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Extending Social Protection to Informal Workers in the Horticulture Value Chain

Author: Armando Barrientos and Stephanie Ware Barrientos
Date: 2002
Size: 57 pages (238 kB)

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Summary

How can social protection mechanisms address the increasing informalisation of work in the global economy? How can the contribution of all potential stakeholders be harnessed to increase support for informal workers? This paper uses a value chain approach and a social responsibility matrix to examine fruit exports from Chile and South Africa to the United Kingdom. It finds that horticultural workers are largely excluded from existing coverage or benefits, which favour those in more stable employment with stronger attachment to an individual employer. Community-based provision, linked to state and market provision, is one avenue through which social protection could be developed.

Globalisation has led to more informal work and less access to social protection for workers. Flexible, precarious and insecure forms of work have increased, associated with an increase in female participation in paid work. Social protection systems designed for formal employment are often inaccessible to informal workers and particularly to women. Globalisation has limited the ability of governments to finance social welfare programmes through public expenditure, but at the same time new actors and institutions have emerged as potential avenues for social protection.

Horticulture involves much informal employment, together with high levels of insecurity and social risk, and low levels of income and social protection. Many of the risks arising from agricultural production and competitive global markets are born by producers. The only buffer they have is the flexible use of informal labour. In addition, increasing use of contractors is further distancing growers from obligations in employment rights or social protection.

The vulnerability of informal workers is reinforced by a combination of poor coverage and (although in Chile and South Africa relevant legislation is increasing) poor enforcement of rights and entitlements reinforces.

• Expansion of private sector provision of health care and insurance, pensions, and insurance of work related injuries is largely bypassing informal horticultural workers.
• Barriers to informal workers' participation in public programmes include: entitlement conditions based on more or less continuous employment; cost recovery and other administrative gatekeeping; and the location of public providers. Internal coordination among government agencies could help to overcome these barriers.
• In both Chile and South Africa, labour and community organisation amongst dispersed and often physically isolated horticultural workers is weak.
• In Chile, some schemes (based on NGO-union links and on government, employer, and community partnerships) have set up social protection projects. These are often limited in scope and time, but could be extended to wider areas of provision.

Informal workers face a particularly high concentration of risks arising from the sector they work in, and from the nature of their employment relationship.

• There is a need to develop, where they are missing, and strengthen, where they exist, linkages across all four main groups of institutions involved in producing social protection: markets, the state, community and households.
• Increasing governance of value chains by dominant buyers creates new channels for extending social protection to informal workers (such as codes of conduct), and enhances the effectiveness of potential links across private sector, civil society, and government agencies to provide social protection. As codes of conduct are voluntary, however, they cannot replace labour legislation.
• The hardest but surest way of extending social protection is to empower informal workers themselves. This implies creating linkages from the bottom up, which are almost non-existent at present.
• The means of orchestrating social protection need close consideration.

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Source: Barrientos, A. and Barrientos, S. W., 2002, 'Extending Social Protection to Informal Workers in the Horticulture Value Chain', Social Protection Discussion Paper Series 0216, World Bank, Warshington, D.C.
Organisation: World Bank, http://www.worldbank.org/