Inequality At Work in the Informal Economy: key issues and illustrations

By Barbara Harriss-White

In many countries, laws forbidding discrimination at work reach a tiny minority of the workforce, using crudely essentialized categories like colour or sex.

In practice, however, discrimination is a complex expression of social regulation and, ultimately, identity, which determines the ideologies and norms that both employers and employees default to in the absence of state regulation (eg caste, race, religion). The forms of authority through which identities are created and evolve originate outside the economy and operate both outside and inside it. Harriss-White looks at how institutional actors and market forces can address discrimination at work.

(International Labour Review. Vol. 142, no. 4, 2003/4; pp459-69)