Gender, Ethnicity and the Informal Sector in Trinidad

Robert B. Potter, Sally Lloyd-Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138718357
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351765299
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2002. Throughout much of the developing world and especially in Africa and Latin America, the informal employment sector is growing spectacularly. This study focuses on the gender and ethnic aspects of the informal economy in Trinidad.

1 Gender, Ethnicity and the Informal Sector in Trinidad: An Introduction

They have simply renounced legality. They go out on the streets to sell whatever they can, they set up their shops, and they build their houses on the hillsides, or on vacant lots. Where there are no jobs, they invent jobs, learning in the process all they were never taught (de Soto, 1989: xix).

Introduction

In 1998, the International Labour Office (ILO) reported that the informal sector accounts for a large proportion of urban employment throughout the developing world. In Africa, informal employment constitutes over 60 per cent of total urban employment and it is estimated that most Asian, Latin American and Caribbean countries exhibit rates which exceed 50 per cent (ILO, 1998: 167). As urban population growth rates greatly exceed employment creation in many developing world cities, labour force growth is also predicted to accelerate rapidly over the next 25 years. A well recognised consequence of the inability of many countries to provide jobs has been the substantial increase in the proportion of the labour force seeking alternative forms of employment outside the boundaries of officially recognised work. The benefits of globalisation which were promised to many developing nations by global institutions, namely formal job creation through foreign direct investment and export-oriented production, have in reality only led to a rise in insecure and low-paid contractual work. In relation to the interdependence of employment and global economic forces, it is structural adjustment which has been most closely associated with formal sector retrenchment and redundancy (Green, 1995; Stewart, 1995), and it is the so called ‘informal sector’ which many households turn to in order to reduce their vulnerability (see de Soto, 1989; Thomas, 1992, 1995; Scott, 1994). In Latin America, for example, the informal sector grew from 40 per cent in 1980 to 53 per cent in 1990 as a direct result of the debt crisis (Stewart, 1995). It is now well established that in many low-income communities throughout the world, household income is less likely to be derived from regular waged employment than it is through a combination of casual activities, selfemployment and multiple occupations.

As a result, the last decade has seen a revived interest by governments and policy-makers in the role of informal economic activity and micro-enterprise as income-generating strategies for poor households in much of the Developing World. Whilst policy initiatives have increasingly looked to the informal sector as a development tool for providing much needed work and employment, there have been relatively few new empirical or theoretical studies of the informal sector which highlight the complex processes which affect the lives of the world’s informal workers. Even fewer studies have attempted to deconstruct the ways in which processes of gender and ethnicity shape the work experiences of different communities in different places. This research monograph seeks to make a much needed and timely contribution to the literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of the geography of the informal sector in Trinidad. The study highlights some of the barriers and opportunities facing informal sector workers in a rapidly globalising economy which produces gendered and racialised spaces.

As research studies are snapshots of a given time and place, it is useful to reflect on the context of this research by drawing on the key socio-economic and theoretical debates which have helped to construct the development agenda over the last decade. In 1990, the year the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published its first Human Development Report, the first named author embarked on a doctoral research project which examined the informal sector in Trinidad, under the supervision of the second author. At that time, much of the developing world was suffering from the effects of global retrenchment, debt and structural adjustment, and the financial crisis which had started in the previous decade. The beginning of the 1990s signalled another turning point for development practice as academics and practitioners started to place greater emphasis on the need to put people first, and to campaign for an empowering development agenda which did not discriminate on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, nationality or religion. Development activitists, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and even some global institutions, started to prioritise human development through the pursuit of goals of equity, empowerment, participation, good governance and sustainability. It is in this context of prioritising human needs in a rapidly changing world that the empirical research reported in this book was undertaken. In order to understand the complex processes of equity and empowerment, academics and researchers started to ask questions about the construction of difference and diversity and how different economic or social spaces become both gendered and racialised. Attention was paid to understanding how the interactive processes of gender and ethnicity affect access to resources, power and space.

Despite the sheer magnitude of the informal economy in developing countries and the heightened concern over human needs, recent academic attention has shifted from Africa, Asia and Latin America to focus on the increasingly ‘casualised economies’ of industrialised nations. Since the early 1990s, interest in gender, race and class has increased rapidly, particularly in terms of studies of labour markets in advanced economies (see Williams and Windebank, 1998, for research on ethnicity and informality in Europe) but there are still few in-depth insights into the informal sector of developing economies which attempt to engage with the interdependent issues of ethnicity and gender. Although the gendering of the informal sector has been well researched, there is an urgent need to understand how the informal sector is racialised and how this affects the ways in which different workers use both ‘material’ and ‘imagined spaces’. Such questions are directly relevant to the politisisation of the sector and the policies which governments and agencies design. It is a central aim of this book, therefore, to attempt to cross some of the academic boundaries between ‘First’ and ‘Third’ world issues by drawing upon the strengths of both bodies of literature in the context of the Caribbean, a locality where the labour process has been racialised for centuries. As such, this research takes ideas from contemporary thinking about race, gender and place, but also endeavours to situate the research firmly in policy and poverty alleviation contexts. In order to develop these ideas, this chapter now expands on the interwoven themes of globalisation, informal employment, gender and ethnicity, as well as providing a brief background to Trinidad and the Caribbean region.

Work, Informality and Global Transformations

One of the disturbing features of development in the Third World during the second half of the present century has been the unprecedented growth of population and the labour force. Since 1950, the world’s population has grown from 2.5 to 5.3 billion in 1992, with much of this growth having taken place in developing countries (World Bank, 1993). Global economic problems of mounting recession and debt, have had an adverse effect on the poor in developing countries, who have witnessed increasing levels of poverty and declining standards of living. Globally, it has been estimated that over 2 billion people either live in poverty, or at subsistence levels (UNDP, 1992). Furthermore, the income disparity between the rich and poor is widening, with the poorest 20 per cent of world population accounting for a mere 1.4 per cent of global Gross National Product (UNDP, 1992).

The inability of countries to provide employment for a growing labour force constitutes one of the most powerful obstacles to social and economic development for the masses. It has been estimated by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that between 1985 and 2000, a total of 1,000 million new jobs would have to be created to establish full employment world-wide (ILO, 1988), a task which remains unattainable. Unless there is a fundamental change in the structure of unemployment in developing countries, these targets are unlikely to met. Although the universal consequences of unemployment are undesirable, its effects are more acute in the nations of the so called Third World.

The 1999 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1999) reflects on the decade of ‘human development’ and concluded that “while globalisation has positive, innovative, dynamic aspects - it also has negative, disruptive, marginalising aspects” (UNDP, 1999: 25). Indeed, as Potter and Lloyd-Evans (1998) have discussed, the 1990s presented a new set of challenges over and above the problems of recession, declining production and structural adjustment which were experienced in the 1970s and 1980s. In this respect, work is becoming one of the key social and political issues of the current century (Pahl, 1988) but the widespread confusion and ambiguity which surround the nature and meaning of work are subject to critical debate. One issue which is widely agreed upon is the need for most households to engage in some form of work. A subject which is less clear, centres upon the definition of the boundary between work and employment. An important area of focus is work undertaken outside the realms of officially accounted employment, a practise which is frequent in developing countries.

Official unemployment and underemployment in developing nations currently stands at over 40 per cent (UNDP, 1998). As a result, a large proportion of the labour force is seeking alternative forms of employment, outside the boundaries of officially defined work, giving rise to what is commonly termed the ‘informal sector’. The informal sector refers to an heterogeneous group of activities and employment opportunities, which lie on the margins of the formal, regulated component of the economy, and which fail to conform with conventional definitions of work. In its present form, the informal sector refers to unaccountable and unregistered activities which are found in most countries of the world (see chapter 2). Moonlighting, tax evasion, and ‘cash in hand’ jobs are familiar activities in many developing countries. Despite difficulties in measuring the exact size of the informal sector, it has been estimated that 50 per cent of the labour force in developing countries work within its boundaries, as opposed to around 5 per cent in developed nations (Thomas, 1992). As Potter and Lloyd-Evans (1998) have discussed in detail, the informal sector is incredibly heterogeneous and provides rather polarised opportunities for workers from different social backgrounds and communities. Although the heterogeneity of the activities undertaken in the informal sector has been well established, less attention has been paid to the diversity of the people who work within it. There is a still a tendency to view informal workers as a homogeneous group of under-skilled and desperate individuals, whose sole reason for seeking informal work is for income-generation. Although the informal sector will always provide a safety-net for poor families who may be channelled into low-paid and insecure jobs, the economy is polarised to such an extent that it also offers other individuals opportunities for self-employment and self-development. Contrary to much of the previous literature, therefore, the informal sector is not just a recepticle or a ‘last resort’ for unskilled, insecure workers who will undertake any work as a survival strategy. The informal labour market, particularly in the Caribbean context, also provides opportunities for creative entrepreneurship, independence and the building of self-esteem for many workers. Individuals have different motivations to work, which may range from economic considerations through to more personal motives such as a desire for independence or greater self-esteem, and we need to understand the complexity of these decision-making processes. In many circumstances, work obstacles and opportunities are shaped as much by prevailing gendered and socio-spatial processes as they are by macro-economic change.

Social Difference: Gender, Ethnicity and Work

The last four decades have witnessed major economic and social changes on a global scale. These changes have transformed the world’s trade and labour markets. One consequence of this economic change has been the rapid feminisation of the labour force in both the formal and informal sectors of many developing countries (Standing, 1999). It is well known that women are more likely to be ‘employed’ in the informal sector than men, due to a combination of factors which include greater household responsibility, unrecognised or lower levels of skills and training, decreasing household incomes, and in some cases, the desire for greater independence and flexibility (Scott, 1986; 1994).

Recent research on the gendered nature of globalisation has also been important in analysing the ways in which women have transformed and redefined their gender roles under these new economic and social structures. It is now well understood that gender relations are embedded in all social, economic and cultural processes. In particular, prevailing norms concerning gender roles, identity and social relations are embedded in experiences of work and the labour market. There is now a vast body of literature which analyses the gendering of work in both the developing and developed worlds, which explores the relationships between production and reproduction. Much of this work highlights women’s participation in the informal economy of developing countries as an important global trend and there are many excellent studies of women’s lives as informal workers (Lawson, 1990; Kanji, 1995; Scott, 1994). In the Caribbean, women’s roles as higglers and petty commodity traders have been well documented by Massiah (1993) and Le Franc (1989) amongst others. These studies have all added weight to the notion that the movement of people across space is a highly gendered process.

Much of the recent work on the gendering of labour markets, however, is location specific and there has been little exchange of ideas between research undertaken in the countries of the ‘South’ with those of the ‘North’. This dichotomy between research undertaken on female workers in the so called ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ worlds is resulting in a failure of researchers in these two fields to explore each others’ ideas and findings which, given the current emphasis on ‘interconnectivity’, is both unfortunate and surprising. The concept of ‘difference’, particularly in relation to gender, ethnicity and class, has been well documented in the geographical literature (see Carby, 1983; Westwood and Maynard, 1993) but it has not been given full consideration in development practice and research. Third World feminists such as Mohanty (1991) have been particularly powerful in drawing the attention of western feminists to the importance of recognising difference in terms of class, ethnicity, nationality and religion (see also Kabeer, 1994), but as Mcllwaine (1995: 239) argues “whilst Third World women’s voices contributed to theoretical orientations within the social sciences, these have not yet been followed through in terms of addressing both gender and race within the formulation of development policies”.

Despite the heightened interest in gender issues, however, much of the current research into the gendering of work fails to engage with concepts of race and ethnicity as equally important processes which shape the labour markets of post-colonial societies. One recent exception has been the work by Peake and Trotz (1999) which successfully explores the processes of ethnicity, gender and place in contemporary Guyana. In the main, issues concerning ethnicity, identity and difference are notably absent from many of the established studies of urbanisation in developing cities, despite the prevalence of literature on racialised divisions within the cities of industrialised economies. As Potter and Lloyd-Evans (1998) have argued, race and ethnicity are important components affecting social discrimination and access to basic needs in most developing cities, as they involve implicit processes of racialisation. Residential neighbourhoods and ‘communities’ are far from socially uniform, as they are usually composed of families drawn from distinct regions or different ethnic or religious backgrounds. In most post-colonial nations, occupational status and social hierarchy are closely interlinked with ethnicity and race, and the informal sector is no exception.

From a different, but not unrelated starting point, much of the current social science literature on ethnicity, race and identity which celebrates difference and challenges the essentialism of much thinking about ethnicity, is firmly embedded in the European and North American experience (Hall, 1992; Bhabha, 1990; Bhavnani and Phoenix, 1994; Gilroy, 1987). A number of these writers have explored the relationships between ethnicity and gender more fully, but there has been little attempt to relate this body of work to different global experiences. In her work on Pakistani female migrants in Britain, Brah (1994) uses the concept of ‘racialised gendering’ in arguing that the ‘feminine identities’ expressed and lived out by different women will have distinct racialised aspects and that the racialised identities of Indo-Caribbean women or African-Caribbean women, for example, will be influenced distinctively by gender. This line of thought has major implications for the way we think about individual identities and what is understood about being an ‘African-Caribbean woman’ or a ‘White woman’, all of which have a direct effect on labour market behaviour. In relation to employment, working identities partly arise out of, but also influence, employment patterns (Lloyd-Evans and Bowlby, 2000). Thus, in relation to the labour market, racialised and gendered identities are performed and re-formed through activities which are part of actually doing a job, as these experiences are central to identity construction. How do racialised and gendered conceptions of identities influence the structure of the informal labour market and the ideas held by institutions and the different types of work deemed appropriate by Trinidadian workers? Understanding how the processes of ‘racialised gendering’ influence an individual’s labour market behaviour and how they are intrinsically communicated within society takes us to another important set of concepts - those of social capital, place and locality.

Social Capital and the Informal Sector: Place, Locality and Networks

Recent research has shown the significance of social networks, ‘social capital’ and locality in the operation of labour markets, as they play a crucial role in the economic and status trajectories of both male and female workers (Putnam, 1993; Fernandez-Kelly, 1995; Granovetter, 1973; Portes, 1995). Social capital is a term which refers to the types of values and internal relationships that a particular group or community might have, such as trust, feelings of reciprocity and mutual assistance, and it is through the social networks both internal and external to a group that social capital is created and maintained. It has recently been argued that a greater understanding of social capital, an asset which is extremely important for poor communities, can inform our understanding of poverty and vulnerability at the grassroots level, as well as assist in the quest for empowerment (Moser, 1996). Whilst Evans (1996) examines the institutional value of social capital, which enables low-income communities to engage with the state, others have highlighted the value of building trust and reciprocity through projects such as urban housing, education and health-care (Ostrom, 1996; Heller, 1996; Brown and Ashman, 1996). In particular, concerns over the influence of human capital in enhancing the potential for income generation has given way to a growing recognition of the importance of social capital in the labour market (Portes, 1995; Portes and Sensenbrenner, 1993; Bowlby, Lloyd-Evans and Mohammad, 1996).

In the British and North America context, research has identified a lack of social capital as a key obstacle facing immigrants in their search for stable employment and it has been suggested that social capital is of equal important in the creation of informal enterprises. As increasingly, the new poverty agenda identifies sustainable livelihoods as a key component of development, it is timely to re-address the informal sector in the light of this new conceptual framework, for two main reasons. Firstly, the continued importance of the informal sector in realising the labour power of the poor in times of economic crisis, and the policy attention paid to enhancing informal productivity in the last decade are salient (ILO, 1995). Secondly, the informal sector’s dependency on social capital in order to operate effectively has to be appreciated.

As labour power has been identified by some as the “poor’s greatest asset” (Moser, 1996: iv), strategies for sustainable livelihoods require improved access to work in times of hardship. As parts of the informal sector are built on local social networks, supported by community loyalty, trust and patronage, it provides a salient st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Gender, Ethnicity and the Informal Sector in Trinidad: An Introduction
• 2 Current Perspectives on Informality, Employment and Development
• 3 Perspectives on Caribbean Development
• 4 Work, Employment and the Informal Sector in Trinidad: An Overview
• 5 Informal Sector Food Production, Distribution and Retailing
• 6 Informal Sector Petty Commodity Production, Service Provision and Retailing
• 7 Gendered and Racialised Spaces: Petty Commodity Trading in Trinidad
• 8 “Like we beggin on de streets”: The Gendering of Street Lives and Working Identities
• 9 Governmental Response to Informal Employment: Micro Level Support as a Strategy for Development
• 10 The Socio-Spatial Geography of the Informal Sector in Trinidad
• Bibliography
• Index