Informalisation in international labour regulation policy: profiles of an unravelling

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INTRODUCTION
The ILO Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recommendation, 2015 (No. 204) introduced a novel objective to international-level policy on informal work: that states should, as a key element of formalisation policies, prevent informalisation.Awareness of informality, as Ashiagbor points out,2 and as the contributions to this volume testify, is invigorating the debates on the role, form, and future of labour regulation.Yet informalisation as a discrete process has tended to be neglected in informality policy.It is therefore crucial to single out informalisation as a distinct element of the evolving growth in informality, and to reflect on the demands that it imposes on law and policy.This chapter is the first scholarly investigation of informalisation in global labour regulation policy.The chapter explores how recent regulatory discourses absorb and convey the processes of informalisation, with a particular focus on the role of legal regulation.Section Two highlights anxiety about the expansion of informal work, including in middle-and highincome countries, situating the problem within the 'unacceptable forms of work' framework.Section Three explores the academic literature on the regulatory dimension of informality, highlighting two crucial insights -that informality exists on a continuum, and that legal regulation mediates the shifting boundaries between the formal and the informal.Section Four examines informalisation in international regulatory policy.The regulatory sites examined are the pivotal transnational spheres of the World Bank and the International Labour Organization (ILO).Section Five concludes that a shift in ILO informality discourses to embrace informalisation is significant, but has not been absorbed in the Organization's conception of the functioning or potential of labour regulation.It argues that informalisation must be better integrated into the formalisation project, including as an objective of improving and sustaining job quality in the formal economy.As a crucial element of this project, the chapter concludes by calling for a new approach to labour law -a pre-emptive approach -that is aimed at preventing the unravelling of decent jobs.

POST-CRISIS INFORMALITY AND THE UNACCEPTABLE FORMS OF WORK PARADIGM
Prominent in analyses of the enduring fallout of the global financial and economic crisis are signs of the expansion of informal economies, including in middle-and high-income The global crisis propelled informalisation to the forefront of the debates on rising informality. 12This notion has been attached to a range of definitions in the policy and scholarly literatures, pointing to a risk of a conceptual incoherence. 13Some definitions are insufficient to anchor a robust conception of informalisation.The term periodically functions, for example, to denote expanding informality: the broader trend towards labour markets that are significantly characterised by the presence of informal work. 14Sharper imagery of informalisation, however, has been associated with the shift in the international policy realm from an enterprise-centred notion of informal work to a job-centred model. 15This shift in the models of informality has embraced a more refined account of processes of informalisation within the formal economy.The earlier enterprise-centred conceptions -hinging on enterprise-size and legal status -neglected key manifestations of informal work, and in particular excluded the formal sector, missing the dynamics of informalisation. 16More recent models, underpinned by the job-centred rendition of informality ('all economic activities by workers and economic units that are -in law or in practice -not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements' 17 ) capture the diversity of informal employment across countries at different levels of development. 18These models encompass informal jobs in the formal sector: that a 'growing proportion of jobs possess what may be called informal characteristics, i.e. without regular wages, benefits, employment protection, and so on.' 19 The evolution towards job-centred conceptions of informality has crystallised informalisation as a distinct dynamic of informality of increasing significance.As Standing has pointed out, traditionally informal economic activities were taken mainly to encompass the means of survival of the rural and urban poor. 20In more recent decades -in both industrialised and industrialising countries -there has been a trend towards enterprises informalising their labour processes.Standing and others have linked the rise in flexible labour relationships from the 1980s, to informalisation across the world, including through formal firms in the global North that sub-contract production to workers in developing countries. 21formalisation has long been recognised in low-income settings.In this regard, Theron, on the South African experience, offers contrasting notions of informalisation 'from above' and 'from below.' 22 The latter captures the conceptions of informality that are familiar from the literatures on the global South: individual workers devising survivalist strategies in response to job losses. 23'Informalisation from above,' more pertinently for present purposes, equates with the notion of informalisation pursued in this chapter: it unfurls through the capacity to bypass labour laws by resorting to either outsourcing or retrenchment. 24This process has been identified in recent years, for example, in the signs from India and a number of African countries that growing numbers of workers in the small formal sectors are not protected by labour law, including through outsourcing and sub-contracting. 25areness of comparable trends in higher-income settings is more recent.Early in the post-crisis era, for example, Jütting and de Laiglesia spotted a growing trend towards informalisation in OECD countries, which they attributed to heightened international competition in the course of globalisation, offering as an example the phenomenon of false self-employment. 26Visser has also pointed to an expansion of the informal economy in industrialised economies that is limiting access to benefits, training opportunities, access to social services, security, and the right to organise. 27n intriguing element of the more recent academic work, in this regard, is that it is beginning to engage much more energetically with the regulatory conduits to informalisation.The informality literature has often been received, with justification, as adrift from the preoccupations of legal scholarship: identified and elaborated primarily by economists; illsuited and neglectful of the intricacies, objectives, and structures of labour regulation. 28La Hovary, centrally, has voiced dissatisfaction with the concept of the informal economy and cast doubt on its promise for effective policy intervention. 29Yet the evolution of the informality narrative has the potential to illuminate the present regulatory era, precisely because it is approaching with more rigour and precision the relationship between formality and informality and the channels that link them.Two insights from the literature are particularly useful for conceptualising informalisation: that informality exists on a continuum, and that legal regulation mediates the shifting boundaries between the formal and informal.

Informality as a continuum
The trajectory in the informality literature is towards an extended, more probing, destabilisation of the dichotomy of the formal and informal.The resultant imagery is of informality as existing on a continuum in which working relationships are compliant with certain legal sub-fields, or specific obligations, but not others. 30Along this continuum, there is an increasingly restricted engagement with regulatory obligations and requirements and an increasingly inhibited access to a range of legal protections and entitlements -in the labour dimension, protection from arbitrary dismissal, for example, work/family entitlements, rights to equality, to organise, and collectively to bargain, social security benefits, training opportunities etc. 31 These observations may appear fairly mundane, at first glance, from the vantage point of labour law scholarship.The uneven protection offered by labour and social protection frameworks has long been highlighted in the literatures on non-standard work and precariousness.This literature has unfurled, at least in part, as 'gap analyses' that have  19(2) European Journal of Industrial Relations 91.This framework, however, is centred primarily on the extent of firm declaration to regulatory authorities, therefore capturing primarily the overlap of formality and informality in which workers are paid two distinct wages (the officially declared wage and an undeclared counterpart), at 94). mapped uneven coverage, exiled workers, and lost protections in higher-income countries. 32he informality literature, however, has a particular vigour in unveiling the complex dependencies between the realms of formality and informality, their dynamic interaction, and the repercussions for legal standards and worker protection across the economy as a whole. 33isser's recent analysis is particularly adept, [T]hese 'economies' are not distinct separate spheres of economic activity.Rather, they are engaged in a complex dialectical relationship through which a structural dependency is continuously constructed and reinforced by labour and material supply chains facilitated under policy and market practices that promote deregulation in the formal economy.The formation of these supply chains, in turn, induce the expansion of the informal economy which manifests in increased levels of employment 'informality' or 'precarity' in the formal labour market and results in the embedding of informal labour markets and economic activity within the formal economy. 34

Legal regulation as mediating the informality boundary
Relatedly, as Sassen noted comparatively early in the debates, 'the informal economy can only be understood in its relation to the formal economy.' 35Informality can be identified, that is, only because there exists an institutional framework for economic activity through which the state regulates working relations. 36Sassen's observation serves, first, further to reinforce that informal economies are not distinct economic spheres: they are '[d]eeply embedded within the formal economy and socially and legally regulated by a battery of social institutions.' 37Second, this analysis emphasises that it is legal regulation, including labour law frameworks, that mediate the ragged boundary between the informal and formal dimensions of working relationships.The latter insight is particularly valuable for conceptualising the mechanisms of informalisation that channel workers from formality to informality, which need to be identified in detail and with precision.Lacunae or deficiencies in regulatory regimes and institutions shape the formality/informality boundary.Legislation permits, facilitates, or neglects paths to worker protection, and formal employers devise strategies that respond to these regulatory prompts.The scholarship points in particular to externalisation strategiesin their myriad forms -as a central conduit to informalisation: hiring on a casual basis, for example, outsourcing or sub-contracting to small firms or home-based workers, securing labour through temporary agency or labour-hire arrangements, or tolerating or facilitating false self-employment. 38Relatedly, the scope of coverage of protective labour legislation, and in particular fealty to traditional conceptions of the employment relationship, deprive workers of legal recognition or protection where the employment relationship is either disguised or an ill-fit with conventional models. 39Other conduits include the failure of legislative frameworks adequately to incorporate dispersion of the responsibilities of employment among multiple entities, the punitive intersection of regulatory fields, notably labour and immigration laws, 40 and ineffective enforcement regimes. 41e guiding contemporary notion of informality, then, loops together the regulatory dimensions of precariousness, in particular where it manifests in non-standard work, deficiencies in the implementation and enforcement of labour laws, and the intersection of regulatory regimes.The research on informality is therefore paralleling advances in the labour regulation literatures in producing a holistic picture of labour law's uncertain or deficient outcomes.Most notably, the notion of 'regulatory indeterminacy' 42 is playing a parallel role, including as it has been elaborated to identify and to link key drivers of the indeterminate impacts of labour regulation, identified as fragmentation, institutional interactions, and enforcement efficacy. 43This complexity renders the concept of informality inevitably challenging to operationalise for statistical measurement and comparison, as Deakin et al argue in this volume. 44Yet the notion is nonetheless valuable at the conceptual and policy levels, to clarify the regulatory conduits to informality and to fashion suitably expansive and coherent policy responses.
Towards such policy interventions, these insights are revealing how legal frameworks shape the incidence and texture of informality.Yet they also suggest that legal regimes can be designed to curb or to alleviate the detrimental outcomes that are associated with informal work.It is evident, for example, that countries at similar income-levels exhibit significant variations in the incidence of informality. 45These varying outcomes suggest the need for an attentiveness to the policy mix, including to the role of the state in generating and preventing informalisation.In this regard, informalisation can be conceived of as a process, often in flux, and channelled through diverse conduits.This process is not inevitable, but can be shaped, tempered, or reversed by regulatory intervention.It is crucial, then, to track the regulatory and institutional activity that engineers informalisation, and to craft policy measures that adequately respond.It is with this objective in mind that the key international regulatory policy responses -by the World Bank and ILO -are evaluated in the following Section.

INFORMALISATION IN INTERNATIONAL REGULATORY POLICY
Given the evolving conceptions of informality traced in the previous Section, it is worth investigating the regulatory supports for informalisation are reflected in key policy discourses.
To that end, this Section examines the most significant renditions of informalisation that are conveyed in international policy discourses.In this regard, the international is understood as a crucial site in which informality is conceptualised and the mechanisms to tackle it are constructed.The regulatory policy sites under consideration are the pivotal international spheres of the World Bank and the International Labour Organization (ILO).This Section builds on earlier work that has argued that the relationship between these institutions should be understood as a dynamic process of institutional convergence and divergence that is generating a conversation about the objectives, format and tenor of labour market regulation. 46The objective is to trace evolving notions of informalisation within broader narratives of informality; to investigate how these discourses capture and convey the nature and dynamics of informalisation; and in particular to highlight how each conveys the role of legal regulation.The Section is based on a review of the recent outputs of each of these transnational actors, with a particular focus on the evolving influence of the 'plateau model' of labour regulation developed in the World Bank's World Development 2013, in particular in the Bank's Doing Business project, and on ILO Recommendation No. 204 and the formalisation strategy that it embodies.

Informalisation on the regulatory plateau: the World Bank
Until recently, World Bank discourses on labour regulation strictly adhered to a dualist model of formal and informal work.The Bank's regulatory policy has in recent decades primarily been associated with the Doing Business initiative -a set of indicators that measure and compare various elements of 'business regulation' in 190 countries, the results of which have been disseminated through a series of annual reports since 2003. 47The project engages with labour regulation through a Labour Regulation Index -previously the Employing Workers Index -which measures and compares select labour protections (e.g.hiring, working hours, redundancy).Conventionally, as has been elaborated elsewhere, the policy discourse associated with Doing Business has conveyed labour regulation to float adrift from a discrete informal economy.' 48A pessimistic account of labour law's promise relayed a clear-cut dichotomy between 'formal' and 'informal' economies. 49One consequence was the characterisation of rigid labour regulation as driving workers into the informal economy; another, the assumption that labour standards are unknown or entirely irrelevant to informal workers. 50Informalisation within formal settings was therefore largely overlooked: an 'informal sector' was assumed and the informal workforce identified with that domain.
The World Bank's imagery of labour regulation has been refined since the limitations of the Doing Business initiative prompted reform of the project. 51With the Employing Workers Index (EWI) widely discredited for its conceptual and methodological limitations, the Bank showcased a new approach.A 'plateau' imagery was pioneered in the 2013 World Development Report (WDR2013). 52The Report identified twin risks -that labour regulations may be either too rigid or too lax -and contended that both can have detrimental effects. 53n appropriate level of labour regulation is, instead, situated on a 'plateau' between excessive and lax labour regulation: ''[l]abour policies that are not to undermine job creation, while maximizing development payoffs from jobs, must remain on this plateau.'The plateau model was an important reset of the Bank's frequently hostile engagement with labour regulation. 54DR2013 acknowledged research findings that labour laws do not inhibit job creation, entertained alternative explanations for poor employment outcomes, and acknowledged the benefits of legal regulation, including social objectives such as improved living standards and social cohesion. 55The outcry about the Doing Business methodology also prompted the Bank to rebrand the EWI as the Labour Regulation Index (LRI) and to incorporate questions on protective regulations ('job quality'): on equal remuneration for work of equal value, measures to combat gender discrimination in hiring, maternity leave, paid sick leave, and unemployment protection. 56Insofar as 'balance' is a proxy for effective regulation, the quest for the regulatory plateau is welcome and has potential to illuminate efforts to conceptualise the regulatory dimensions of informalisation.In this respect, the Bank's policy discourse parallels a central objective of the recent labour regulation literature: properly to conceptualise and to gauge the effectiveness of regulatory frameworks, including their role in generating and sustaining informality. 57Yet the plateau model has not been absorbed uniformly across the Bank's labour regulation policy discourses.
In the Doing Business project, at the rhetorical level the language of 'balance' is sustained: '[t]he challenge in developing labour policies is to avoid the extremes of over and under-regulation by reaching a balance between worker protection and flexibility.' 58An examination of the post-WDR2013 era evolution of this project, however, shows its fidelity to the plateau model to be uneven and poorly absorbed into the LRI methodology, including in relation to informality.Most fundamentally, there is no recognition that informality spans a continuum: the rendition of dichotomous informality and formality remains strikingly intact. 59 central role for regulation in generating informality, further, is present, but it is 'rigid' labour regulation that continues to be identified as the culprit.Employment protection laws in particular are conveyed almost exclusively as drivers of labour market segmentation, relying on a small number of studies. 60 the methodological level, the LRI is not attuned to capturing either the dynamics of informalisation or the legal mechanisms that are being tested to reorient these frameworks in fields other than labour law and social protection, are beyond the Index's scope.It cannot, therefore, capture the diversity of legal regimes that regulate labour markets.Inevitably missing, in particular, is the harsh logic of the immigration frameworks that channel migrant workers into informal work. 61Even within the conventional parameters of labour law, however, the Doing Business methodology does not capture the regulatory supports of informalisation.The 2017 Report reverts to the evaluation of national labour regulation frameworks, following a post-reform hiatus in which the LRI findings were relayed without comment. 62The Report's -laudable -conclusion is that regulation should be tailored to national circumstances and designed in collaboration with the social partners. 63The return to an evaluative strategy, however, purports to demonstrate the association of labour regulation with informal employment and unregistered firms 64 (including through a reversion to the original nomenclature of a 'rigidity of employment regulation' index). 65This outcome is realised through a scoring system that has presumably been in abeyance since the reform of Doing Business, although it is not elaborated in detail in the Report.
Yet despite the tenor of these conclusions, the LRI and the associated literature miss much of how regulation sustains informality, and, most pertinently for present purposes, channells informalisation.Elements can be singled out that are both central to the deficiencies of this project and of broader significance for the exploration of the regulatory dimensions of informalisation in international labour policy.First, the LRI is oriented towards 58 World Bank, Doing Business 2017 (note 56) at 87. 59 See the discussion of employment protection legislation on p 87, referring to 'dual labour markets, whereby a labour force becomes segmented into formal versus informal sector workers (in developing economies)….'3 Ibid, at 87. 64  substantive standards -hours limits, rest periods, annual leave, redundancy protections, equal pay, maternity leave etc. 66 The Index therefore misses central features of labour regulation frameworks, highlighted in Section 3.2 that are associated with informalisation.These tend to be found in the minutiae of labour law texts, rather than in their flagship protections.The LRI does not, for example, capture exclusions from protection, explicit or implicit.Nor does it, centrally, capture the personal scope of legal measures, typically tied to the presence of a judicially-endorsed 'contract of employment' and therefore elusive for many workers. 67cond, and linked to the project's tilt towards the substantive, Doing Business is unable to capture the crucial role of non-standard work regulation in propelling workers towards the informality continuum.In this regard, the Bank's thin rendition of informality hosts a supplementary dichotomy: between formal and informal workers in developing countries and 'permanent' and 'contingent' workers in high-income economies. 68This account inevitably misses the parallel processes of informalisation in lower-and higherincome countries, and the degree to which informality manifests as non-standard work in both.
This deficiency crystallises in Doing Business's treatment of fixed-term contracts, the only non-standard work-form that is tracked by the LRI.The hiring sub-index captures (1) the extent to which employers can hire workers on a fixed-term basis to perform permanent tasks and (2) the maximum duration of fixed-term contracts (including renewals). 69The Index is again assumed to capture rigidity; the merits of widespread fixed-term contracting is assumed. 70The 2017 Report asserts the potential of fixed-term contracts to enhance the employability of labour market entrants, particularly young workers, through providing experience and access to professional networks. 71There is little effort to convey the downside of short-term work, 72 or to quantify or compare the protections increasingly available to fixedterm workers in countries across the world: mandated maximum durations/renewals, for example, equal treatment, or conversion rights to open-ended contracts.
Doing Business also continues to miss the actual strength of labour regulation, thus remaining open to the criticisms that have endured from the outset of the project about the Index's failure to accommodate the observance of legal standards. 73In particular, the LRI does not capture enforcement -an enduring omission, long noted, 74 central to the Doing Business reforms and touching on key elements of informality.Questions, further, that might offer some insight into informality channels were dropped in the 2017 report, on the availability of administrative/judicial relief where employees' rights have been infringed and the presence of a labour inspection system. 75As a result, the Index risks inaccurate conclusions about the impacts of labour laws, including on informal work.
While the extensive and punctual annual outputs of the Doing Business project tend to overshadow alternative narratives of labour regulation that emanate from the Bank, these periodically surface.The key comparator is WDR2013 and the literature that takes it as a point of departure.One is the 2015 report on Balancing Regulations to Promote Jobs ('the Balancing report'), which emanates from the Bank's Social Protection, Labor and Jobs realm and was produced in consultation with the ILO, International Trade Union Confederation and International Organization of Employers. 76The analyses that characterise this line of the Bank's work have a more refined and expansive grasp of the regulatory dynamics of informalisation.WDR2013, for example, catches the de jure routes to informality, listing the features of legal frameworks that preclude protected status: exceptions -of domestic workers, small enterprises, export zones; the complexities of regulating multilateral working relationships; and limited access to adjudication mechanisms. 77The Balancing report also recognises the significance of non-standard work regulation, capturing key regulatory conduits and certain of the measures that are being trialled to reorder them. 78The report advocates protective regulatory frameworks for non-standard workers 79 : legislation that entitles temporary and part-time workers to protections equivalent to full-time workers, 80 restrictions on the use of fixed-term contracts (citing ILO Convention No. 166 on preventing abusive recourse to fixed-term work), 81 legislation to combat disguised employment, 82 and requirements that employees receive written employment contracts. 83

The formalisation paradigm: the ILO
1 The illustrations are limiting recourse to a specified period to cases in which, owing to nature of work or circumstances under which it is to be effected, or the interests of worker, the employment relationship cannot be of indeterminate duration; deeming contracts for a specified period to be contracts of employment of indeterminate duration; deeming contracts for a specified period that are renewed on one or more occasions to be contracts of employment.Ibid. 82 Although with a curious definition that is confined to trilateral relationships; ibid, note 23. 83Ibid. 84Section 3 above.informal employment85 and, ultimately, the Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recommendation, 2015 (No. 204).This job-centred model, capturing economic activities that are insufficiently covered by formal arrangements in law or practice, 86 always implicitly extended to formal-site informality, made explicit in the Recommendation's coverage of 'employees holding informal jobs in or for formal enterprises. 87aluating the ILO instruments by drawing on the insights on the regulatory dimension of informality elaborated in Section 3 confirms their value in transmitting sophisticated conceptions of informality to the international labour policy arena.The ILO policy discourses embody the two insights highlighted in Section 3. First, they are alive to the continuum between the formal and the informal.Most strikingly, in the 2002 Resolution even the more expansive job-centred concept of the informal economy is conveyed as tending 'to downplay the linkages, grey areas and interdependencies between formal and informal activities.' 88 Second, legal frameworks are recognised to govern the uneven boundary between formal and informal work, emphasising the crucial role of domestic legal regimes. 89e ILO policy discourses are explicit in recognising informality as a problem of governance: Informality is principally a governance issue.The growth of the informal economy can often be traced to inappropriate, ineffective, misguided or badly implemented macroeconomic and social policies, often developed without tripartite consultation; the lack of conducive legal and institutional frameworks; and the lack of good governance for proper and effective implementation of policies and laws. 90e ILO instruments also capture the diversity of the modes and forms of regulatory escape that are generated at this boundary.The 2003 Guidelines are most elaborate, incorporating a list that includes non-declaration of jobs or employees, casual and temporary employment, working hours or wages below legal thresholds, work at home or beyond the premises of the employer, and jobs to which labour laws 'are not applied, not enforced, or not complied with for any other reason.' 91The Recommendation's scope provisions add explicit references to both individuals in subcontracting and supply chains 92 and workers in 'unrecognized or unregulated' employment relationships. 93The 2002 Resolution, most expansively, alludes to 'grey areas' in which the economic activity involves characteristics of both the formal and informal economy, such as workers in formal enterprises whose wages and working conditions are typical of those in informal work. 94ocesses of informalisation, however, were not central to the 2002 Resolution.Recommendation No. 204 is therefore pioneering in including preventing the informalisation of formal economy jobs among its key objectives. 95Embracing the prevention of informalisation as an integral element of the formalisation project is a key contribution of the Recommendation that should not be understated.The preventive objective strengthens research and policy conceptualisations of the nature and dynamics of informality and is available to shape global renditions of formalisation.Given its far-reaching potential, it is not that the inclusion of this objective in the Recommendation was contested.The preparatory documents reveal that the objective was incorporated through an amendment to the International Labour Office proposed Conclusions that were deliberated upon by the Committee on Transitioning from the Informal Economy at its first discussion in 2014.Proposed by the Worker Vice-Chairperson, the amendment was opposed by the Employer counterpart on the grounds that the existing text was sufficient, 96 highlighting that the stance of the international employer lobby would have precluded informalisation as an element of domestic formalisation policies. 97e Recommendation is also robust on the breadth and mix of the policy response to informality, including to informalisation.In this regard, labour regulation can only be an element in a range of policy arenas that must be engaged to improve or discourage informal working relations.The Recommendation stresses the need for coherence and coordination across a wide range of policy fora including macroeconomic, employment, and social protection policies. 98Related ILO literature has also captured the role of formalisation strategies and legal regulation in a crafted policy mix that embraces macro-economic, monetary, financial sector, exchange rate, and public investment policies and favours job creation in the formal economy, structural shifts to higher productivity activities, and labour markets polices and institutions that enable transitions to formality. 9994 ILO Resolution concerning Decent Work and the Informal Economy (n 17), para 5. 95 This aim is enshrined among a trilogy of key objectives in para 1(c), 'Objectives and Scope,' together with facilitating the transition of workers and economic units from the informal to the formal economy 'while respecting workers' fundamental rights and ensuring opportunities for income security, livelihoods and entrepreneurship' (1 (a)); and promoting enterprises and decent jobs in the formal economy and the coherence of macroeconomic, employment, and social policies (1(b)). 96It was also opposed by the Africa Group of governments, see Report of the Committee on the Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy: summary of proceedings, available at www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_norm/---relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_375370.pdf,paras 734-41. 97The International Organization for Employers (IOE) had earlier objected to the inclusion of the 'informal in the formal' in the standard-setting exercise.See La Hovary, 'The Informal Economy and the ILO,' (n 28) at 407-408, citing IOE Proposed New ILO Standard(s) -Informal Economy (Geneva, IOE, 2013), 6. 98 Paras 1, 7(d).It also calls for an 'integrated policy framework…included in national development strategies…as well as in poverty reduction strategies and budgets….,'para 9. 99 eg ILO 'Informality and the Quality of Employment in G20 Countries,' Report prepared for the G20 Labour and Employment Ministerial Meeting, Melbourne, Australia, 10-11 September 2014, available at www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/--publ/documents/publication/wcms_305425.pdf,8-9.
Labour regulation initiatives that have the potential to curb informalisation are included in the Recommendation.These respond to the legislative mechanisms and employer strategies that generate and sustain pockets of informality.Governments, first, are called upon to ensure that workers are covered by labour laws.The Recommendation prompts ILO members to adopt, review, and enforce legal measures to ensure appropriate coverage and protection of all workers and economic units. 100Effective enforcement -part-constitutive of the parameters of informality in the job-centred model -is also extensively treated.States are encouraged to address avoidance of labour laws, 101 to ensure recognition and enforcement of employment relationships, 102 to strengthen inspection, 103 to provide information and assistance on legal compliance, 104 and to establish efficient and accessible complaint procedures. 105The Recommendation, third, calls for states to realise the fundamental principles and rights 106 and ensure health and safety protections in informal work, 107 progressively extend social security, maternity protection, decent working conditions and a minimum wage to informal workers, 108 and encourage the provision of affordable childcare and other care services. 109These recommendations are relevant to tackling informalisation, since parity of entitlements would curb the incentives associated with resorting to precarious forms of work.
The Recommendation, further, does not betray the hesitancy about the international labour standards that has become characteristic of the ILO's flagship policy discourses during the last decade. 110Recommendation No. 204 has a fairly robust embrace of the ILO standards, requesting member States to take into account a range of instruments that are listed in an Annex. 111Particularly useful, in this regard, is the presence of 'non-standard work' standards: the Private Employment Agencies Convention, 1997 (No. 181), which requires a degree of protection -albeit unambitious -for temporary agency workers 112 ; the Employment Relationship Recommendation (2006) No. 198 -again flawed, but nonetheless a source of some guidance on the regulatory dimension of the formalisation project 113 ; and the Home Work Convention, 1996 (No. 177) and Domestic Workers standards, 114 both essential references for formalisation policies targeting crucial harbours of protective frailty in the global economy. 115e Recommendation is not equally convincing, however, on what can be achieved by using such legal frameworks and techniques to combat informalisation.While preventing the unravelling of formal jobs is among the Recommendation's objectives, the mechanisms that might stem the slide into informality are sparsely elaborated.Yet the regulatory options are numerous, diverse, and available for testing at local levels: 116 equal treatment mandates, specific allocation of legal obligations in multilateral relationships, explicit distribution of responsibilities across value chains, restricting outsourcing or mandating protections for the outsourced workforce, working time techniques that limit fragmentation or that promote certainty in scheduling and wages, and specific protections for the range of forms of temporary, casual or multilateral work.
To some degree, this limitation reflects that the Recommendation references the nonstandard work standards without fully absorbing the regulatory strategies that these instruments demand.The equal treatment model is a case in point.It has been observed that the Recommendation encourages the progressive extension of decent working conditions to informal economy workers. 117Yet one obvious route to this goal is an equality mandate that demands parity of treatment between non-standard and standard workers.One of the key models developed to ensure that non-standard working relationships -part-time, fixed-term, temporary agency -match the quality of standard-form jobs, the equality model, is being tested in legal frameworks across the world. 118This approach, further, is particularly apt for the dual-track complexion of formal-site informality, in which the differential treatment is accented by proximity.As the international spearhead of the equal treatment model, 119 the Home Work Convention could have been drawn on to support a more expansive endorsement of the equal treatment model.This opportunity was neglected, however.Nor is the Part-Time Work Convention, 1994 (No. 175) included in the Recommendation's Annex, although it elevated the equality approach to an economy-wide model and targets a core mode of fragmentation, through shortened hours. 120 this regard and more broadly, Recommendation No. 204 parallels the World Bank literature by assuming the centrality of substantive protections.This point is further illustrated by Section IV of the Recommendation (Employment Policies), which calls for measures to help low-income households to escape poverty, and includes wages policies such as the minimum wage. 121Wages policies, however, cannot adequately respond to the regulatory conduits to informalisation; in this case, legal structures that facilitate, or do not impede, casualisation.Fragmented work-forms, captured in equally splintered terminology (casual work, zero hours contracts, day labour etc.), are characterised by the absence of guaranteed hours and have harsh repercussions for the level and predictability of incomes.Yet these outcomes cannot be tempered by conventional wage policies. 122Necessary instead are novel -and at present only nascent -mechanisms designed specifically to regulate casual work.Other elements of the Recommendation are an equally poor match for the dynamics of informalisation.Section V (Rights and Social Protection) calls for measures to prevent avoidance of labour, tax, and social security laws.Yet the proposed strategies are exclusively configured towards smoothing the transition from informal to formal. 123The level of detail, most strikingly, on the routes to formalisation for micro and small economic units, 124 while immensely helpful, is not matched by any comparable blueprint on preventing informalisation.
These limitations are significant, not only because they weaken Recommendation No. 204, but because they expose the centre of gravity of the international formalisation project.The project is tethered, that is, to a preoccupation with informal firms and settings.Informalisation is an adjunct.This outcome can be read as path dependence associated with the origins of the informality project, which also accounts for the late, and contested, entry of the preventive objective into the Recommendation.The assumed direction of travel is perhaps most stark in the objection of the Africa group of governments to the inclusion of the preventive objective, that 'the subject of the [Recommendation is] the transition from the informal to the formal economy, not the other way around.'125This objection crystallises an assumption about the orientation of the formalisation project, both within key ILO policymaking bodies and across the international and national policy realms.This focus neglects the expansive imagery of informality, its emergence, and its potential solutions of the kind pursued in this volume.It exposes a broader threat to the rapidly-evolving formalisation project that is of particular risk to its legal architecture and impedes a vigorous role for this policy realm in combatting the informalisation of formal jobs.Emphasising cure over prevention, the outcome is that the key international policy discourse on informality does not grasp the symbiotic relationship between formalisation and prevention of informalisation.It therefore does not hold these targets in the sensitive balance that is needed to underpin sophisticated policy-making and effectively to allocate resources between the twin objectives.

CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS A REFINED CONCEPTION OF INFORMALISATION IN GLOBAL REGULATORY POLICY
This chapter has investigated the regulatory dimension of informality in global policy discourses with a focus on informalisation.It therefore responds to the relative neglect of informalisation within the policy debates on informal work.The chapter has observed that labour regulation literatures are devising refined conceptions of informality, which have a firmer grasp of the role of legal regulation in generating, shaping and sustaining informal work.Particularly crucial contributions from this literature were identified: the linked insights that informality is a continuum and that legal regulation governs a shifting boundary between formal and informal work.These notions are revealing when deployed to interrogate policy discourses.In this article, they have been drawn on to elaborate and to assess a recent turn in international labour policy towards the regulatory dimensions of informality.To this end, the chapter has examined policy discourses from the two most significant sites of global labour regulation policy, the World Bank and the ILO.
This analysis has revealed an unsurprising divergence in the policy narratives that emanate from the World Bank and the ILO, accompanied by some revealing convergences.World Bank policy streams have unevenly absorbed the plateau model that was unveiled in the 2013 World Development Report, thereby sustaining a slippery grasp of informality that eschews the continuum model and, in the recent literature, has reverted to identifying 'rigid' protective regulation as the cause of informality.An examination of the Bank's flagship Doing Business project has found these notions to be conveyed through a focus on substantive standards, a lack of attention to the regulatory conduits to informalisation, and an enduring neglect of labour regulation's de facto influence on working relations, including the efficacy of state enforcement.Alternative narratives within the Bank are both less prominent and more promising, including in that they highlight legal measures that have been engineered to improve the treatment of workers in non-standard working arrangements.
Recent discourses from the ILO are particularly significant, given the Organization's status as the key global host of the formalisation project, the home of the sole international standard, and the most prominent international policy forum in which trade unions play an integral role.The ILO has long recognised informality that resides in formal settings and the Organization's policy discourses are alive to certain of the associated regulatory dynamics.Yet informalisation was not a central preoccupation of the ILO until the inclusion of the preventive objective in Recommendation No. 204.The repercussions of this shift, further, have not been fully absorbed.Labour regulation mechanisms that can curb informalisation feature in the Recommendation, and it cites most of the pertinent international labour standards.Yet the Recommendation is deficient at the level of regulatory strategy.It is not as robust on what can be achieved, and how, by legal frameworks and techniques.Partially, this is because the Recommendation adopts, like the World Bank literature, a focus on the substantive standards that are enshrined in legal instruments, rather than on the intricacies of their scope, exceptions, distribution of legal obligations etc.It was concluded, then, that the formalisation project is primarily preoccupied with informal settings, rather than with informalisation of formal working relations or the balance that should be struck in regulatory policy between formalising and preventing further informalisation.
A more robust conception of informalisation, then, must be demanded from international policy-makers, which better captures the contemporary dynamics of this phenomena and in particular the associated regulatory supports.Informality narratives are significantly driving the debates on poor quality work, prominently at the global level.Informality policy is therefore a site with which it is vital for labour law scholars to engage and where the promise and risks of labour regulation can be explored.Formalisation, in particular, is a potential gateway to incorporating legal regulation into flagship global policy discourses, including towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.This notion would, ideally, be fashioned to embrace sophisticated conceptions of informalisation, and of legal regulation, thus marrying the formalisation project with the objective of improving -or sustaining -job quality in the formal sector.In this regard, earlier contributions have called for a reconstructive labour law, which builds coherent jobs from fragmented working relations. 126his reflection on informalisation suggests a parallel pre-emptive labour law, which should be integrated into formalisation policies and is targeted at preventing the unravelling of decent jobs.To some degree, this is a call for an alertness to, and defence of, the architecture of the mundane.In recent decades -perhaps unexpectedly -labour regulation scholars have been called on to produce refined typologies of the mechanisms and institutions that have supported, and can extend and surpass, the standard employment model.Intensified endeavours of this type are now vital if high-quality work is to be sustained -as aspiration and reality -in the face of the increasingly intense pressures towards informalisation. 126McCann 'New Frontiers of Regulation,' (n 120), McCann and Murray (n 114).
Informalisation and Reformalisation of Industrial Relations in Norway's Agricultural Industry in the 21 st Century' (2017) 32 Population, Space and Place .On the UK, see Sam Scott 'Informalisation in Lowwage Labour Markets: A Case Study of the UK Food Industry' (2017) Population, Space and Place. Neoliberalism: Ibid, citing Simeon Djankov and Rita Ramalho, 'Employment Laws in Developing Countries,' Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Discussion Paper No. DP7097, December 2008; Siddharth Sharma, 'Entry Regulation, Labor Laws and Informality,' Working Paper 48927, World Bank, 2009; Norman V Loayza, Ana Maria Oviedo and Luis Serven, 'The Impact of Regulation on Growth and Informality -Cross-Country Evidence,' Policy Research Working Paper, WPS 3623, World Bank, 2005. 61eg Working Lives Research Institute, 'Study on Precarious Work and Social Rights.Study arried out for the European Commission,' VT/2010/084 (Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, 2012). 62World Bank Doing Business 2017 (n 56), Annex: Labour Market Regulation, pp 87-95.
As discussed in Section 3, a job-centred definition of informality was enshrined in the ILO's 2002 Resolution and Conclusions concerning decent work and the informal economy since incorporated in the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) 2003 Guidelines concerning a statistical definition of 75 Both were included in Doing Business 2016; see n 56 above. 76Kuddo et al (n 72). 77World Bank, World Development Report 2013 (n 52), at 156. 78 Kuddo et al (n 72), ch 1. WDR2013 was weaker on non-standard work, offering few suggestions, for example, on the regulation of multipartite relationships, see McCann, 'Labour Regulation on the Plateau' (n 46).