WIEGO Newsletter

Volume X
January - June 2008

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HIGHLIGHTS: Building Networks of Informal Workers

First International/Third Regional Conference of Waste Pickers
The first-ever conference of waste pickers, entitled “Waste Pickers Without Frontiers” took place in Bogotá, Colombia from March 1 - 4, 2008. WIEGO was instrumental in organizing the international steering committee, which planned and managed the conference. 250 people attended the conference from 34 countries, including representatives from membership-based organizations (MBOs) of waste pickers; staff of supportive NGOs, international agencies, and foundations; individual researchers; and government officials. On the first day, the Colombian National Day of the Waste Picker, 350 local waste pickers from Bogotá attended as well. The key outcomes of the event are an expanded and consolidated Latin America Network of Waste Pickers and a commitment to developing national and regional networks of waste picker organizations around the world. For more details and photos of the conference, see www.recicladores.net.

Domestic Worker Network Project
Since the first international meeting of domestic worker organizations in November 2006, there has been an initiative, led by the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (the IUF) to build an international network of domestic worker organizations. WIEGO staff, Chris Bonner (Director, WIEGO Organization and Representation) and Karin Pape (WIEGO Regional Advisor-Europe) are part of an Interim Management Committee that is working closely with the IUF to provide leadership for this effort. At its meeting in March 2008, the Governing Body of the International Labour Organization (ILO) agreed to add a standard-setting discussion of the needs of domestic workers to its agenda for the International Labour Conference (ILC) 2010, with a view to adopting a relevant convention in 2011. This would be a global agreement mandating the kinds of measures that are needed to protect the interests of domestic workers. The global initiative to build a network of domestic worker organizations will mobilize a campaign around the possible convention and work closely with the ILO in preparing for the standard-setting discussion on domestic workers at the 2010 ILC.

Reaching Out to Institutional Members
The WIEGO network is comprised of three constituencies: membership-based organizations (MBOs) of informal workers; researchers and statisticians; and professionals in development agencies (inter-governmental, governmental, and non-governmental). The membership-based organizations (MBOs) of informal workers and trade unions that have organized informal workers are invited to become Institutional Members of WIEGO. WIEGO is committed to reaching out to our Institutional Members, especially the MBOs of informal workers, to familiarize us with their work and to determine how WIEGO might support their work. In March-May 2008, WIEGO programme staff from around the world visited affiliates of HomeNet South East Asia in Thailand and the Philippines and the Federation of Non-Salaried Workers in Mexico. In each country, the WIEGO staff met with the members and organizing staff of our Institutional Members and participated in meetings with their allies in issue-based advocacy on behalf of informal workers.

HomeNet Thailand
Known in Thailand as the Foundation for Labour and Employment Promotion or FLEP, HomeNet Thailand briefed the WIEGO team on its work, which originated with home-based workers and has expanded to include other informal workers such as motorcycle service groups, contract farmers, and waste pickers. Together, HomeNet Thailand and WIEGO staff discussed strategies for programming and fundraising, as well as communications. The WIEGO visitors made field visits to the home of a family of home-based workers who embroider sequins and beads on garments, and to a community of brass workers where HomeNet Thailand has introduced occupational health and safety measures to provide protection from back strain and hand injuries and to improve ventilation and general working conditions. HomeNet Thailand has played a lead role building a national coalition, the Informal Workers Network (IWN), that helped pushed for universal health coverage and is now pushing for social insurance, old age pensions and other social protections for informal workers.

At a day long seminar in Bangkok entitled “Progress on Social Protection for Informal Workers in Thailand,” after brief presentations by Marty Chen (WIEGO International Coordinator) and Francie Lund (Director, WIEGO Social Protection), participants from Thailand’s NGO and government sectors offered detailed reviews of the most pressing issues under discussion in Thailand, particularly strategies to achieve greater social protection.

Patamaba and HomeNet South East Asia
In the Philippines, the WIEGO team was invited to join a provincial Coordination Committee Meeting of Patamaba, the national alliance of home-based workers of the Philippines, in Bacalan, an area outside of Manila. After its regular business meeting, Patamaba briefed the WIEGO team on its activities as well as the on-going challenges it faces. Its members include vegetable growers, bead workers and seamstresses, makers of slippers and fashion accessories and volunteer health workers. Patamaba’s primary goals are to create awareness and provide learning opportunities while building community. Its activities include micro-finance services, skills training and political advocacy.

The WIEGO team also took part in a meeting of a national alliance MAGCAISA, which is headquartered in Manila and led by HomeNet South East Asia. MAGCAISA is pushing for passage of House Bill No. 1955, otherwise known as “ A Magna Carta for Workers in the Informal Economy”. This legislation covers workers in the informal economy as defined by the International Labour Conference (ILC) 2002a as: “the self-employed in informal (i.e., unregistered and unregulated) enterprises and wage workers in informal (i.e., unprotected) jobs.”

The bill defines a convention entitling the workers to rights and visibility, opportunities for registration and accreditation, the development of standards, and the provision of programs and services for financial support and social protection. At the HomeNet South East Asia meeting attended by WIEGO staff, alliance members were represented from many different worker groups and organizations including: the Association of Construction and Informal Workers, PATAMBA - representing homebased workers, Kakasaha- Women in Livelihood Assistance, the Democratic Socialist Women of the Philippines, Makalaya- Women Worker’s Seeking Justice and the Women’s Association for Economic Action. All of these groups have combined forces to lobby for passage of this bill that would open the way to acknowledging workers in the informal economy and initiate action to address their needs, rights and role in society.

Patamba members and the University of Philippines colleagues also took WIEGO staff to the township of Angono on the outskirts of Manila. There they visited the local municipality office of Angono, where Patamaba organizers regularly interact with city officials on issues relating to their members. WIEGO was hosted at a production-sales center for handicrafts produced by Patamaba members; and given a tour of a housing project on reclaimed land for Patamaba members.

La Federacíon Nacional de Organizacíones de Trabadores No Asalariados
On a visit to Mexico in May, Marty Chen (WIEGO International Coordinator) and Carmen Roca (WIEGO Regional Advisor, Latin America) lead a seminar at the Comisión Económica para America Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) headquarters in Mexico City and attended a conference at Monterrey Tech in Monterrey (see below). They also visited Jose del Valle Perez (member of the WIEGO Board) at the international office of Confederacíon Revolucíonaria de Obreros y Campasinos (CROC) in Mexico City and La Federacíon Nacional de Organizacíones de Trabadores No Asalariados, an affiliate of CROC that organizes non-salaried workers, in Monterrey. The Monterrey visit included a meeting with 200 street vendors and union officials at the CROC office in Monterrey and a field visit to a covered market that the Federacíon has developed for street vendors and two rows of small shops that it has recently built for vendors.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

Official Visit to Cambodia
The WIEGO network was invited to make an official visit to Cambodia by the Minister of Women’s Affairs of the Government of Cambodia, whom Marty Chen (WIEGO International Coordinator) met at the International Women Leaders Global Security Summit in New York in November 2007. The purpose of the official visit was to exchange information on the informal economy in Cambodia and worldwide and to explore opportunities for collaboration. The visit took place on March 31-April 3 in Phnom Penh. Headed by Marty Chen, the team included four other WIEGO staff (Rhonda Douglas, Frances Lund, Leslie Tuttle, Joann Vanek) and three WIEGO members from organizations of home-based workers in South East Asia (Donna Doane, Josephine Parilla, Poonsap Tulaphan). The team participated in a one-day seminar on the informal economy co-organized by WIEGO and the Cambodian Ministry of Women’s Affairs; and held a series of meetings with government officials and organizations of street vendors and artisans. This exchange began a dialogue that promises to introduce critical support for informal workers in Cambodia.

Historic Board Meeting
In June 2007, WIEGO was registered as a non-profit company (limited by guarantee) in the UK. WIEGO Limited (Ltd.) is based in Manchester, UK with a part-time accountant and a part-time legal and tax advisor. Most future grant funds for the whole organization will be directed through WIEGO Ltd. The switch is timely because WIEGO has formalized and is growing. The two UK-based members of the WIEGO Steering Committee, Elaine Jones and Dave Spooner, and the members of the WIEGO Management Committee, worked closely with Secretariat staff to make this transition happen. In June 2008, at the annual meeting of the WIEGO Steering Committee, the WIEGO Ltd. Board held its first meeting. In addition to a review of progress made over the past year and future work plans, the meeting included a discussion of WIEGO Ltd., and WIEGO’s new financial system, with the UK accountant, legal and tax advisor and external auditor.

PROGRAMME HEADLINES

Global Trade
As Director of WIEGO’s Global Trade Programme, Elaine Jones represents WIEGO on two working groups of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) in the UK: one on Home-Workers; the other on Purchasing Practices. The Purchasing Practices group seeks to improve labour standards for workers in global supply chains through piloting different approaches to doing business. Through this group, WIEGO (in the person of Elaine Jones) was recently contracted to work with an ETI corporate member to monitor one of its factories in Turkey over a period of 12 months to understand the relationship between purchasing practices and labour conditions and examine where improvements can be made.

Social Protection
An Africa-wide initiative entitled ‘The Livingstone Call for Action’ on social policy and social protection spearheaded by the African Union is trying to get commitments to social spending back on the political agenda against the background of growing poverty and rising food prices. HelpAge International is managing the project for the African Union. Francie Lund (Director, WIEGO Social Protection) was asked to prepare a policy brief on social protection and the informal economy for the North Africa regional meeting of this initiative held in Cairo in May 2008. In addition, she served as a discussant and one of the rapporteurs who synthesized the meeting recommendations. This interaction prompted an invitation to Francie by the League of Arab Women - an influential group of women in the region - to be a discussant at their conference on human security in Abu Dhabi in November 2008.

Urban Policies
In late April, WIEGO was invited by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a proposal for a global project addressing urban poverty. In consultation with its allies in the international movement of informal workers, WIEGO developed a concept note for a global project focused on the working poor, especially women, in the urban informal economy. The proposed global project would seek to build the capacity of membership-based organizations of different categories of urban informal workers – notably, home-based workers, street vendors, and waste pickers – to engage effectively in city planning around issues of concern to their members. If funding is secured, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), StreetNet International, HomeNet South and South-East Asia, and associations of wastepickers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will be co-grantees and partners in the proposed global project. WIEGO would coordinate the global project and help generate the statistical data, research findings, and policy analysis that the global partners need in their advocacy efforts.

Organization and Representation
Building Networks of Organizations of Informal Workers - The first international waste picker conference (see above) was the big event of the first half of 2008 for WIEGO’s Organization and Representation Programme. Another important milestone was the establishment of an Interim Management Committee for the domestic workers’ network project (also above).

Pilot Project in India on Law and the Informal Economy - Beginning in late 2007, the Pilot Project in India has focused on four groups of informal workers: domestic workers, waste pickers, forest gatherers, and fisher folk. The primary focus of this pilot project is on developing a platform of legal demands and an ‘observatory’ that documents successful modes of interaction and struggle, innovative strategies for legal and policy reform and successful uses of litigation and participation in policy formation. The project team – two lawyers and a SEWA consultant - have identified and interviewed key stakeholders who are organizing or otherwise support the four categories of informal workers in different states of India, and have collected documents on the legal struggle and legal outcomes from these stakeholders. To this end, three regional stakeholder consultations will be held during July and August 2008. Results from this project will be shared on the WIEGO website “Law and the Informal Economy in India.”

Statistics
Project on the Measurement of Informal Employment in Developed Countries - Francoise Carré (active WIEGO Member and research collaborator), Marty Chen (WIEGO International Coordinator), James Heintz (WIEGO Research Coordinator), and Joann Vanek (Director, WIEGO Statistics Programme) met on February 21, 2008 at the Harvard Kennedy School to further develop plans for a programme of work on the measurement of informal employment in developed countries. Researchers and advocates have noted the need for a framework to capture fully and with sufficient precision the range of employment arrangements in developed countries, particularly the growing share of non-standard arrangements – including short term, temporary contracted employment. For developing countries, the relevant categories of informal employment have been specified and now guide data collection, compilation and analysis for an increasing number of countries. However, the concept of informal employment has not yet been applied in most developed countries. To address this need, a workshop will take place at Harvard University on October 31 and November 1, 2008. This meeting will bring together producers and users of employment statistics to explore possibilities and challenges involved in capturing in official statistics the varied forms of informal or non-standard employment - short term, temporary, contracted, etc. – across developed countries. Francoise Carré and James Heintz are preparing a paper covering a “model” for the relationship between dimensions of employment and statistical categories that will be a basis for discussion at the meeting.

Official Statistics and the WIEGO Mission to Cambodia - The improvement of statistics on informal sector and informal employment was one of the important purposes of this mission. At the seminar on the informal economy in Phnom Penh on March 31 (see Highlights section), Joann Vanek made a keynote presentation on the informal economy in Cambodia based on official national statistics provided by James Heintz. She also made a presentation on improvement of official statistics on informal employment and informal sector worldwide. Meetings were held with government agencies, including the National Institute of Statistics and with groups of informal workers. At the suggestion of the Minister of Women’s Affairs, Joann prepared a follow-up note, “Data Needs and Strategies for Policies and Programmes on Employment, Especially Informal Employment, Gender and Poverty in Cambodia”.

Other Statistics and Research Initiatives - The WIEGO Statistics Programme continues its working relationships with international organizations on the improvement of official statistics on employment. WIEGO participated in a meeting of the Steering Committee of the United Nations Development Accounts Project – Interregional Cooperation on the Measurement of Informal Sector and Informal Employment held in New York in February 2008. In addition, together with Ralf Hussmanns of the ILO Statistics Bureau, Joann Vanek (Director, WIEGO Statistics) is co-editing an ILO manual on surveys of informal sector and informal employment.

GENERAL ACTIVITIES

Exposure Dialogue Programme in India
For the past four years, WIEGO has been involved in a series of Exposures and Dialogues with the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India and Cornell University. The basic objective of this initiative is to promote a dialogue between mainstream economists from Cornell University, activists from SEWA, and researchers from the WIEGO network around key neo-classical economic assumptions – and neo-liberal economic policies - which “trouble” ground-level activists and researchers working on issues of employment and labor. The hope is to deepen understanding on both sides of certain economic theories and to avoid the usual stylized debates between radical critics and neo-classical economists. The key event of this return trip to India by the Exposure Dialogue group was a reunion with their hosts from the first Exposure held in Gujarat State in January 2004. Other events at the Exposure Dialogue in included a technical dialogue with SEWA organizers in Ahmedabad City, a field visit to a National Rural Employment Guarantee field site in Gujarat State, two policy dialogues in New Delhi (on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector), and a book launch in New Delhi. The book, Membership-Based Organizations of the Poor edited by Marty Chen, Renana Jhabvala, Ravi Kanbur, and Carol Richards, grew out of a conference in January 2005 that followed the first Exposure Dialogue during which participants recognized that membership-based organizations of the poor (MBOPs) are central to achieving equitable growth and poverty reduction.

Review of Informal Enterprises in Africa for the World Bank
In response to a request by Louise Fox of the World Bank Africa Bureau in late 2007, William (Biff) Steel (Member, WIEGO Board) and Marty Chen (WIEGO International Coordinator) led a review of programs and policies in support of the smallest informal enterprises in Africa: those without hired workers. Biff Steel and Marty Chen put together a team of experts to review five programme and policy areas: micro-finance, business development services, sub-sector development, commercial law, and economic policies. From the WIEGO network, James Heintz (Research Coordinator) and Imraan Valodia (active WIEGO Member and research collaborator) undertook the review of economic policies, which they presented at a one-day workshop held at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. on June 3, 2008.

Monterrey Tech Conference
Marty Chen (WIEGO International Coordinator) and Carmen Roca (WIEGO Regional Advisor, Latin America) were asked by the Harvard Kennedy School and the Tecnologico de Monterrey to help organize a conference on “The Informal Economy in Latin America” in Monterrey, Mexico May 22 - 28, 2008. At the suggestion of Marty and Carmen, the secretary-generals of the national federations of self-employed workers in Mexico and Venezuela as well as the leader of an association of street vendors in the historic district of Mexico City were invited to speak on the informal economy. Four women street vendor leaders from Mexico actively participated in the conference where Marty gave the opening keynote presentation entitled “The Informal Economy in Latin America: A Global Perspective”. Bernice Ramirez Lopez, an expert on social protection from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) who participated in a WIEGO-organized dialogue on social protection in Mexico, was also asked to speak at WIEGO’s suggestion. The head of the census in Mexico, who is an active member of WIEGO, offered recent data (2003-2006) on informal employment in Mexico for Marty to present at the conference. This kind of collaboration between grassroots leaders, academics, and policy makers is what WIEGO is striving to achieve.

Harvard Kennedy School Forum on “Worker Protection in a Globalized Economy: The Role of Government, Business, and Civil Society”
The lead panelist at this Forum that Marty Chen (WIEGO International Coordinator) moderated and helped to organize was Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland. Mary Robinson and the two other panelists, John Ruggie (Professor of government, Harvard Kennedy School) and Richard Freeman (Professor of economics, Harvard University), examined the interrelated roles of government, business and civil society in promoting worker protection in a globalized economy.

This event was hosted by The Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations at Harvard University in collaboration with the Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Committee for Human Rights Studies at Harvard University. The Hauser Center also hosted Mary Robinson at a luncheon seminar on the topic of worker protection. During the day, Marty Chen met with Mary Robinson and two of her colleagues to discuss collaboration between Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalization Initiative (headed by Mary Robinson) and WIEGO on this topic.

PUBLICATIONS AND REPORTS

Publications
Kabeer, Naila and Sarah Cook, eds. 2008. Economic Growth, Social Protection and 'Real' Labour Markets. IDS Bulletin, Vol. 39, Number 2. This volume contains a selected set of presentations from a workshop on this topic co-organized by the IDS, Sussex and WIEGO in October 2007. Many of the articles in this volume were written by WIEGO staff or Members: Marty Chen, Sarah Cook, James Heintz, Naila Kabeer, Francie Lund, Victor Tokman and Imraan Valodia.

• Edited and introduction by Naila Kabeer, James Heintz and Sarah Cook
  
  
• “Economic Growth, Social Protection and 'Real' Labour Markets: Linking Theory and Policy,” Sarah Cook, James Heintz and Naila Kabeer
  
  
• “Revisiting Labour Markets: Implications for Macroeconomics and Social Protection,” James Heintz
  
  
• “Informality and Social Protection: Theories and Realities” Martha Chen
  
  
• “The Challenge of Informality: Perspectives on China's Changing Labour Market,” Sarah Cook
  
  
• “Informal Employment, Labour Markets and Social Protection: Some Considerations Based on South African Estimates,” Imraan Valodia

Reports
Cornell-SEWA-WIEGO. 2008. "2008 Dialogue - Ahmedabad and Delhi: Compendium of Personal and Technical Notes." http://www.arts.cornell.edu/poverty/kanbur/CSW2008DialogueCompendium.pdf

"Report of Conference Proceedings: Waste Pickers without Frontiers - First World Conference and Third Latin-American Conference of Waste-Pickers, Bogota, Colombia, 1-4 March 2008." download report

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