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Outcome 5: Thematic Funding for 2014-2015 - Final Independent Evaluation

eval_number:

2572

eval_url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/eval/2572

lessons_learned:

themes:

theme:

Migration

category:

Conditions of work & equality

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comments:

Targeted users/beneficiaries: ILO branches and tripartite constituents working on the promotion of decent work and labour governance for informal sector workers.

challenges:

Potential resistance to promoting alternative modes of labour governance (as opposed to classic formal sector regulatory approaches) from some ILO staff and constituents?

success:

The project has generated a great deal of evidence of alternative forms of labour governance (including minimum wages, labour inspection, access to social protection etc.) which feed directly into this area of debate. These have already been extensively disseminated through the global products and the domestic work working group.

context:

The wider context of globalization and feminization of labour conditions makes this lesson widely relevant.

description:

Contribution to Outcome 6 in the new ILO P&B: How to ‘formalize’ in an increasingly informal global economy? The project is extremely well placed to inform Outcome 6 of the new ILO P&B strategy (Formalizing the Informal Sector). Furthermore it may also be a good starting point to interrogate what the vision of ‘formalization’ promoted by this new Outcome should constitute. Research suggests that, in an increasingly globalised economy, the formal labour conditions that were previously associated with national economies with developed welfare states and state managed labour protection, are now increasingly rare, in particular in the global South. Thus for example, research has highlighted the feminization of labour force participation, characterized both by increasing female labour force participation, and by more flexible, unprotected, part time, and low wage conditions of employment, and an increasingly blurred distinctions between the formal and the informal sector, which result from increasingly competitive global markets and national deregulation of labour protection in an effort to attract international business. In this context, the experience of extending labour protection and decent work to domestic workers could provide wider learnings about how to extend labour protection to informal sector workers, not through trying to produce traditional formal labour markets, which are increasingly a chimera, but by developing novel ways of governing employment (including through change in social norms) and providing the core components of decent work, in the context of flexible, small scale forms of work, with distinctive employment relationships, as typified by domestic work.

administrative_issues:

Outcome 6 of the new ILO P&B is already defined, which may make it difficult to open up the understanding/ definition of ‘formalizing’ to debate.

url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/lessons/220061

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location:

country:

Inter-Regional

region:

Inter-Regional

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eval_title:

Outcome 5: Thematic Funding for 2014-2015 - Final Independent Evaluation