Jo Swinson withNaila Kabeer (LSE Inequalities Institute), Laila Iskander (former Minister, Egypt; 40 years with Cairo’s recyclers) and Laura Alfers (International Coordinator, WIEGO). Thursday 30 April 2026, 13:00 to 14:34 BST
This was the second conversation in the exploration of the Inequality Emergency, picking up the thread from the 22 April dialogue and turning it toward the workers and economies that mainstream measurement keeps out of view.
Naila began with some background on the shift in ILO terminology around 2003, from informal sector to informal employment. The shift, she argued, was precisely about moving away from establishment-based definitions and toward the conditions under which workers actually work. “Informal workers” was always shorthand for those conditions. The deeper move is to spell out why informality is so central to inequality.
She traced the architecture of invisibility back to GDP itself, which conceptualised work as visible pay or profit and ignored the vast majority of workers who labour seasonally, irregularly, or on their own account. Standard employment, she observed, is in fact non-standard employment for most of the world. Informality is not chosen; or where it is chosen, the choice is constrained, particularly for women whose responsibility for unpaid care work and whose mobility restrictions narrow their options.
“The vast majority of people were essential workers, were people who, if they withdrew their labour, our normal lives would collapse. And yet, when things go back to normal, we forget about the essential backbone that they represent to daily life.” Naila Kabeer
Naila pressed on the idea of “skill.” Skills carried in bodies and traditions, learned through family and place rather than certification, are systematically not recognised as skills. She drew the gendered geography sharply: in richer countries the gender gap in wages opens at the glass ceiling; in poorer countries it opens at the sticky floor. The sticky floor is its own metaphor, because no matter how hard a poor woman works in the informal economy, she will not escape it. And gender is not the only axis. Caste, race, indigeneity all sorts the labour hierarchy. Domestic work, the most informalised of informal work, is everywhere done by the most marginalised identity in that country.
“When we’re talking about inequality, we need to really bear in mind the way in which identity, endowments, inherited forms of disadvantage are what describe, what characterises those at the bottom of the economy.” Naila Kabeer
She closed her opening with a distinction worth carrying forward. There are familiar challenges, the long fight against the erosion of labour rights, where we know roughly what to do. And there are challenges that take us into unknown territory: automation, AI, the gig economy. WIEGO’s standpoint should remain that of informal workers, she argued, but its perspective needs to widen. Today’s formal workers will be tomorrow’s informal workers. The fight needs bridges to the formal labour movement before complacency forecloses solidarity.
“AI and technology automation has the potential to free us from the realm of necessity. But it is not taking us to the realm of freedom. Instead, the people who own these technologies are buying themselves beautiful homes, going to outer space, having expensive weddings in Venice. What about the rest of us?” Naila Kabeer, drawing on Marx
Jo picked up the public-good framing of essential work, drawing the parallel with nature: value that is not accruing in any one place gets taken for granted, and the assumption that anyone can do it slides easily into the assumption that the work itself is unskilled. Care work, she noted, is the obvious site of this misrecognition. The act of feeding or changing or cleaning is measurable; the dignity, the emotional labour, the multitude of skills that allow it to be done well are not. The structures of measurement decide what counts as value, and AI is reproducing that asymmetry: a massive lost opportunity in terms of who benefits.
“Anyone can do it, but not anyone can do it well. And yet we don’t capture that value because we don’t have some kind of nice tick box where we can measure it.” Jo Swinson, on the value of care work
Laila brought the conversation into a single city and a single trade, told in the long arc that only forty years of work allow. Eighty years ago, rural farmers from southern Egypt came up to Cairo and instituted what has continued ever since: door-to-door waste collection, every day, without interruption, at the doorsteps of the rich. The city has grown from 2 million to 22 million people. For the first forty years there was no municipal service. The recyclers did the work quietly, growing with the city, evolving from pig breeders into recyclers of plastic, paper, cardboard, tin, aluminium, and glass.
Then, in 1984, the government decided to formalise them. “Formalisation” in this telling meant determining who they could serve, where, and at what price; curbing their expansion; managing licences opaquely; impounding trucks; levying fines. Laila’s point landed sharply: the way the state managed the so-called informal system was itself thoroughly informal. The vocabulary of formal and informal collapses into a question about who is permitted to make the rules.
“For 80 years, these people have been protecting us from cholera. They have been our public health agents. I’d much rather call them essential, unrecognised, investors in the local economy, because what they’ve done with their money is investment par excellence.” Laila Iskander
She listed what they had built: compactors, granulators, palletisers, agglomerators, warehouses, trucks. Six neighbourhoods which serve as hubs (the European concept would be transfer stations) where materials harvested from the city are sorted, traded, compacted, consolidated, and channelled to the formal manufacturing industries that depend on them. They have adjusted to oil-price-driven plastic markets in ways no formal business could match. They live in solid brick buildings that hold the family, the warehouse, and the garage together. None of them live in shanty towns.
And yet the new waste-management law and authority repeat the old script. The proposal on the table is still: licence them, register them, contract them, but not for their protection. The motivation is to know how much they earn so they can be taxed.
Jo connected the story to Elinor Ostrom’s long argument that people get around problems and organise themselves collectively, and the structures that present themselves as the only legitimate forms of order miss what is already working.
Laura began with the productive contradiction at the heart of WIEGO’s work. WIEGO measures, which means it puts people into boxes; and WIEGO organises, which means it tries to break boxes open. Measurement gives informal workers visibility in statistical infrastructure; movement-building requires the categories to dissolve so that workers can act as workers, full stop, before capital divides them.
“We’re busy putting people into boxes, but at the same time we’re busy breaking people out of boxes. We’re trying to create links with the formal labour movement, with the cooperative movement, between workers at the bottom of the economic pyramid and those in other statuses, so that power can be built.” Laura Alfers, WIEGO
Laura told a story from fifteen years ago, her first conference in Johannesburg, where a leading South African sociologist asked her how WIEGO’s framing would change if the lens were inequality rather than poverty reduction. She had no answer at the time, but the question has stayed with her. To have inequality now squarely on the international agenda is obviously good but a concern is the crowding-out effect. When the gaze goes to the wealthy and to the macro structures (and rightly so, the wealth tax and the UN tax treaty are not optional), it can pull attention away from what is happening at the other end of the income distribution. Mike Rogan’s work in West Africa, she noted, has shown women in the informal sector paying nearly 50% of their income in tolls, fines, and fees. That is taxation in fact if not in name.
“Going forward, widespread informality may hold back the recovery to a green, inclusive, and resilient development path. Squarely, informality is the problem here, not anything else, not the structural economic conditions that create the situation. Then think about the waste workers in the zabaleen. What could be a greener, more inclusive, more resilient future than what those communities have built?” Laura Alfers, quoting and rebutting the World Bank’s 2022 Long Shadow of Informality
Her closing point was the one that lit the chat. There is no macroeconomic theory which understands the behaviour of labour markets dominated by self-employment. James Heintz wrote this up in 2009 and the question has fallen off the radar. The cities of the global South, the streets of Cairo, the markets of Ghana, the homes of India and Bangladesh are not in the model. There are traditions that speak to it (Gandhian economic thought which inspires SEWA, the popular economy in Latin America), but they sit in the box of post-colonial thought rather than entering the live debate about economic alternatives.
Jo brought the dialogue into wider company before bringing Naila back. The week before, she had been in Geneva at an ILO event led by Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, where the roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth was being presented. The question on the table there was the question on the table here: what are the different models and mindsets we need to move beyond GDP? Naila’s work on the UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP made her the right voice to answer.
Naila offered the same tension exists inside her own institute, between those who would have everyone focus on extreme wealth and those who refuse to let go of the people at the bottom. Her answer was not either-or but both, complementarity rather than competition. She needs the wealth scholars to position the worsening situation of the very poor against the concentrations at the top. The wealthy are also “micro pictures”: individuals who have made their money through nefarious, legal, and other means, and who need to be named.
She gave a careful sketch of the Beyond GDP work in which she sits. GDP, in her telling, is not the enemy. It is a measure of means. The problem is that we never ask what the means are for. Beyond GDP says: if we do not tick the boxes on health, education, poverty, inequality, safety, security, sustainability, the high level of GDP is useless. The momentum (the Beyond GDP panel, the G20 inequality work, the Eradication of Poverty roadmap, WIEGO itself) represents an international unhappiness with the way the world has gone. The oligarchs who own the platforms can shape popular narratives about where the fault lies. The work is to come together under different umbrellas.
“Even the millionaires are realising that we live in a very unjust and unsustainable world. Patriotic millionaires: millionaires who want to be taxed. That’s not something we would have heard of twenty years ago.” Naila Kabeer
She closed with an image that travelled. In the late 1980s she had proposed, for a participatory poverty valuation, an indicator drawn from Bangladesh: how many meals did you eat yesterday? Today the Guardian carries that same indicator from inside Britain. The macro and the micro have to link up. We are doing the hard work because the macro people will not.
Jo carried Naila’s thread forward before turning to Laila. The unequal model the UK has exported to so many countries, she observed, is hitting home; the same is true of the debt crises long familiar in the global South, now becoming a serious issue across rich countries too. It is depressing that hardship has to come home before solidarity becomes possible. But the point of hope is exactly that: the potential for greater solidarity, opening as the costs of an unequal system land everywhere.
Asked then what change she had seen across forty years, Laila described a mixed picture. At the local level, in cities of the global South, recognition is growing: the link between clean cities, public health, and the work of recyclers is being made. The dominant government and international narrative is still loud, however, and there is, in parallel, what she called a hypocritical game at the international level.
“Industrialised countries in the north export their waste to countries in the South. The data is clear. The routes are known. There is no denial. But it is masked under the hypocrisy of trade. And in parallel, those same countries design mechanisms that prevent us from exporting our manufactured products unless we can prove our value chain is net zero. They export their waste to us; we cannot export our products to them.” Laila Iskander, on CBAM (the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism)
Recyclers are organising internationally, and recognition is growing in the international debates. But the structural mechanisms designed in the North continue to load the costs of decarbonisation onto the South.
Jo extended Laila’s point. The CBAM example is one of many. Emissions reductions are claimed in places where consumption is not counted; anything deemed problematic is outsourced; and the double standard travels back as something else. Some of the politicians putting these mechanisms forward, she noted, are doing so with good intentions but with very little appreciation of the full extent of the issue. The visibility of the pattern matters.
Laura answered the same question with a difficult honesty. The rise of authoritarianism and the closing of civic space have made it hard for the workers WIEGO supports to leverage even the small gains they have made. WIEGO’s monitoring of global shocks (the 2008 crisis, COVID, and now climate) reveals workers in the informal economy absorbing the impact, and the answer they always offer (organise) is itself difficult when people are struggling. And yet she sees the space for solidarity opening: waste pickers with the environmental movement, domestic workers with the labour movement. The biggest changes have always been made in coalition.
Federico took the title of the dialogue and pressed on it. Many of the grass-rooted initiatives he works with, social and solidarity economies, popular economies, are themselves invisible economies. Production is measured in a way that makes them disappear, and they face two compounding threats. First, policy frameworks reproduce the classical economy and erect barriers to alternatives even when those alternatives demonstrably work. Second, social solidarity economy is increasingly being replaced, at the global level, by social entrepreneurship, with all the difference that single substitution implies.
“In the first there are collective subjects. In the second there are productive units that compete among each other rather than organise themselves. Public policies to overcome informality, in Latin American formalisation policy for example, give law and credit to productive units to escape poverty, but not to consolidate the collective subject, the collective business, the solidarity that is grass-rooted in the community.” Federico Parra
Mike named a narrative that has become uncritical orthodoxy in development. Countries with high informality also have high inequality. From this correlation, the inference is drawn that informality causes inequality, and the policy response that follows is to remove informality through narrow formalisation. The work he and colleagues have done, particularly on tax, shows formalisation in this mode often does more harm than good when basic regulation is wrong.
“It leads to magical thinking that by doing away with the informal economy we will achieve our national development goals or the SDGs. It leads us to believe we can do something about inequality without improving the working conditions or livelihoods of the vast majority of workers in the world.” Mike Rogan
His structural point: we now have the statistical tools to make nuanced connections between informal earnings and inequality, but we lack comprehensive household micro-data that captures total household income alongside types of employment. Without that, the case from the bottom is hamstrung. The wealth-tax conversation gets all the airtime; building up from below gets too little.
“These stories of informal success possibly speak to the presence of other forms of modernity that coexist, modernities that are indigenous to Africa or to India or beyond, evolved over millennia, often informed by animist beliefs and the need to manage uncertainty. They were crushed by colonialism, further crushed by globalisation, but they did not fully disappear. If we are going to be formalising these systems, we are eroding precisely what made them resilient over millennia.” Nicola Robins
Nicola’s offering was a working hypothesis: what we are calling resilience in the second economy is the residue of older modernities that were never extinguished. To formalise without seeing them is to continue the erasure of indigenous knowledge under the cover of good intentions.
Nash offered three small points carrying considerable weight. First, language and framing. Words like “invisible” and “shadow” are policy-space inventions; on the streets of Manila or any city across the South, these economies are entirely visible. The vocabulary itself does the invisibilising.
“We come to look at economic growth in almost a cultish way, like we all worship in this church of economic growth, which seems to excuse all the harms. We don’t ask anymore: who is the growth for?” Nash Tysmans
Second, the cult of growth. The dilemma WIEGO holds about measurement is only a dilemma when measurement is taken up nefariously, to tax workers rather than protect them. The deeper move is to imagine economic growth oriented toward letting us live better and longer together. Third, scale. The default frame says we must scale our economies. Nash’s organising work with street vendors says creativity happens in small ways, in communities, and is closer to indigenous practice than to the gigantism of growth.
She offered the Anishinaabe concept of sintering as a frame: how to live within our differences while also recognising that we share a world, including with the more-than-human beings that allow us to live and that we rarely include in labour-rights conversations.
Jo picked the cult-of-growth image up and carried it further. There is something almost wilful about the unquestioning loyalty: even where the contradictions are obvious, we refuse to see them, both in terms of our own well-being and in terms of the lives of the other beings we share the planet with. We are interconnected, we depend on them; we are not living up to our side of the bargain.
Andrew opened with the disarming line that as a trained economist he was fully qualified to tell us exactly how the world does not work, and reached for the same image as Nash, sharpened. If we exist within this economic framework, he said, we are religious: we have a Vatican, heretics, high priests, scriptures, all delineating a fiction we cannot break out of because everyone is living inside it.
“Words mean things. So, what would change if we treated informal workers, not as marginal labour and not as invisible, but actually gave them names: public health agents, infrastructure providers, recyclers, investors, city makers? In whatever role we play, particularly publicly, we introduce ourselves, we wear a name badge. Now if somebody calls me Andy, I correct them. So, I think there’s a way of introducing informal labour in the community it’s in and naming it as essential, giving it an essential name.” Andrew Kelly
His proposal was modest in scale and large in implication. Not enormous trade unions, but groups of twenty people doing the same job in a hospital or on a street, agreeing a name and carrying it proudly. Not creating value, signifying the value that already exists. The point of the name is to be able to organise around it, and to keep it visible enough that when the work disappears (as it did when COVID showed us who was essential) the disappearance becomes legible to everyone else too.
Laila answered with a story. Two years ago, in Cairo they piloted exactly this. Jo set up the move: she loved Andrew’s point about how language shapes our very thinking and noted that the reframing thread had run through several of the contributions; Laila’s own work in Cairo around how the recyclers are named was the obvious next place to go. The community decided they did not want to be called zabaleen any longer (the Arabic word means garbage collector and carries a derogatory edge). They approached four ministries (environment, labour, local development, interior) and asked for the name on the back of their national ID cards (where every Egyptian adult’s occupation is recorded) to be changed to “recycler.” The four ministries agreed. The Ministry of Labour required the workers to sit a qualifying exam to be allowed even the dignity of the title “garbage collector.” The pilot adapted the test, applied it to a sample of 300, and 300 collectors now run around Cairo with proper ID cards calling them recyclers. The next step would be national rollout. The ministries proceeded to forget about it.
“We pretend like all formal systems are so formal. They’re not. So, they proceeded to forget all about it.” Laila Iskander
Jo brought Laura back to her own dilemma about whether to use the existing economic models to make the case. The example she drew was care work: the way unpaid care is instrumentalised inside growth-led arguments (childcare gets women back to work, women back to work raises GDP) reaches the conclusion by foregoing the point. Care, in a different framing, is the organising principle.
“Sometimes you have to make a case in a way that you can win the argument, but you don’t want to forget what the real objective is. Care is the point. It is what we are here for. If you’re a recycler, you’re engaging in care work: literally taking care of the things that we have, making sure these valuable materials are not wasted. It’s a move from an extractive mindset to one that is regenerative and literally careful, full of care.” Jo Swinson
Naila’s final intervention pulled the threads together. Mainstream macroeconomics, she said, is built on significant exclusions: unpaid care work, ecological resources, the distribution of wealth, and the difference between contributions to GDP we would welcome (vaccines, care) and those we would not (armaments, oil spills, pollution). Until the macroeconomic model takes seriously what the economy is for, it will continue to benefit those already in privileged positions.
“Growth has been a lie. I find it very hard, as someone who has argued all my life in a very instrumental way, this is good for growth, more and more I am abandoning that language. I talk in terms of human needs, of well-being, of dignity. Growth does not guarantee that. It could if it were done well. We could have a system that grew the things we valued and de-grew the things we don’t.” Naila Kabeer
On indigenous knowledge: capitalism values the opposite of what indigenous cultures value. Capitalism prizes competition and individualism; indigenous cultures are built on interdependence with each other and with nature. And then there is AI, the other end of the knowledge spectrum, consuming staggering amounts of energy and water. “I’m not sure why we are continuing to promote this form of technology. It is the most environmentally destructive technology, and yet all we talk about is the wonderful things it can do.”
“Numbers without stories are meaningless. But stories without a few numbers can just be stories, your story versus my story. I would like to see numbers that help us distinguish between minority views and majority views, frequency, all of that.” Naila Kabeer
And on policy, she offered a clean threefold frame that gathered the conversation: pre-distribution, distribution, redistribution. The wealth-tax and illicit-flows people release the funding that funds social protection and conditions of work. The two ends are not in competition, as long as no one loses sight of the other.
“The tension we have to bear in mind: do the marginalised value the margins, or do they want to escape the margins? Sometimes both, in different proportions, which is exactly what the policy needs to know.” Naila Kabeer
Jo closed by drawing two threads. The first was Naila’s formula: growing what we value and de-growing what we do not. The same logic applies to informality: not a binary, all-bad situation, but a question of what is valued inside it that we want to learn from and what is causing harm we can act on differently. The second was the care around language. The dialogue had asked, repeatedly and from multiple angles, what some of these terms mean, where they come from, and how they are shepherding our thoughts. The thread of the next conversation is already laid.
Naming as recognition. From Nash’s critique of “invisible” and “shadow” to Andrew’s “city makers” to Laila’s recyclers and the popular economy in Latin America. Naming is not aesthetic. It opens or closes the space for organising and protection.
The micro and the macro have to link up. Naila’s line, but it threads through Laura’s crowding-out worry and Mike’s data critique. The wealth tax, the UN tax treaty, and the structural redirection of public procurement are essential. So is the unfair tax burden on women in the informal sector at the other end. Both ends of the income distribution have to stay in view.
The realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Naila’s Marxian frame, picked up by Renata via Sen and Nicola on the difference between liberal individual freedom and the freedom of deep humanity. Automation could free us. Right now, it is concentrating the freedom in very few hands.
The cult of growth and beyond GDP. Nash, Andrew, Naila. Growth as religion. The point of the means is what we can do with them. Beyond GDP, multidimensional poverty, the wealth-distribution lens, all converge.
Older modernities and indigenous knowledge. Nicola’s working hypothesis. What we are calling resilience may be the residue of older modernities never fully extinguished. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s grammar of animacy, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s sintering, Robert Macfarlane’s rivers. Reading list of the dialogue.
Solidarity across the divide. Today’s formal workers will be tomorrow’s informal workers. WIEGO’s May Day statement (released the day after this dialogue) argues that all workers must be seen as one group, or capital wins. The bridges to the formal labour movement and the cooperative movement are the work.
Social solidarity economy versus social entrepreneurship. Federico’s sharpest substitution. The first builds collective subjects. The second produces competing units. Latin American formalisation policy carries the tension internally. The policy framing of “new economy” is the next conversation.
Care as organising principle. Jo and Laura. Care reframes the recycler, the domestic worker, the carer of the old and the young, and the relationship to the more-than-human world. The instrumental case for care work (it raises GDP) gets lost when care is the point.