 Good morning. That's work. It's good afternoon by a few six seconds Thank you to you in wider for the for the invitation and it's really not good to meet and to re-meet the the panel and I'll draw quite a bit from my experience in the field in South Africa You can tell I talk a bit like him so you can tell we both from South Africa, hey From from a large-scale National and then provincial survey of poverty and inequality Which mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and I'll get that use that to get back around to the possibilities of multidisciplinary work and also to a set of research experiences Done by we go women in informal employment globalizing and organizing Working with the self-employed women's Association in India and a set of economists from Cornell University led by Ravi Kanpur and and Making reference particularly I think to two economics and then later to political science I'm a sociologist and I kind of didn't realize by the time I finished my undergraduate degree that you meant to say that When you go into the world, I'm a sociologist I just thought you were meant to say I've got a degree or I'm quite talented or I've got gaps in my knowledge Anyway, I learned that that that's an important and it's about I'm talking about the construction of our own identities as Belonging in one domain and not in another domain and that's part of the overall problem that you were referring to her in the thing of language matters and that the language that we use and I Suppose when you look at the title making multidisciplinary work you think Well in what way for whom and with what purpose why is it an interesting and important quest set of questions? and in this conference, I think it's safe to assume it's about at least addressing poverty and inequality and also about the potential transformation of aspects of the global economy and Such that people could lead better lives with better prospects Better prospects for themselves, but also for their own children live to hope that your children might live better than you do meaningful occupation and Reconcilable reconciled with the protection of of our planet and I'll try and deal with it at the conceptual and theoretical level. What are the chances of working together at the? methodological level And the key question is how do we each in our separate disciplines think we know what we know? And then the implications for policy and practical interventions My focus here purposely is on occupation and livelihoods and on informality and in particular for this presentation in cities not so much in in the rural sectors and drawing on on we go work and I think just to to say that one of the Important points to make drawing from our own experience is that and we work with the sharp and creative edge of urban planners who are looking at spatiality and temporarily the temporality and the construction of cities and Fascinating work on the regulation of space land use zoning to do with settlement and Not enough informed by economics Not enough Looking at those informal settlements there and going around with planners in those spaces and seeing that they're looking at living conditions They're not seeing home as the place of work for so many people. This is a broad generalization, right? and then with the economists in local city development and thinking of my own city of Durban and not enough informed by politics, perhaps yes by politics and By the way that people make use of space for their own Economic purposes and this is missed with the kind it can be easily missed with the large-scale surveys What counts as work? Where do scholars? Draw the line on the continuum between formality and informality Beneath which they say if I draw it here, I can't capture I can't measure in a meaningful way with my methods as an economist say the bottom end towards the most informal end Where people it's hard if you walk in and administer a questionnaire It's hard to see over the period of a day the very very many multiple ways in which people earn tiny bits of income They're not jobs. They might they're not jobs in the sense of the creation of employment. It's self-created work And even if you add it all together very often You're not talking about decent incomes But you're talking about the restless economic activity that underlies That the data that comes out of the bigger quantitative surveys And and with a typical expression saying no, but Francie you can't really mean that's employment You wouldn't change your unemployment figures in South Africa because of that. That's too marginal And I would say that's the wrong way to look at it if we know that our small and medium enterprise policies are hopeless in my country and in many countries at getting down and Creating policies that can actually reach very poor people and help very poor people start accumulating assets in a way that might have sustainable outcomes in the cause you know tell income dynamics study and I had the remarkable opportunity of Revisiting a small sub-sample of households which it had quantitative measurements Over five years and two years. So it was 1993 1998 and it was the original 1993 study was the World Bank poverty and living standards PLS DS one and Then Julian May and his colleagues picked up that survey and re-administered to my province Quasulut Natal And then we a team of us at And Michael Carter a lot of people familiar here. It was a comparative study of Peru and South Africa and We went back three years later to a sub-sample of those households Chosen because of the evidence of dynamics from the quantitative work of had people Got out of poverty fallen into poverty stayed about the same and And so we were armed in a sense with those data and went back and could sit down inside people's homes for more than an hour and I mean from many cases for three four hours and ask people to to Tell what had happened to the household And in the one module in particular for which I was largely responsible. There were three questions Who of all these household members? Found work who lost work and who made their own work and what did what did what did they do once they had lost or found Or how did they make and There was a startling and some would say alarming gap in the findings between what people themselves identified as work and what the quantitative survey had measured as work and It was you kind of at first didn't want to tell too many people that the methods Throughout such different data. I didn't think that any well with a few exceptions Which they'll always be none of it again would have changed the employment rates as measured But you picked up so much more economic activity You blew the the thing of so many people coming in from outsides outside say South Africans don't seem to do enough And you know what's made people so discouraged so soon for instance is one of the things that we care And part of it is what people themselves identified as work because of People's Conceptions of what we were probably asking given that they'd been surveyed to us before and part of it was The small amounts of income that were being gleaned We of course encountered also Occupations which were were frankly very illegal. There wasn't a lot of that and that that's that that's not what I'm talking about here but Dozens of small whether it was collecting mushrooms or growing flowers for sale or Slaughtering a beast once every couple of months, you know sort of drawing down assets as they say a Lot more domestic work, which wasn't mentioned in any of the households and that which was really speaking households It weren't identifying them going and doing paid domestic work for other black people They wouldn't call that work They called it work if they were going out to work for otherwise to Indian people in the area Which is just very very very interesting Puzzling but interesting And I think that the the lesson from that whole experience for all of us was That it's difficult to write a joint the theoretical paper coming out of it by Michael Carter Julian May and Michelle Adato From if pre Was that it's very difficult to write a joint multidisciplinary paper You could actually tell paragraph by paragraph that someone from a discipline Had read I could tell oh, that's Michael. Oh, that's Michelle It was very hard to get it properly integrated much harder than any of us expected The ex I'll move on now to the exposure dialogue program It's a methodology designed by the self-employed women's association in India in which You go out in to the home of an informal worker spend two or three days and nights with her and Her family and I'm saying that because they were members are all women and then you have a very structured Dialogue Discussion about a theme that you've been prepared to look for in advance and that might be on the effective minimum wages It could be on information asymmetries. It could be on social protection and It's a tough tough tough experience. We've held them with sort of In people at the head of insurance industries to try and convey the idea that poorer people are actually insurable If you look at it and if you look at it in a different way to how usually actuaries Look we've had it with human rights lawyers Also looking at this idea of recognition of different forms of work in the right to work So I have been Partnered with Ravi Kanpur making Tinshra with a tin artisan and Oaxaca Making it for the Catholic churches and also lots of Frida Kahlo flaming hearts and things like that very skilled at cutting tin and Varnishing trinkets like that and also living with a vegetable vendor in Amitabha and What Keith Hart would say that this is a way of introducing realism into the discourse on the informal economy By participating in the daily life and listening to perspectives of the informal workforce Ravi Kanpur in his writing on it focuses more on bridging the gap between what's in our heads and the real well it isn't different and the and the reality of workers lives and Then Tony Addison did an evaluation for us of the whole program and came out fairly convinced that it's Specialness for us here isn't changing the mindsets of very influential people It's hard work for those who are willing to get involved and I sat here from the Cornell team Koshik Basu Ravi himself Gary Fields Nancy Chow amongst others who came in and and endured the pace and partnered Suman Biri from the NC AER in India in Amitabha It's it's hard work and it reveals the Distance for between what we think we know and and what's going on in the creation of economic activities It's not about bonding. It's not about learning to love people who are in a different class Do you are it's about the hard reality of getting up at 4 30 in the morning getting to bed at 9 30 at night tired as a dog But just brain operating very fast. I Have run out of time and would just like to say very briefly that We think From we know now that from both of these sets of experiences that probably what's ignored by many economists specifically is The local institution analysis what local governments do is More important for the everyday economic lives of informal workers in their attempts to grow Assets, it's much more important than national policies Of course macroeconomy Economic policies have an effect of course trade and industry policies do Very much have an effect but in terms of the the working conditions of sanitation Storage access to markets and so on childcare provision the local government activities really have an important Impact and I think that's something that would be very fruitful for discussion of what how that could be tackled more and Then the thing that I'm working on specifically at the moment is in the construction of one profession as Haroon was talking about law in the profession the discipline and practice of occupational health and safety that Occupation only deals with workers in formal shops factories and offices Only deals with individual workers as the unit of analysis not connected to community and context I know I'm out of time and don't have no way of reaching out to Two workers outside of of that context and what we're trying to do in this research is the Institution analysis to say if you were to want OHS Globally to extend its reach to informal workers. You're not going to do it overnight It's going to be hard you up against Extremely powerful vested interests. What are the ways in and we're looking at inserting some of the new knowledge into formal curricula of in prestigious Schools, that's enough. Thank you