Pandemic and Future of Work: Rehabilitating Informal Workers Livelihoods Post Pandemic
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Pandemic and Future of Work: Rehabilitating Informal Workers Livelihoods Post Pandemic Reema Nanavaty1 Published online: 11 October 2020 © Indian Society of Labour Economics 2020
Abstract At SEWA, we strongly believe that "Work is a healer". In the current pandemic situation, when the majority of informal workers livelihoods have come to a screeching halt, it is important to focus on rehabilitating the livelihoods of workers, building their resilience, promoting the local decentralized economies, organizing workers into their own economic enterprises, repurposing the supply chains of worker-owned microenterprises and hand-holding workers to adopt and adapt new technologies. At SEWA, we call this Building Economy of Nurturance. Keywords Informal workers · Women workers · SEWA · Livelihoods · Ela Bhatt · Decentralized local economies Today the entire world is facing very turbulent times. In particular, for the poor workers from the informal economy, survival itself has become a question. Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a national trade union of over 1.9 million; such poor women workers from the informal economy are spread across 18 states in India and over 125 informal trades. The current pandemic and the accompanying economic slowdown have directly and in a very destructive way affected the income and livelihoods of these informal workers—both urban and rural. Their access to food and nutrition has dropped implying that access to food and nutrition by the entire family has dropped as usually women are the last to eat and they eat the least. With the migrants returning to villages, the stress on the rural economy has also increased, exacerbating the issues and challenges around gender inequality, gender pay-gap, preferential employment of men over women, etc. These issues and challenges would directly translate into reduction in women’s earning—and thus, continued challenges for women to manage the household expenses as well as unscrupulous demands of their family members. * Reema Nanavaty [email protected] 1
Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ahmedabad, India
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The Indian Journal of Labour Economics (2020) 63 (Suppl 1):S151–S155
Fig. 1 Loss of Employment for Informal workers due to Covid19 between 13th April and 23rd May in India. Source: Survey outcomes of SEWA-Azim Premji Foundation’s Covid-19 Livelihoods survey -https://cse. azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/
Fig. 2 Reach of Govt. relief schemes (Cash transfer through JanDhan accounts) during Covid-19 Lockdown in India. Source: Survey outcomes of SEWA-Azim Premji Foundation’s Covid-19 Livelihoods survey -https://cse.azimpremji university.edu.in/
In order to understand the issues and challenges faced by women workers from the informal economy, SEWA conducted 3 surveys with over 1800 members over the past 3 months and the results reflect that over 67% of the informal workers lost their livelihoods resulting in severe working-capital crisis (see Fig. 1). Eight out of 10 households have not been
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