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A Sem ena Werq (Wax and Gold) Open Dialogue
An Impact Trust Open Dialogue with Laura Affers (WIEGO), Dr Laila Iskander and Professor Naila Kabeer moderated by Jo Swinson, Partners for a New Economy
The G20’s inequality emergency report counts the wealth gap. It does not count the recognition gap. More than 60% of the world’s workers earn their living in conditions of informality – not because they have chosen to stand outside the system, but because laws and institutions were never designed to see them. All labour law assumes a formal employer-employee relationship. When that relationship does not exist, the architecture of worker protection simply falls away.
These workers are not illegal. They are unrecognised. This is not an accident but a structural feature of today’s economies, reproducing inequality as powerfully as tax rules or financial deregulation. Around two billion people work in the informal economy: waste pickers, street vendors, domestic workers, home-based producers, construction workers without contracts, platform workers without protections. In much of the Global South, informality is the norm, accounting for the majority of all work. In the Global North, similar dynamics appear through gig work, zero-hours contracts and the deliberate casualisation of labour. The conditions vary. The structural logic is the same: work without recognition, contribution without protection, economic participation without political voice.
During COVID-19, many of these workers were suddenly declared essential – key workers, in fact. They kept cities clean, supplied food and provided care, often with no protection or safety net. Once the immediate crisis eased, they slipped back into invisibility. Today, immigration enforcement politics are again exposing how deeply economies rely on workers the formal system does not acknowledge. Visibility seems to arrive only in moments of crisis. The question is: what would it take to make it permanent?
This dialogue builds on the Inequality Emergency conversation that engaged with the G20 report’s macro diagnosis and the proposed International Panel on Inequality (IPI). Here, we look from the ground up – from the perspective of those most affected by the inequality emergency and least visible in the systems created to address it.
Three growing pressures make this dialogue important and urgent:
1. The structural production of invisibility. The phrase “informal workers” has long implied that the problem lies with the workers themselves, as if they are informal by nature or by choice. A crucial shift is underway: from “informal workers” to “workers in conditions of informality.” This moves the focus from people to structures – legal frameworks that do not recognise certain kinds of work, institutional arrangements that exclude them, and economic models that treat them as residual rather than foundational. Understanding this shift is essential to understanding what the inequality emergency looks like for most of the world’s working people.
2. The question growing in volume: Is employment still a pathway out of poverty? The G20 report assumes that better conditions, stronger protections and reduced inequality can restore employment as a route to dignity and security. Yet technological change, platform capitalism and the erosion of labour protections are calling that assumption into question. In-work poverty is rising in many richer economies. In poorer ones, informality has not faded with development but deepened. If employment is no longer a reliable pathway out of poverty, how should we rethink inequality – and the institutions we are building to address it?
3. Informality, democracy and civic space. Highly unequal countries are far more likely to face democratic backsliding. Less attention is given to who is excluded from democratic participation by the structures of informality themselves. Workers in conditions of informality are largely absent from the policy processes that shape their lives. They are not represented in the institutions – trade unions, employer bodies, regulatory frameworks – through which labour’s voice usually enters democratic space. Meanwhile, the social movements that have organised informal workers over the past three decades are among the most significant democratic innovations of our time. Understanding how they build power – and what threatens them – is key to understanding the link between inequality and democratic resilience.
This dialogue sits within The Impact Trust’s 2026 theme of sem ena werq – the Ethiopian concept of wax and gold, where speech has a surface meaning and a deeper truth beneath.
The core question is not how to change workers so they fit the system, but how to redesign systems – legal, institutional, economic – so they start from the reality of how people actually live and work.
Laura Alfers leads WIEGO and its global network of membership-based organizations of workers in informal employment. She joined WIEGO in 2010 and has worked across research, programme development and strategy. From 2017 to 2024 she served as Director of the Social Protection Programme, where she helped grow the team and expand WIEGO’s work on social protection, childcare and workers’ health. During this time, she worked closely with worker leaders and global partners to strengthen the case for inclusive social protection systems and more responsive public services. She also initiated the “Challenging Economic Orthodoxies” project, helping to reposition workers in informal employment within macroeconomic and fiscal policy discussions. She has also served as Senior Informal Economy Advisor to UNDP and as a consultant to bilateral donors during the COVID-19 crisis. Laura holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an MA from Rhodes University. At the heart of her work is a belief that worker organising, knowledge and practical innovation offer essential insights into building more equitable and resilient economic systems.
Dr Laila Iskandar was the Minister of State for Urban Renewal and Informal Settlements in Egypt from July 2014-September 2015 and Minister of State for Environmental Affairs from 2013-2014. Prior to holding public office, she was a leading member of civil society both nationally and internationally, working with youth, women and children in livelihood programs in informal urban settlements and deprived villages in Upper Egypt. CID Consulting was awarded the “Social Entrepreneur of the Year” award in 2006 at the World Economic Forum by the Schwab Foundation. She studied economics, political science at Cairo University, Near Eastern studies and international education development at UC Berkeley, California and Columbia University, N.Y (Doctorate in International Education Development). She has been working with the informal waste recyclers/collectors of Cairo since 1983. CID Consulting is currently working on plastic neutrality issues and climate change designing partnerships between multinationals and informal waste recyclers.
Naila Kabeer is Professor Emeritus at the Department of International Development, a Faculty member of the International Inequalities Institute and on the government board of the Atlantic Fellowship for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics, UK. She has extensive experience in research, teaching and advisory work in the fields of gender, poverty, livelihoods, social protection and inclusive citizenship, with a particular focus on South Asia. She has published books, journal articles, working papers and blogs on these issues. Her first book ‘Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought’ was published in 1994 while her more recent one ‘Renegotiating patriarchy: gender, agency and the Bangladesh paradox’ (LSE Press Open Access) came out in 2024. She has worked in an advisory capacity with various international agencies, such as the World Bank, UNDP, UN Women and the Asian Development Bank, with international NGOs, such as OXFAM and ActionAid and with national NGOs, such as BRAC in Bangladesh and PRADAN in India. She is on the editorial board of Feminist Economics and Gender and Development and serves in an editorial advisory capacity for Development and Change, Bangladesh Development Studies and European Journal of Development Research. She is also currently on the advisory boards of UNRISD, UNU-International Institute for Global Health, a member of the UN Women Leaders’ Network and of the UN High Level Expert Group on ‘Beyond Growth’
Jo Swinson has been Director of P4NE, a grant-making fund seeking to catalyse transformational change in our economy so that it values and benefits nature and all people, since 2020. She has a long-standing passion for new economics. Jo is a former UK Government Minister, Liberal Democrat party leader and MP, in 2009 she co-founded a cross-party group of MPs to work collaboratively on new economic thinking and wellbeing economics.
This is the second in a series of dialogues on the inequality emergency. Together, they connect:
Together, these conversations trace an arc from diagnosis, through lived reality, to the institutional imagination required to act.
This is not a webinar. It is a deliberative, interactive dialogue – an invitation to listen, reflect and explore what becomes visible when we view the inequality emergency from the standpoint of those the system was not built to see.
Ahead of International Workers Day, please join us