globalization reduces the emotional, cultural and material resources necessary for the well-being of most
women and families.
While the traditional ideology of patriarchal states, religions, and families locates women in the
home as loyal dependents and loving service providers, economic realities (and consumerist ideologies)
increasingly compel women to seek formal employment and/or undertake additional ‘home-work.’ As
families worldwide confront shrinking economic resources, women are disproportionately expected to
compensate–to absorb the costs of ‘adjustment.’ Women have fewer legal protections than men, fewer
property rights, and less access to education, training, and work opportunities that are associated with
highly valued skills. As a survival strategy, women especially rely on informal work to ensure their own
and their family’s well-being.
Informal activities are not unique to but have greatly expanded in the context of neoliberal
restructuring.
10
Increasing un- and under-employment (especially of men), flexibilization, and erosion or
prohibition of union power has meant declining real incomes and decreased job security worldwide.
Deregulation and privatization undercut welfare provisioning, state employment, and collective supports
for family well-being. People are thus ‘pushed’ to engage in informal activities as a strategy for securing
income however they can. Yet these activities are ‘outside’ of and contravene theoretical expectations
regarding capitalist development, which presumed an increasingly formalized workforce.
Moreover, informalization has a variety of direct and indirect effects on labor relations. In general,
it decreases the structural power of workers, reaps higher profits for capital, depresses formal wages,
disciplines all workers, and through the isolation of informalized labor, impedes collective resistance.
Women, the poor, migrants, and recent immigrants are the prototypical (feminized) workers of the
informal economy; in the context of increasing flexibilization, the devalued conditions informalization
constitutes are arguably the future for all but elite workers worldwide.
Informalization is heterogeneous and controversial. Some individuals prosper by engaging in
entrepreneurial activities afforded by a less regulated environment. This is especially evident in micro-
enterprises (favored by neoliberals) where innovation may breed success and multiplying effects; in tax
evasion and international pricing schemes that favor larger operations; in developing countries where
informal activities are crucial for income generation; and in criminal activities that are ‘big business’
worldwide (e.g., traffic in drugs, arms, and the bodies of sex workers and illegal immigrants).
11
Informalization is then crucial to GPE because of its defiance of theoretical expectations, its
10
Debates regarding how to theorize, define, measure and evaluate informalization are addressed in Chapter 4 of my
book (2003) where I reference an extensive and rapidly growing literature. The shadow or underground economy
was in 1998 estimated to be $9 trillion--the equivalent of approximately one-fourth of the world’s gross domestic
product for that year (The Economist 28 Aug 1999, 59). Sivard (1995, 11) estimates that including ‘women’s work’
would add as much as one-third to the world’s gross national product.
11
A variety of sources (see Peterson 2003, 196, 201) provide the following estimates (in US dollars, per year): of
‘white collar crime’ in the US: $200 billion; of profits from trafficking migrants: $3.5 billion; of money laundering:
as much as $2.8 trillion; of tax revenue lost to the US by hiding assets offshore: $70 billion; of tax evasion costs to
the US government: $195 billion.
Convention