By: Asbar World Forum
September 26, 2018
Technology and what it will do to change how we work is the driving obsession of the moment. The truth is that nobody knows for sure what will happen – the only certainty is uncertainty. How then should we plan for the jobs that don’t yet exist?
Our starting point is to deal with what we know – and the biggest challenge that the future of work faces – and has faced for decades – is the vast numbers of people who live day to day on casual labor, not knowing from one week to the next if they will have a job and unable to plan ahead, let alone months rather than years, for their children’s prosperity. We call this the informal economy – and as with so much pseudo-technical language which erects barriers, the phrase fails to convey the abject state of purgatory to which it condemns millions of workers and their families around the world.
A worker is informally employed when she does not have a contract, social security, health insurance or any other protections. Informal work is a means of survival, nothing more. From the rickshaw pullers in the streets of Dhaka to the mobile fruit vendors of Nairobi, the informal economy is omnipresent. Informal employment is more than 70 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and more than 50 percent in Latin America. In Cote d’Ivoire and Nepal, it is more than 90 percent. As you can see in the graph below, which I have borrowed from the draft World Development Report 2019, informal work is more widespread for low income than high income economies.