Search

Homeworkers form a significant part of the informal economy in the global South, are over-represented by women, and are defined by their place of work, that is, their 'home'. As production and social reproduction intersect in the private sphere of the home, a woman's mobility and access to public spaces is limited and gendered. Within this reality, in the narrow streets of the small town of Ambur in Southern India, women homeworkers stitching leather footwear access 'public' entities through their 'thinna': a porch/veranda-like structure at the entrance of the house. This article explores thinna as a quasi-public space, arguing that even while spatially attached to a private home, it allows women to place themselves and to participate in the realm of the public. Based on in-depth interviews with 62 homeworkers, I show that women homeworkers utilise the thinna to make themselves 'visible' – physically, socially, economically, and politically. They sit here not only for better lighting but also to chat with neighbouring homeworking women, thereby keeping themselves informed on what other women are stitching and their piece rates. They engage economically with the contractor(s), using it to showcase their stitching skills. Here, a local civil society organisation convenes meetings to organise them and here leather company representatives 'visit' homeworkers. For homeworkers, thus, thinna provides a public and social space where the professional and personal imbricate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, women have been disproportionally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the impact has varied between groups of women, women in the informal sector, mainly those managing micro- and small-scale businesses, have been severely affected. Drawing on the case of urban Sri Lanka, this paper explores the challenges that women owners of micro- and small-scale businesses faced during the pandemic and how they leveraged digital technologies to overcome these challenges. The paper adopts a feminist intersectional lens, which examines the everyday experiences of women in gendered economies through semi-structured interviews conducted in three phases during the pandemic. The first section of the paper details the challenges that women faced during the pandemic, including issues of mobility, competing care responsibilities, lack of institutional support, financial security, and health. The second section discusses how women used digital tools such as social media to overcome these challenges. The paper argues that although digital tools were initially used in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic, they have been permanently incorporated into everyday entrepreneurial practices of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies show that the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions had disproportionately negative impacts on the majority of the world's workers who work informally, and on women informal workers in particular. This reflects the interplay between the pandemic, existing decent work deficits in informal employment, and discriminatory gendered norms within and outside the workplace. Based on a sample of 1,935 informal workers from a mixed-method longitudinal study across 12 cities in 2020 and 2021 conducted by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), this article finds that the gendered impacts on informal workers within and between occupational sectors observed in the initial three months have persisted over a year and half into the pandemic, and explores the reasons for the gender-differentiated impacts. It then considers the specific demands made by informal workers to the state, highlighting the ways in which sector and gender mediate workers' policy needs. Finally, it provides evidence of the role of member-based organisations of informal workers in responding directly to the needs of women workers, and on making claims on the state to fulfil these needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of thousands of migrant workers returned from their countries of employment to their families in Lao People's Democratic Republic. This article focuses on a specific population of migrant workers – Lao women returnee migrant workers in informal employment in Thailand – to explore how COVID-19 impacted their well-being and to what extent their home country's social protection system supported them. It is based on more than 400 structured interviews with women migrant workers across nine provinces of Laos, who were working abroad in the informal economy and returned to Laos at the beginning of the pandemic. The research documented a rise in unemployment and income loss while aggravating gender inequalities in terms of the division of unpaid care work, discriminatory behaviours, and potential risks of gender-based violence. It identified several policy areas where systemic support for Lao women returnee migrant workers in informal employment should be prioritised: (1) extension of social protection, (2) national labour market strategy plan, (3) migration-sensitive national action plan, and (4) co-ordination between government and civil society organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]