Introduction

Informal work preceded neoliberalism, and it exceeds capitalism. A snapshot of informal work research reveals subsistence activities such as street vending in many cities, cash-in-hand babysitting for neighbours in the UK, a complex economy of favours and non-market exchanges in Russia, and a whole host of other hardly visible, ordinary work activities. Estimates of the prevalence of informal work vary; the ILO has recently suggested 60 per cent of employed people work in the informal economy. In the first of three chapters that explore the specific knots that mark present times as especially challenging (see Chapter One), this chapter looks in detail at informal work as part of how everyday life is lived. I suggest in this chapter that what’s wrong with work can’t be understood without acknowledging the mesh/mess of work and life together, and that a focus on informal work is essential to seeing that.

Informal activity, however, often has the condition of ‘non-existence’, being residual, inferior, local and non-productive. Recognition, not deletion, has to be a starting point for considering the ethical issues of work. Informal work includes wage labour without employment contracts or regulation, and small-scale self-employment; it might be done simultaneously with childcare, as in the case of homeworkers subcontracted to do piecework for electronics manufacturers, and it might be childcare. By studying the many different forms of informal work and informal economic activity and how they make livelihoods, it’s possible to understand much more about how different kinds of work are connected, including how formally contracted work relates to the informal (as when people learn to sew at home in order to get informal paid work in satellite factories).

In this chapter, I’ll look in more detail at the complexity and variety of informal work, how it relates to global inequalities, how it contributes to, but is not reducible to, capitalist exchange and can only be partly understood in the language of an all-enveloping neoliberalism. In thinking about informal work, I hear echoes in the discussions of precarious work, as well as in the gig economy, and domestic work: different but overlapping forms of work. Attending to their similarities and differences contributes to thinking about a better future. Taken together, these elements are reminders of the arguments I made in Chapter Three about the relationship between work and life.