The Informal Economy: The Invisible Economy That Sustains the World
Rigoberta has prepared a cake to celebrate her grandson’s birthday. She had to stock up on flour and sugar for several days, which was not easy at all. She knows that many children from the neighbourhood will come to the event with their mothers and, sometimes, their fathers.
The cake is a success. And she has thought that perhaps she could earn some money by making them to order for other families. Nicolás is a good mechanic, he repairs vehicles after taxiing with his own car that he was able to fix with scrapyard parts and which, of course, has no insurance. María sews uniforms for the little schools in the neighbourhood. Nayara waits at the traffic lights for cars to stop to sell cut-up fruit or handkerchiefs or whatever she has been able to get from street vending. Miguel and Lucy have a street stall where they take the products from their conuco (family vegetable garden).
Along with them, hundreds of families also have their food or clothing or second or third-hand footwear or handicraft stalls. José will enter today, with his father, for the first time, an abandoned mine where many others say they have managed to extract a gold nugget. Rubbish is the «mine» where Juan and a few thousand more people work searching for plastic to recycle, metal, clothes, tyres, parts, food… Technically and statistically it is informal economy. In reality, it is the invisible work that sustains the majority of the world’s population. «Sustains» is almost a euphemism, the work is inhuman most of the time and barely reaches enough to survive with great difficulty. The day when flour is lacking, or Nicolás falls ill, or Nayara has to go looking for her little brothers who have returned from school because their teacher, who has two jobs, has not been able to arrive, or Miguel and Lucy have broken down the means of transport that takes them to their stall,… That day perhaps the already meagre ration of food will be reduced for the whole family. Or they will not eat.
When we talk about work in general we usually refer to employment, to work that is part of a specific mode of production, in our case the capitalist one, or to work for which we try to receive remuneration that allows us to go to the market to acquire the goods and services necessary to live. The qualifier «informal» that is technically used in official statistics (with all the reservations that the official implies in many failed or not very transparent States), tells us of work lacking contracts, lacking adequate remuneration for the level of work performed and lacking direct social benefits in the innumerable situations of work inactivity that may arise when we work: rest, illness, accident, care of children and elderly parents, retirement…
We repeat: it is in this situation that the majority of workers in the world still find themselves (more than 60%) and the trend towards exclusion from the «labour market» of capitalism does not seem likely to stop with technological advances.
It is important that it has faces and names. Because we have already become accustomed to the coldness of statistics and calamities without thinking of them as great injustices. The informal economy, which is the niche of the criminal economy of prostitution, delinquency, drugs, human trafficking, the mafias of emigration, etc., is the usual means of livelihood in many areas of the planet. Especially bleeding in the peripheries of all large cities. But no less important in the rural or mineral extraction sector. Without forgetting that it is also present in countries that we consider «developed». Considering only «formal» self-employment and chronic unemployment, we are aware that here too a great deal of work and undeclared money moves, from which results the difference that allows us to make ends meet.
We have frequently heard that we are facing the most efficient and just economic system that history has produced. But of course, that depends on what we measure. That depends on what we consider «wealth» in economics. If what we call the economy has as its primary objective to be able to dispose of what is necessary for us to develop a dignified life, the proof that this system does not fulfil this is there. But the worst thing is that we have not realised that all our mental (and cultural) categories have accepted this system that prioritises capital over work as the only possible one. And they have perverted work so much as the main source of wealth that we human beings have that even our Spanish minister (of work?) says that her mission is to abolish it. That is, to live off the capital fairy tale or rents, which, apparently, are generated out of nothing. Let them tell that to more than 60% of the «invisible» workers in the world. Only those who have slaves are allowed the luxury of not working. And we remind the minister (of work?) and, incidentally, the unions, that there are still more than 400 million child slaves in the world. And that we will shout it next 16th of April, International Day against Child Slavery.
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