We – Seth Brown, Peter Kelly and Scott Phillips – have recently published a new book – Informal Workers and a Political Economy of Lifelong Learning: Provocations from the Margins of Global Capitalism – that had its beginnings in a policy and literature review of informal work and skills development in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that we prepared for the Section of Youth, Literacy and Skills Development, at UNESCO in Paris.
We believe that book makes an innovative, sociologically informed contribution to academic and policy discussions about informal work, skills and training for lifelong learning (LLL), and the promise of decent work and just transitions for sustainable development.
Informal Economies and Informal Workers
In the economies of the OECD and the EU, and in the more informal economies of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Asia–Pacific (AP) that are our focus in the book, the challenges and opportunities of/for promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all (UN SDG8) are connected to broader concerns in relation to social, economic and political development—as captured at a global level in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Although it may be understood in different ways in these different contexts, and, indeed, will be situated differently in particular contexts, we understand the informal economy as those:
economic activities by workers that are—in law or in practice—not covered (or insufficiently covered) by formal employment arrangements. Although it is hard to generalize about the quality and nature of informal employment, the characteristics include a lack of protection for non-payment of wages, retrenchment without notice or compensation, unsatisfactory occupational health and safety conditions and an absence of social benefits such as pensions, sick pay and health insurance. (ILO, 2021)
Life Long Learning (LLL)
In many of these contexts the hope and promise of Life Long learning (LLL) is imagined as a route and process by which informal workers in informal economies can develop the skills that will enable them to secure more just and sustainable livelihoods.
The ILO (2019, pp. 30–32), for example, suggests that:
Lifelong learning encompasses formal and informal learning from early childhood and basic education through to adult learning, combining foundation skills, social and cognitive skills (such as learning to learn) and the skills needed for specific jobs, occupations or sectors. Lifelong learning involves more than the skills needed to work; it is also about developing the capabilities needed to participate in a democratic society. It offers a pathway to inclusion in labour markets for youth and the unemployed. It also has transformative potential: investment in learning at an early age facilitates learning at later stages in life and is in turn linked to intergenerational social mobility, expanding the choices of future generations.
Given these high level policy definitions, our book highlights historical and contemporary characteristics of informality in different regions from a political economy of LLL perspective. This political economy approach draws on theories of post- and neo- colonialism, space, place and globalisation, and critical accounts of curriculum and pedagogy in skills and vocational education and training.
A Political Economy of LLL
Our purposes here are informed by and enabled through an engagement with the concept of political economy. We draw on Maysoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock’s (2015, 2016), reference to the Political Economy Project (2017) of the Arab Studies Institute (Washington and Beirut), and a definition of political economy that explicitly draws on the “intellectual tradition of political economy from Karl Marx to the present, embracing both its methodological pluralism and its fundamental critique of capital and empire”. In this sense political economy:
addresses the mutual constitution of states, markets, and classes, the coconstitution of class, race, gender, and other forms of identity, varying modes of capital accumulation and the legal, political, and cultural forms of their regulation, relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture, the construction of forms of knowledge and hegemony; techno-politics; water and the environment as resources and fields of contestation; the role of war in the constitution of states and classes; and practices and cultures of domination and resistance. (Arab Studies Institute, 2017, n.p.)
We use this concept of a political economy of LLL in a series of ‘case studies’ of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Asia–Pacific (AP) – and where we propose a series of ‘provocations’ that critically examines the limits and possibilities of the promise of LLL for just transitions.
By way of example, in Chapter 2: Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) we reference the substantial academic and grey literature that suggests that the informal sector in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) was “estimated to represent around half of total employment”, and that the COVID-19 crisis has amplified the scale, scope and character of the informal economy, indicating that informal employment is the most pervasive “structural weakness” in the LAC economies (Basto-Aguirre et al., 2020; OECD, 2020a, 2020b). As Basto-Aguirre et al. (2020, n. p.) suggest:
Both cause and consequence of many of the regions’ development traps…informality has been eroding tax collection, undermining productivity growth, and leaving a large share of the workforce vulnerable to shocks for lack of social protection, while feeding on low productivity levels, unsophisticated economic structures, rigid regulations, low skill levels and inefficient institutions.
Our provocation in this chapter suggests that the challenges faced by informal workers in the informal economies of LAC appear not to be amenable to the sorts of remedies that organisations such as the World Bank propose. Indeed, the historical actions of many of these organisations and agencies have produced the forces and processes that continue to energise these seemingly intractable, “wicked problems”. We explore a number of these concerns via reference to Naomi Klein’s (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and how her detailed, extensive and highly critical account of the influence of the Chicago School of Economics and the Washington Consensus in shaping the LAC’s “lost decade” can inform a political economy of LLL in LAC.
Informal Work and Skills for Just Transitions
In summary, these ideas have emerged from and been developed through an encounter with a number of productive trajectories suggested by authors such as Simon McGrath, Presha Ramsarup, Jacques Zeelenc, Volker Wedekind, Stephanie Allais, Heila Lotz-Sisitka, David Monk, George Openjuru and Jo-Anna Russon, and their work on a political economy of LLL and VET for sustainable development, decent work and just transitions in Africa. Foundational to this political economy of LLL is identifying what the concept of “skills for just transitions” might mean, might look like, in “complex labour market and vocational learning contexts” (McGrath & Russon, 2023, p. 4). For Mark Swilling (2020, p. 7), the concept of “just transitions” signals “a process of increasingly radical incremental changes that accumulate over time in the actually emergent transformed world envisaged by the SDGs and sustainability”.
The book can be found here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-72451-0
References
Arab Studies Institute. (2017). Statement of purpose. Retrieved 4 June from http://www.politicaleconomyproject.org/
Basto-Aguirre, N., Nieto-Parra, S., & Vázquez-Zamora, J. (2020). Informality in Latin America in the post COVID-19 era: Towards a more formal ‘new normal’? https://vox.lacea.org/?q=blog/informality_latam_postcovid19
ILO. (2019). Work for a brighter future: Global commission on the future of work. International Labour Organisation. https://www.ilo.org/publications/workbrighter-future
ILO. (2021). Informal economy in Asia and the Pacific. International Labour Organization.
McGrath, S., & Russon, J.-A. (2023). TVET SI: Towards sustainable vocational education and training: Thinking beyond the formal. Southern African Journal of Environmental Education, 38(2), 1–18.
OECD. (2020a). COVID-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean: Regional socio-economic Implications and policy priorities.
OECD. (2020b). Informality and employment protection during and beyond COVID-19.
Sukarieh, M., & Tannock, S. (2015). Youth rising?: The politics of youth in the global economy. Routledge.
Sukarieh, M., & Tannock, S. (2016). On the political economy of youth: A comment. Journal of Youth Studies, 19(9), 1281–1289.
Swilling, M. (2020). The age of sustainability: Just transitions in a complex world. Taylor & Francis.