The ILO, the Politics of Statistics, and Changing Perceptions of Informal Work, 1970–Present

Abstract

The article contributes to the history of labor statistics by identifying the social, political, and epistemic conditions that led to the recognition of informal work as a countable form of labor. The article traces the ILO's efforts since the 1970s to capture the initially elusive concept of the informal sector in an internationally recognized statistical definition and to introduce it into national accounts. It also elucidates how the understanding of informal work broke away from its original focus on developing countries and expanded in the 1990s, at a time when the spread of nonstandard employment had led to an increase in informal employment in developed countries as well. By analyzing the decades-long attempts to develop statistics on the informal sector and informal employment, the article illuminates labor as an object of contingent (and contested) statistical definition and also shows how actors representing informal workers mobilized statistical knowledge for political action.

According to recent estimates of the ILO (International Labour Organization/Office), over 60 percent of the world's employed population make their living in the so-called informal economy. This number is based on data for more than one hundred countries across the globe, representing more than 90 percent of persons in employment aged fifteen years and older. Given this impressive finding, one might forget that the term informal sector was barely used before the 1970s and that reliable, directly measured, comprehensive, and comparable statistical data on informal employment was not available until a decade ago.¹ For the ILO, the development of statistics on the informal sector and informal employment has been an important political objective, justifying the organization's involvement in numerous international projects to generate data on informal work.²

This article brings the history of labor and the history of science into conversation by examining the development of statistics on informal work since the 1970s, and the use of quantification as an instrument to generate knowledge and exercise power. While statistical claims refer to objects that are real (e.g., workers), they are, at the same time, a construct reflecting social, political, and scientific conventions (e.g., the long-standing Western premise that women's household labor was not work worth counting). That is why the renowned historian of statistics Alain Desrosières has suggested to speak of “objectivation” instead of objectivity when explaining what statistics do and the scientific authority they convey.³ In his and Sandrine Kott's understanding, to quantify refers to the process of making numbers (instead of just having words as before) from two distinct operations: first, agreeing on certain conventions, approaches, and definitions; and then, measuring.⁴ The resulting numbers, conveyed in statistical form, both describe and create social reality, influencing the perceptions, interpretations, and meanings of the objects they represent. Yet for all their rhetorical authority, statistical descriptions are unstable, changing with the emergence of new methodologies and shifting with changing definitions of the phenomena they aim to picture.

In the case of labor and employment statistics, they have never simply depicted the social reality of working conditions or forms of work. Rather, they exemplify the “scientification of the social,”⁵ the inherently political process that informs and influences common understanding of what counts and is counted as labor. Already starting in the nineteenth century but accelerating in the second half of the twentieth, labor has become a knowledge-based object, with international organizations like the ILO acting as prime sites of both the knowledge production and the accompanying efforts of standard setting on the international level.⁶

The decades-long attempts to develop statistics on the informal sector and informal employment reveal labor as an object of contingent (and contested) statistical definition; they also illuminate how actors representing informal workers mobilized statistical knowledge for political action. The ILO provided an important arena for negotiating processes of defining and measuring informal work. The term informal sector was coined as an alternative concept in development thinking, facilitated by research carried out under the ILO's World Employment Programme (WEP) in the 1970s, albeit without a coherent understanding of what it meant or how it could be defined. The ILO's preliminary attempts toward a feasible statistical definition started in the early 1980s and culminated, in 1993, in an internationally accepted definition of the concept. The spread of informal employment in industrialized countries during the 1990s paved the way for the broadening of the international statistical definitions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Most recently, activist networks representing informal workers have mobilized statistics to propel policies of a formalization of the informal economy.

The Informal Sector as an Alternative Idea and Exploratory Field in Development

The concept of the informal sector emerged in development research in the early 1970s. At that time, development economics was in crisis, as traditional methods based on macroeconomic theories of modernization had largely failed. As a result, the interdisciplinary field of development studies emerged to better reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of developing societies with more concrete approaches.⁷ In this context, the ILO launched the WEP in 1969 as a contribution to the second development decade of the United Nations (UN). The WEP aimed to develop strategies to create productive employment and reduce unemployment and underemployment, two major stumbling blocks to social development and poverty reduction. With the WEP, the ILO gained wide international recognition as one of the leading development agencies.⁸

The idea of the informal sector represented a welcome alternative in development thinking. The then-common distinction between a “modern” and a “traditional” sector was transformed into the dichotomy of “formal” versus “informal.” The informal sector offered an alternative to conventional measurements of economic growth tied to gross national product, as well as to modernization theory's focus on formal employment.⁹ For the ILO, the concept replaced the unsatisfactory notion of “disguised unemployment” with an operational measure to quantify employment insufficiency in developing countries, an objective the ILO had pursued since the postwar era.¹⁰

It was the British social anthropologist Keith Hart who coined the term informal sector. In the second half of the 1960s, Hart conducted a field study in Ghana of men and women in urban areas who provided services in trade, transport, housing, home manufacturing, shipping, and the like. Referring to the work of the renowned economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, he defined these men and women as “small-scale entrepreneurs.”¹¹ Later, Hart conceptualized their economic activities as “informal income opportunities,” “informal economic activities,” “informal employment,” and “informal occupation” taking place in an “informal sector.”¹²

Crucial for the dissemination of the concept was the September 1971 conference titled “Urban Unemployment in Africa” at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex,¹³ then a leading hub for interdisciplinary, alternative approaches to redistribution and poverty.¹⁴ Hart's idea of the informal sector stimulated “fruitful discussions,”¹⁵ with some conference participants adopting an “unorthodox” view of the informal sector as an important factor for future economic progress; no longer was the lack of formal employment understood as the biggest obstacle to development.¹⁶ John Weeks, a lecturer in economics at the University of Sussex, presented “broadly similar ideas.”¹⁷ One year later, he participated in one of the WEP's comprehensive employment missions, codirected by Hans W. Singer and Richard Jolly, two eminent development researchers also based at the influential Institute of Development Studies.¹⁸

During this 1972 mission to Kenya, the concept of the informal sector was tested and played a dominant role in the chapters for which Weeks was primarily responsible in the mission's widely received report.¹⁹ Social scientists from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Nairobi also contributed, suggesting that “a new school of analysis may be emerging,” as the Kenya report put it.²⁰ The report appraised the informal sector rather positively as a potential prosperity factor, characterizing informal economic activities by “ease of entry,” “family ownership of enterprises,” “small scale of operation,” and “unregulated and competitive markets,” among others.²¹

Existing literature distinguishes between “job-based” and “enterprise-based” definitions of informality, with Hart's description belonging to the first definition and the Kenya report to the second.²² It must be emphasized, however, that the representation of informal workers as “entrepreneurs” had played a key role in Hart's understanding and was thus central to the concept from the beginning. In the following years, the notion of the informal small-scale entrepreneur would become appealing to neoliberal celebrations of free enterprise.²³

The new concept of the informal sector, as the ILO proudly noted, gained “wide currency” in development thinking in the 1970s.²⁴ The definition and meaning of the term remained elusive, however, prompting further ILO research and a reorientation of the WEP's “Urbanisation and Employment” subprogram toward the informal sector.²⁵ The research was led by US economist Harold Lubell, who arrived at the ILO in 1971. He was joined two years later by S. V. Sethuraman, who would become one of the ILO's leading experts on the informal sector. Together they launched a series of survey studies that became known as “the urban informal sector programme.”²⁶ The first three studies covered the cities of Calcutta, Dakar, and Bogotá, followed later by surveys in other cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.²⁷ Although exploratory in nature, the surveys designed by Sethuraman and then adapted for each city represented a first attempt to systematically collect information on the informal sector.²⁸

Sethuraman defined the informal sector as a subsector of the urban economy consisting of “small-scale units engaged in the production and distribution of goods and services,”²⁹ excluding agricultural activities.³⁰ The perception of informality as an urban phenomenon was built into the concept from the outset. Like the Kenya report, the urban informal sector studies chose enterprise as the observable unit. However, ILO official Sethuraman acknowledged that this term was “perhaps inappropriate,” since shoeshine boys, street vendors, building caretakers, or parking attendants “can hardly be called an enterprise.”³¹ Nevertheless, he considered an enterprise-based approach most likely to support the ILO's goals of improving employment and income conditions in the informal sector.³²

The urban informal sector studies faced several definitional difficulties, beginning with fitting the observed economic activities into existing classification schemes such as the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities and the International Standard Classification of Occupations. The activities studied did not appear in these international classifications because, as one ILO paper noted, “some of the informal sector occupations and activities seem to be unique to developing countries.”³³ The greatest difficulty, however, was defining a sample frame. The survey studies’ general approach was to construct a sample frame consisting of the eligible units in the whole city or selected sectors of it. But it was not easy to determine what constituted an eligible unit because the smaller the economic unit, the greater the likelihood that it was not recorded anywhere in official records. Therefore, it proved extremely difficult to assemble a meaningful sample that could be studied. If, for a given city, it had been known, for example, that most informal workers were found in certain occupations or activities, the informal sector could have been defined to include only those occupations or activities, but such preexisting information was generally not available.³⁴

The survey studies of the WEP's urban informal sector program hence revealed considerable inadequacy in statistically representing the social reality of informal work in developing countries. As comprehensive statistics seemed crucial to support the assertion of the informal sector's growth potential,³⁵ the ILO pressed ahead with projects on the feasibility of informal sector statistics with the aim of establishing international standards.

Toward an International Statistical Definition of the Informal Sector

At the beginning of the 1980s, the ILO reeled under financial pressure due to the earlier withdrawal of the United States. Moreover, with the rise of neoliberalism and structural adjustment policies, other international organizations, notably the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were gaining prominence on issues of economic growth and labor.³⁶ At the same time, the ILO was confronted with profound changes in the world of work and sought to adapt its recommendations on employment policy accordingly.³⁷

It was against this backdrop that the Thirteenth International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) met in 1982 to revise its recommendations concerning statistics on the labor force, employment, unemployment, and underemployment. In a report prepared for the conference, the ILO explained that especially for developing countries, existing protocols were “neither easy to apply nor particularly meaningful.”³⁸ A resolution adopted by the Thirteenth ICLS therefore called to “account for the informal sector activities, both in developed and developing countries,” among other things.³⁹ Notably, in acknowledging the prevalence of informal work in developed countries, the resolution reflected the public and political attention given to the so-called hidden economy, whose existence advocates of neoliberalism in the early 1980s attributed to overregulation of the formal sector.⁴⁰

The ILO Bureau of Statistics subsequently commissioned two methodological surveys, one in Kerala in India and one in San José in Costa Rica, to test alternative question formulations and to examine the application of the 1982 ICLS resolution “in different cultural settings.”⁴¹ The surveys were designed by ILO officials, while the fieldwork was done by the Kerala Statistical Institute and the Dirección General de Estadística y Censos in Costa Rica, but little progress was made in developing statistics specifically on the informal sector.⁴²

At the Fourteenth ICLS in 1987, the ILO devoted a chapter of its general report to the informal sector,⁴³ and the ICLS supported an oral resolution from the delegate of Mexico “to measure employment outside the formal sector.”⁴⁴ The informal sector was then placed on the agenda of the next ICLS in 1993 as “the first completely new topic” since 1949 to be discussed with the aim of standard setting.⁴⁵ As informal work at the time was no longer seen as a phenomenon limited to developing countries, the ILO carefully ensured that these countries’ perspective was not overshadowed by the voices of industrialized countries. Preferably, a person from a developing country would chair a committee presenting its findings to the 1993 ICLS. Ralf Hussmanns, responsible for the work on the informal sector at the ILO Bureau of Statistics, noted that the “ideal candidate would be a person from an important Latin American country.”⁴⁶

A chair from Latin America reflected a pivot away from Africa toward Latin America for studying the informal sector.⁴⁷ The ILO's Regional Employment Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean had introduced the concept of the informal sector to Latin America at the beginning of the 1970s and contributed to a Latin American theory of informality.⁴⁸ More importantly, the 1986 publication of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto's bestseller The Other Path made the informal sector something of a cause célèbre for neoliberals who imagined small-scale entrepreneurs as the driving forces of a free-market revolution from below.⁴⁹ De Soto's book was disseminated in foundations, think tanks, development agencies, and international organizations advocating for neoliberal policies.⁵⁰ Even the ILO could not avoid de Soto as a reference, although his arguments were grist to the mill of the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies that the ILO fought against.

Maria Martha Malard Mayer, head of the Department of Employment and Income at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, chaired the resulting committee.⁵¹ Their definitions, adopted in a resolution by the Fifteenth ICLS, were included in the 1993 version of the System of National Accounts, the internationally agreed-upon recommendations for measuring economic activity.⁵² According to the resolution, the informal sector consisted of “units engaged in the production of goods or services” aimed at “generating employment and incomes.” These units usually operated “at a low level of organization” and “on a small scale” and had “the characteristic features of household enterprises.” Enterprises could be marginal, with no clear distinction between production activities and other activities, such as subsistence or reproduction activities of the owners; or they could be larger and thus include occasional or even permanent contributing family workers or employees. The common feature of all these heterogeneous manifestations of household enterprises was that their operational relations were based on “casual employment, kinship or personal and social relations rather than contractual arrangements with formal guarantees.”⁵³ With this description, what gave the informal sector its informality might be called “extra-legal regulation.”⁵⁴

This formulation reflected the ILO's limited scope of the informal sector as confined to units that produced for the market. Accordingly, informal sector activities or enterprises had to meet the criteria of production and the categories of household market enterprises as established in the System of National Accounts. Household enterprises engaged exclusively in nonmarket production for own final consumption and unpaid domestic services were therefore excluded.⁵⁵ Housework, care work, and volunteer work, as well as do-it-yourself activities, were seen as noneconomic and thus uncounted, although they had often been included in conceptualizations such as the British sociologist Jonathan Gershuny's theory of the self-service economy,⁵⁶ and feminists’ insistence that reproductive labor be recognized and measured as work. Within the ILO, development feminists involved in the “Programme on Rural Women” overcame the distinction between housework and productive work based on research about informal subsistence labor by rural women, but it would take until 2013 for the ICLS to recognize unpaid reproductive labor as “ ‘own-use production’ ” and thus as “ ‘work.’ ”⁵⁷

Although the 1993 ICLS resolution aimed to set an international standard for all countries, the concept reflected the particular social reality of developing countries. But as Ralf Hussmanns recalled, since “the developed countries . . . were well represented in the committee and engaged actively in the discussions,” the relationship between the concept and measurement of the informal sector and the underground economy was again discussed for “considerable time.”⁵⁸ The idea that informal work might equate to hidden production or concealed employment, however, was mainly a Western view. As a journalist from the internationally distributed Colors magazine asked, did employment in the informal sector now primarily mean “unreported economic activities” and “unlicensed work”?⁵⁹

This had indeed become the emphasis in industrialized countries thanks to advocates of neoliberal ideas, arguing that the hidden economy was an escape route from overregulation. Calls for tax reduction, liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and a flexibilization of labor were echoed in pronouncements by the World Bank, the IMF, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and contributed to a new branch of macroeconomic research to calculate the underground economy's share of the gross national product. However, because these macroeconomic approaches did not utilize interviews or questionnaires and limited themselves to indirect metrics, the nature of the hidden economic activities remained obscure.⁶⁰ The ILO was also interested in quantitative data on the informal sector but considered the usual, direct methods of employment statistics more appropriate to capture it. At the same time, these survey techniques made it possible to learn more about the informal sector as a specific place of production and employment. The ILO therefore insisted on distinguishing between the informal sector and the hidden economy because they reflected “a different socio-economic concern with its own measurement objective” that accordingly required different approaches to quantification and statistical coverage.⁶¹

The 1993 ICLS largely followed this argument by emphasizing that informal sector activities “are not necessarily performed with the deliberate intention of evading the payment of taxes or social security contributions, or infringing labour or other legislations or administrative provisions.”⁶² An earlier terminological suggestion to speak of “business under the open sun”⁶³ underlined that most work in the informal sector was not intentionally concealed but remained absent in official records whether because informal sector entrepreneurs were unaware of existing laws and regulations or could not afford the cost and time required to comply with them, or authorities lacked the resources to enforce existing legal, administrative, or technical regulations.⁶⁴ For these reasons, the ILO considered (il)legality “of limited relevance in defining the informal sector, particularly in the context of developing countries.”⁶⁵ The issue had featured in earlier contributions such as the 1972 Kenya report,⁶⁶ but with its goal of creating employment and income opportunities, the ILO was more interested in the “operational characteristics” than in the legal-administrative aspects of informal sector enterprises and their relations to public authorities.⁶⁷ Nonetheless, in order to accommodate developed countries, the ICLS resolution included nonregistration as a possible criterion for defining informal sector enterprises.⁶⁸ Overall, however, the informal sector resolution of the Fifteenth ICLS in 1993 was a success for both the developing countries and the ILO. While the developing countries established a concept of work that reflected social realities, the ILO successfully made informal work an internationally recognized labor concept and integrated it into the System of National Accounts. In contrast to calculations of the hidden economy, but in line with ILO policy objectives, the informal sector should be statistically captured from a perspective related to income and employment.

The Global Spread of Informality and the Broadening of Definitions

The 1993 ICLS resolution advocated an “enterprise-based” definition of informal work, as the observable unit that provided the basis for the first international statistical definition was (small-scale) enterprises. The notion of informal sector enterprise seemed reasonable because it fit into existing classifications. But while the ICLS was establishing this definition, the ILO was addressing what it called the “dilemma of the informal sector,” namely whether to promote further employment in the informal sector or to plead for more protection and social security at the risk of reducing informal employment possibilities.⁶⁹ The ILO was thus well aware that “enterprise” was a blunt euphemism for a heterogeneous informal sector in which workers mostly lived and toiled in precarious conditions. Renana Jhabvala, the secretary of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a respected and influential association of women informal workers in India,⁷⁰ wrote to the ILO director-general to express her concern “with the limited understanding of the informal sector,” given the “wide variety of workers and types of economic activities,” in “both rural and urban areas.”⁷¹ Against the backdrop of such criticism, the understanding of informality expanded in the 1990s.

A decade of neoliberal labor market policies had already led to a worldwide decline in so-called standard or formal employment. This trend was exacerbated in the 1990s, transforming the prevalence and the perception of the problem of informality. As a 2002 ILO report pointed out, a large proportion of new employment opportunities in developing countries as well as those transitioning away from socialism was in the informal economy. In addition, trends toward decentralization, outsourcing, and subcontracting had increased informal employment in industrialized countries. As a result, the ILO called for “decent work along the entire continuum from the informal to the formal end of the economy.”⁷² The International Labour Conference (ILC) adopted a resolution that now allowed the “informal economy” to encompass “all economic activities by workers and economic units that are—in law or in practice—not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements.”⁷³ Notably, just as the formal economies of industrialized countries were now subjecting workers to atypical, nonstandard, and often precarious employment, the ILO and the ILC universalized the need for decent work.

This sea change in perception also led to a change in the statistical definition of informal work. In 2003, the Seventeenth ICLS discussed new guidelines to complement its 1993 definition. A veteran of the 1993 meeting, French statistician Jacques Charmes, chaired a committee that recommended the recognition of informal work within formal economies. “Informal employment” carried out “in formal sector enterprises, informal sector enterprises, or households” now complemented the conceptual framework.⁷⁴ Adding a job-based definition of informal employment to the existing enterprise-based definition also made “the total number of informal jobs” an observable unit.⁷⁵ The expanded 2003 ICLS definition no longer referred only to production units; now it referred explicitly to workers as well. Thus, in addition to enterprise relations, labor relations became a focus of statistical analysis.

The new guidelines also recognized two important categories of informal labor: agricultural and domestic workers. They urged countries to develop “appropriate definitions for informal jobs in agriculture.”⁷⁶ Agricultural activities had not been included in the 1993 ICLS definition due to fears that doing so would greatly expand the scope and cost of conducting surveys, especially as many countries already had established systems of agricultural censuses and surveys.⁷⁷ A decade later, deteriorating working conditions in agriculture were a major concern of the ILO.⁷⁸ In the new context of promoting decent work, it now viewed obstacles to data collection as political rather than practical problems.

Regarding paid domestic workers, the guidelines recommended that they should be treated “separately as part of a category called ‘households.’ ”⁷⁹ Under the 1993 resolution, such workers had not been consistently included in informal sector statistics because the ICLS could not reach agreement on the topic.⁸⁰ This indecision reflected a common belief that women's labor in intimate workplaces such as private households was incomparable to other occupations. However, the 2003 creation of the separate category of households suggested that commodified forms of household and care work would receive more recognition in the new millennium. In 2011, the ILC adopted a convention on domestic work.⁸¹

In sum, the ICLS's expanded conceptual framework encompassed both the notion of the informal sector and that of informal employment; the latter was of particular interest to developed countries.⁸² The spread of informal employment in informal as well as formal economies had made informal work into a global problem, affecting developing, transition, and developed countries alike. Suggestions to speak of “unprotected employment” instead of informal employment reflected a change in the perception of informality.⁸³ Although the ICLS rejected this idea, the discussion clearly showed the new focus on the precariousness of informal work and decent work deficits.

Instrumental in the expanded statistical definition of informality was a statistical expert body known as the Delhi Group. The Delhi Group was established in 1997 by the UN Statistical Commission,⁸⁴ after the informal sector had been identified as one of the “critical problems in economic statistics” and the measurement of informal sector activities as “a most pressing need” for policymaking, especially in developing and transition countries.⁸⁵ The Indian Central Statistical Organization, which had gathered a wealth of information on statistical methods for designing surveys and collecting data in the informal sector, offered to host: hence, the Delhi Group.⁸⁶ Participants were some two dozen experts from statistical offices around the world, especially from developing countries. Members also included international bodies like the Asian Development Bank, the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the Statistical Institute for Asia and the Pacific, the UN Statistics Division, and the ILO (represented with its senior statistician Ralf Hussmanns), along with NGOs, think tanks, research institutes, and organizations representing informal workers such as SEWA.⁸⁷

The Delhi Group helped advance statistical inquiry toward the insecurity and precarity of informal work. In 2001, reacting to the inability of an enterprise-based definition to capture all aspects of the increasing informalization of work, they concluded that “the definition and measurement of employment in the informal sector needs to be complemented with a definition and measurement of informal employment.”⁸⁸ They also recommended that countries test the new concept of informal employment and the job-based definition, respectively. Subsequently, several countries—Georgia, Brazil, Mexico, India, and the Republic of Moldavia—followed this recommendation, and, as one ILO report noted, “the results of the tests were encouraging.”⁸⁹ The operational criteria used to define informal jobs—no employment contract, no social security coverage, no paid annual or sick leave, no protection against arbitrary dismissal, and the casual nature of the work—clearly elucidate the difference from the earlier concept of the informal sector, which mainly emphasized enterprises’ small size and possible nonregistration.⁹⁰ The Delhi Group contributed to a chapter titled “Informal Aspects of the Economy” in the 2008 System of National Accounts,⁹¹ and it initiated and collaborated on a 2013 manual that remains the main source of technical and practical guidance to national statistical offices and other producers of statistics on the informal sector and informal employment.⁹²

Statactivism and the Formalization of the Informal Economy

Beyond the global spread of informal employment and the broadening of statistical definitions, new global activist networks emerged in the 1990s to provide visibility and support to workers in the informal economy. Particularly influential is Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), which was heavily involved in the work of the Delhi Group.⁹³ WIEGO uses statistics as a political strategy and successfully lobbies at the international level to improve and further disseminate statistics on informal work. Its founding members include Harvard lecturer Martha Chen, SEWA's Renana Jhabvala, statistical expert Jacques Charmes, and former ILO official S. V. Sethuraman. WIEGO came out of the 1996 fight on the ILO convention on home work, as activists had learned through the process that statistics mattered in the making of global labor standards and for the visibility of workers.⁹⁴

From the beginning, WIEGO's founders recognized “the power of statistics” to draw attention to the scope and situation of workers in the informal economy and to provide statistical data for informal workers to use in their discussions with policymakers.⁹⁵ As WIEGO “seeks to mainstream” the measurement of the informal economy in official statistics, it strives to improve classifications, concepts, and methods for data collection, as well as the availability, reliability, and international comparability of data.⁹⁶ It also advocates for countries to include informal employment in their statistical programs, tries to find donors for statistical activities, and provides training on informal economy statistics to statisticians and data users. In addition, WIEGO works with organizations of informal workers and their networks, including SEWA and several associations of street vendors, home-based workers, domestic workers, and waste pickers.⁹⁷

WIEGO's statistical experts and consultants engage in “scientific political activism.”⁹⁸ They are highly decorated scientists who contribute expertise to their special field of knowledge but at the same time use their scientific authority to pursue very determined political objectives. An evaluation report of WIEGO's statistics program in 2009 therefore emphasized that “the use of statistics to drive arguments is not uncommon among activists, but to place it at the forefront of their work agenda is rare.”⁹⁹ This mobilization of statistics has been called “statactivism,” a neologism to point to social movements’ use of statistics as a form of contentious and/or emancipative action.¹⁰⁰

WIEGO's statactivism is based on the belief that statistics are key to drive policy initiatives. “Numbers are needed to influence policy and change the situation for women around the world,” observes Joann Vanek, senior adviser on statistics and former director of the WIEGO Statistics Programme.¹⁰¹ A first and crucial step is accessibility to statistical knowledge: “In fact,” one WIEGO working paper noted, “many countries began to collect data on the informal sector and informal employment because international definitions became available which they could use.”¹⁰²

Since its founding in 1997, WIEGO's statactivism has relied on collaboration with such bodies as the UN Statistics Division and the Delhi Group,¹⁰³ but its most important partner in its statistical endeavors has been the ILO. One of WIEGO's first contacts within the ILO was the ILO Bureau of Statistics, to which it offered its expertise.¹⁰⁴ Some WIEGO statistical experts, in particular Jacques Charmes, had been involved in the development of informal sector statistics from the outset. In the new millennium, WIEGO has consistently played an important role in the development of statistics on all aspects of the informal economy and has joined together with the ILO to produce a flagship publication on the size, scope, and types of informal work across the globe, titled Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. The most recent edition in 2018 included differentiated data for more than one hundred countries, as mentioned at the beginning of this article.¹⁰⁵

Statactivism has also led WIEGO to expand its influence through the exchange of know-how and expertise. In 2008, for example, WIEGO's Statistics Programme organized an expert workshop at Harvard University to explore data collection on all forms of informal and nonstandard employment in OECD countries. The main goal of such efforts is to raise awareness of the ongoing informalization of work around the globe, which affects both developing and developed countries, and to design statistical approaches accordingly. Following the workshop, WIEGO successfully advocated with a workshop participant at the Eighteenth ICLS in 2008 for a revision of the International Classification on Status in Employment to better reflect the changing structure of the labor force.¹⁰⁶ The ICLS subsequently made this topic a priority for ILO work on labor statistics.¹⁰⁷

In 2015, the ILC adopted a recommendation to formalize the informal economy with the aim to “facilitate the transition of workers and economic units from the informal to the formal economy,” “promote the creation, preservation and sustainability of enterprises and decent jobs in the formal economy,” and “prevent the informalization of formal economy jobs.”¹⁰⁸ In the process leading to the recommendation, WIEGO together with SEWA not only participated in the ILO's preliminary expert meeting in 2013 but also organized regional workshops in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where informal workers could give their input to develop a platform, which subsequently was shared at the ILC 2014.¹⁰⁹ In 2015, WIEGO supported a delegation of thirty-two representatives of informal workers to participate in the ILC discussion on the adoption of the recommendation “to ensure that their voices were directly heard again.”¹¹⁰ The ILO, which called the recommendation “the first international labour standard specifically for the informal economy,”¹¹¹ believes that the regular collection of statistical data on the size and composition of the informal economy is a key element in monitoring and assessing progress toward formalization.¹¹² WIEGO thus not only supported and represented informal workers in their fight for an international labor standard but also contributed to develop the statistical knowledge that underpins the recommendation and will assess its impact. WIEGO's statactivism continues, as it is currently involved in the revision of the statistical standards on informality, the proposal for which is to be submitted to the ICLS in 2023.

WIEGO mobilizes statistics because it believes that what counts and is counted as (informal) work is foundationally a matter of numbers. One could argue that the current perception of informality as a common problem of developing and developed countries alike has much to do with the availability of numbers based on international statistical standards that make it possible to compare and relate phenomena of informality and informalization on a global scale.

Statistics (of informal work) are inherently political because they enable certain perceptions and interpretations about the social world (of work) and make others less plausible. That is, numbers help make a particular argument more robust because, as objectifications, they are a way of making things “real.” Or, to put it another way, numbers make it harder to ignore a particular social phenomenon. Accordingly, statistics open up scope for political action. Statistics can change the perception of reality simply by their presence, and when they do, they become a powerful rhetoric and a transformative tool. In this regard, WIEGO has recognized the importance of quantification from the beginning, emphasizing the power of statistics and the influence of numbers on policy.

At the same time, statistics tend to hide the complex epistemic, social, and political contexts and the contentious negotiation processes that made their production possible in the first place. Numbers often evoke immediate evidence and seem to speak for themselves. Statistics’ supposedly apolitical and neutral image has much to do with this disappearance of their coming-into-being. The scientific expertise and authority required to produce the numbers, in turn, commonly reinforce the trust in them. For this reason, WIEGO has taken advantage of its close relationships with renowned scholars and leading institutions and has invested heavily in becoming a valued collaborator with international bodies that also deal with the production of statistics on the informal economy, particularly the ILO.

However, mobilizing statistics requires significant effort to make a difference in the social world. Even if the numbers seem to speak for themselves, to be politically effective they must be widely disseminated and recognized. The example of WIEGO is illuminating because it shows what statactivism looks like in practice: It is not limited to producing numbers. Rather, the numbers must be actively circulated and used to lend plausibility to and advance political demands. To achieve this, access to and credibility with influential actors and institutions are essential. This is the reason why WIEGO has actively offered its statistical expertise to political authorities and international organizations from the very beginning.

Studying statactivism and the development of (labor or employment) statistics is instructive because statistics, as instruments of knowledge and power, capture and at the same time transform social realities and perceptions (in the world of work). This means that statistics are both indicators and factors of social change. Engaging in conversation with the history of science in order to analyze and historicize the process of the creation and impact of statistical data in the social world is therefore a worthwhile endeavor for labor historians.

I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful suggestions and Seth Rockman for his invaluable support.

Notes

References