade unions, the ILO and other institutions – on the need for strengthened protections and entitlements for workers in informal employment.

• Protecting Human Rights in Informal Employment

  Human rights – which include rights to work and rights at work – are compelling moral claims that governments have made binding commitments to guarantee. For workers who rely on public spaces and resources, the focus on the state as the primary bearer of human rights duties can help strengthen their demands vis-a-vis local authorities controlling their terms and conditions of work.

  For this reason, advocacy with regional and international human rights institutions is a key part of the Law Programme’s strategy. For example, since 2017, our Protection of Human Rights of Waste Pickers in Latin America project has sought improvements for this occupational group through legal advocacy with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Documenting systemic rights violations against waste pickers – such as their rights to work and to life – led the Commission’s rapporteurs on economic, social, cultural and environmental rights to champion the labour rights of workers in informal employment in the region.

  Waste Pickers and Human Rights

• Reshaping Urban Governance Laws

  The livelihoods of many workers in informal employment are defined by regulations, by-laws and city ordinances that give local authorities powers to govern access to the public space and resources they rely on.

  Challenges workers face often result from how those powers are designated, interpreted and exercised. The principles of administrative justice regulate the actions of government officials – they must be lawful, reasonable and procedurally fair. This makes administrative justice a tool workers can leverage to contest actions that impede their work, and push for inclusive decision-making that, ultimately, changes laws.

  The Law Programme seeks to understand law’s impact on livelihoods in urban space in order to reconfigure urban governance relationships to better advance the human rights and labour rights of workers in informal employment. Projects include Organizing through Administrative Justice and R204 and the edited book Mapping Legalities: Urbanisation, Law and Informal Work.

• Realizing Homeworkers’ Rights in Supply Chains

  Homeworkers produce goods and services that are essential to global and domestic garment production. But long and complex supply chains make outsourcing to them a challenge to regulate. These arrangements don’t fit labour law’s traditional assumptions of how and where work is undertaken. To ensure decent terms and conditions for homeworkers, sector-specific legal protections are needed.

  The Law Programme supports HomeNet International and its members with research, technical support and capacity building on different models to protect homeworkers in both national legislation and international instruments. This contributes to campaigning for the ratification and implementation of ILO Convention 177. We also deepen alliances with global networks in the garment sector to build solidarity among all workers in the supply chain. Projects include collective advocacy on the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and support to the Bulgarian Homeworkers Association to report to the ILO.