Handouts & Guides
All over the world, the informal economy is growing. Fewer people are in formal work, which offers social benefits. Workers who have had formal benefits are losing them, through casualisation and outsourcing. People who start working in the informal economy have little or no access to social protection. Also, there is an increase in the number of people working in unregulated and often hazardous environments, where the work itself brings exposure to risks.
Informal workers will only get better access to social protection if they organize. Social protection can be a useful platform for organizing. This set of learning materials has been developed in order to assist as tools for advocacy.
They are drawn from workshop discussions at the Asia Social Protection Dialogue in Bangkok, 2004, where there were participants from eight countries in Asia: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The materials reflect this regional experience, but many of the situations and problems are experienced by informal workers worldwide. The materials are meant to be used by organizations and networks of informal workers, by groups of informal workers or by individual workers.
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