Informality and the Future of Work: A Conversation

Description

The predominance of informal forms of work and means of making a living across the global South requires a critical intervention into current debates around the future of work. This moderated conversation foregrounds the complexities and challenges for people laboring in the informal sector in the South Asian and Latin American contexts.

Key moments

0:00 Introduction
0:50 Panel begins
20:20 – 22:35 Luis Eslava explains how informal workers earn very little, and often live in poverty, even as their labor generates value.
27:13 – 31:42 Luis Eslava presents a short documentary clip highlighting the experiences of informal workers in Colombia, showing their (often invisible) labor contributes to economic growth.
43:26 – 44:29 Rina Agarwala focuses on two main positives of welfare boards that offer lessons for future experiments in worker organizing: first, an articulation of a financial structure which is designed to both hold employers accountable and create a mechanism for state funding, and second, a reliance on worker’s organizations, on a movement from below.
49:25 – 50:50 Rina Agarwala explains how the care crisis in the Global North is subsidized by imported labor from the Global South, arguing that transnational flows of labor enable new forms of global inequality.
50:55 – 52:13 Rina Agarwala asks how governments in the Global South attain consent for a new form of hegemony, in a context of resistance by workers on the ground, specifically in India.
1:08:21 – 1:10:05 Rina Agarwala argues that one major flaw of the twentieth century “contract” is based on a harmful distinction between the public and private sphere.

Kamran Asdar Ali,

Essential Work,

Labor Organizing,

Racial Capitalism,

Work Across the Global South

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