Paid informal work: a barrier to social inclusion?

Colin Williams and Jan Windebank
Additional contact information
Jan Windebank: Senior Lecturer in French Studies and Associate Fellow, Political Economy Research Centre (PERC), University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2001, vol. 7, issue 1, 025-040

Abstract: Paid informal work has been conventionally viewed as a barrier to social inclusion. Conceived as exploitative low-paid employment conducted by marginalised populations for unscrupulous employers, such work has been considered to prevent social inclusion, in that it denies employees access to the normal social rights attached to formal employment and takes away jobs from the formal sector. Its eradication is thus pursued so that ‘social inclusion’ (i.e. insertion into formal employment) can be achieved. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically this conceptualisation of paid informal work and social inclusion. Drawing upon case study evidence from deprived neighbourhoods in British cities, we first show that the vast majority of paid informal work is conducted by and for neighbours, friends and relatives for the purpose of either redistribution or community building. We then argue that a policy of eradicating this work reduces rather than ameliorates ‘social inclusion’ in the sense of enabling citizens to help each other out. To conclude we explore the policy implications of our findings.

Date: 2001
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/102425890100700105 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:treure:v:7:y:2001:i:1:p:025-040

DOI: 10.1177/102425890100700105

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().