Workers and the global informal economy. Issues and perspectives

The Chapter recalls some of the main aspects stressed in the international debate and discussed in the book and it tries to offer an advanced starting point for further developments of research about the formal/informal blending. Starting from the structural character of informality, it is clarified that any attempt to understand and research informality needs to look at it as a historical product of the structural relationship between formality and informality which is at the very core of evolutionist development of capitalism. In order to understand the characteristics of this historical product, the nature of the formality-informality combination in the context of the fading “société salariale” or “democratic capitalism” is briefly recalled. According to many scholars, the declining of that social framework is now resulting in the rising of a global regime of informalization as a multi-sited strategy. But the declining “société salariale” has not been (yet) substituted by another stable labour-society framework and the contemporary social landscape presents many ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions. In the final part of the Chapter a critical appraisal of the formality-informality continuum can be established, where being “critical” means trying to enable the possibility to distinguish between positive and negative effects of the transformation of the formality-informality blending. In this attempt, we think that the capacity for voice of social actors plays a fundamental role.