 Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Mike Rogan. I'm a research associate with Wigo and I teach economics at Rhodes University in South Africa. It's my great pleasure today to invite you to the second session on informal employment organized jointly by Wigo and UNU Wider. For those who don't know, Wigo stands for Women in Informal Employments, Globalizing and Organizing, and it's a global research and advocacy network that works directly with the organizations of the working poor around the world. And of course, we all know UNU Wider, who are our gracious hosts at the conference here in Helsinki today. Just a brief overview of the two sessions. On Monday, we listened to a number of papers that outlined the very specific and frankly devastating effects of the pandemic on different groups of informal workers in cities and countries around the world, largely highlighting the fears we had at the beginning of the pandemic and how those would be felt by informal workers, those without social protection. Today's session aims to be somewhat more forward-looking, where we consider some of the lessons we've learned over the past 18 months and think through possible ways forward. So in other words, how should we be thinking about the recovery from the current crisis and what lies beyond both in practical terms and ideally what could we see as a future for informal employment in the wake of this crisis. I'd also like to mention briefly that all of the papers in this session and the previous one organized by UNU Wider and Wigo are going to be a part of an edited volume very tentatively titled Informal Employment and Labor Markets, Insights and Reflections from the Era of COVID-19. So to that end, we're looking forward to sharing some thoughts with you today and we very much invite your comments and feedback on the themes that we're engaging with today. Time is very tight, so I'm going to move quite quickly into the program. We've got three presenters followed by two distinguished discussants and I'll introduce each speaker just before they give their remarks so that we can move through as efficiently as possible and ideally that'll leave us with some time for questions and discussion at the end. So our first speaker today is Sally Rover. She holds a PhD from the University of California Berkeley in political science and she serves as the international coordinator of Wigo and the Wigo Network. Sally, over to you for about eight minutes. Okay, thanks Mike and thanks everyone for joining us here today. It's a real pleasure to be in this distinguished panel. So the main question for to start with is essentially what are the high level lessons from COVID-19 with regard to workers who are informally employed and what do they tell us about what an inclusive recovery might look like. So one that addresses the needs of workers in all kind of a full range of employment arrangements. So we'll be learning a lot about that today and you know we know from a range of studies over the past year that the impact as Mike said has been uneven disproportionately impacted informal workers, women workers and so on and also differentially impacted different groups of informal workers as the previous panel highlighted but from those lessons what are the implications for recovery. So to help us think this through I'm just going to be synthesizing some learning from across the Wigo Network and variety of activities particularly in light of a couple of the key findings from the from the early days which were a mass disruption in earnings among informal workers particularly in the month of April 2020 and the impact that that had on on asset depleting coping strategies. So things like drawing down savings, selling off assets and taking on more debt which were fairly common. So I'm going to look at it from two angles. One is what we learn from our direct engagements with informal worker leaders and their organizations and then on the other hand what we've learned from our analysis of economic recovery approaches at the national level. So just wanted to highlight a couple of lessons from the early days sort of the initial relief phase and think about kind of what ground shifted and I should say I'm going to keep my comments outside of the realm of social protection because Laura will be addressing that in a few minutes. So one of the early and really important developments I think in terms of ground shifting was the need to consider this essential worker designation in order to identify those who could continue working during lockdown. So this is the idea of designating informal workers and particularly self-employed informal workers as essential workers was not on the table before the pandemic. So in particularly in context where the dominant refrain and policy is you know informal employment is unproductive and therefore undesirable there's very little consideration of what role these livelihoods actually play in keeping the basic function of economies and societies running. So there wasn't a possibility of considering self-employed particularly own account informal workers as essential workers and then suddenly there was and this played itself out very differently in different kinds of economies and also even subnational geographies from city to city and in some suddenly governments were forced to recognize that these workers actually provide critical services that the city can't live without. So an example of this is street food vendors in South Africa were designated as essential workers and there were some enabling conditions in that context that helped it among them academic engagement among researchers on food security and how food security happens in low-income communities and the fact that that there relied so much on informal food traders and then engaged street vendor organizations that were able to advocate for designation as essential workers. So that was one kind of ground-shifting piece of the landscape early on. Another early lesson that came to our attention above and beyond again kind of the reach of emergency cash grants is a big part of the story but Laura will address that. Another one that's a little bit less on the radar we think is around the suspension of utility payments. So this is something that was noted over and over by worker leaders in our in-depth interviews with them on sort of what actually helps so some positive news on what really made a difference. So in Accra and in Ghana street vendors and market porters for example noted that relief on electricity had cut their costs in half. Street vendor leader in Lima said nearly everyone's in debt for electricity so thank god the municipality has provided water. So the extent to which this mattered to workers in those early days the relief of utility payments kind of reflects a reality of informal employment that I think is not often visible in national recovery plans which I'll talk about in a second which are that incomes are so insecure and workers fall into debt very easily. So debt is to some extent a sort of unifying theme all the way from the country level to the household and the individual level and we also learned of some examples where governments partnered with mbo's of with membership-based organizations of informal workers to shape markets in ways that were designed to help connect them with buyers and keep people working. So a couple of examples of this in Thailand home net Thailand partnered with national government on procurement so as to create a market for home-based producers of traditional clothing who had lost their market which is normally tourist. In India likewise the self-employed women's association partnered with the Ahmedabad municipal corporation to engage street vendors to provide vegetables to residents in areas under curfew. So these are the types of sort of market shaping initiatives that informal worker leaders reported really made a difference to to getting people to keeping people at work. So what's interesting about these developments is that there are types of measures that are seen by informal workers as useful and appropriate and helpful in their ability to survive the crisis by in one way or another but not the types of things that we tend to see in national economic recovery approaches. So I'm just going to say a couple words about those we've analyzed recovery plans from a few different countries and and have a couple of observations that we think are interesting relative to to sort of juxtaposed against some of the key lessons. One of them is there are not many explicit mentions in national recovery plans of informal workers per se. So there are mentions of recovery measures that could theoretically support recovery for these workers particularly self-employed workers but the way that they're formulated is likely to leave a gap when it comes to the informal workforce. One example I'm just going to share two examples and then wrap up one is a very common approach in national economic recovery plans is to direct assistance to SMEs, small micro enterprises. So this typically comes in the form of institutional supports of simplified registration, streamlining regulations, reducing the time it takes to register a company and then financial support in the form of affordable loans but again most of the informal self-employed are own account workers who for a variety of reasons either don't meet the requirements for SME registration or can't afford to do so and for many of these workers loans even if they're affordable would add to an existing debt burden that already ballooned during the lockdown. So this is a measure that won't likely have a heavy impact and more broadly again in other types of labor market interventions that are common in national recovery plans things like wage subsidies, tax incentives for employers, tax relief for SMEs, public employment plans and so on. These are again going to miss the informal self-employed. So circling back to where we started for conclusion, informal workers got a lot of attention at the beginning of the crisis. There was recognition in some places that they are in fact workers who are essential to the basic functioning of the economy and they're a little bit more openness in terms of ways of thinking about them but there does seem to be a gap in terms of what they need and what actually they report working and the national economic recovery approaches which don't put much emphasis on measures that are likely to have a high probability of reaching them. So I'll conclude there and hand the mic back over to Mike. Thanks Sally that was perfect and your timing couldn't have been more spot on. Thank you for that. Before I introduce the next speaker I'd just like to encourage the audience to make use of the chat function and the Q&A function on the right of your screen if you'd like to post any questions in advance while the speakers are talking. Our second speaker is Dr. Laura Elfers who's the director of Wego's social protection program. She's also based at Rhodes University in South Africa where she's a member of the Neil Agott Labor Studies Unit in the Department of Sociology. Over to you. Thanks Laura. Thanks. Thanks very much Mike and very good to be here. As Sally mentioned I mean one of the big learnings coming out of the COVID crisis last year was that informal workers really need social protection and that they really are the missing middle in terms of social protection coverage and that social protection not only the presence of social protection not only allows societies to better cope with crisis but also can help to mitigate against the kind of economic shocks that we've seen happening in 2020 and into 2021. I was asked to speak about the lessons from relief for social protection and I think it's important to point out the difference between relief measures and social protection so a number of commentators have pointed out that we shouldn't confuse short-term relief measures with what should be longer term systems of social protection providing protection for people throughout the life cycle. Nevertheless what we did see in 2020 was an unprecedented expansion of government relief measures which leveraged existing social protection systems either systems of cash grants or food relief that existed and that means that there will be lessons for social protection systems going forward so just to make that clear. So what lessons? They've been an increasing number of analyses which have sought to answer this question particularly looking at what made the difference to an effective response or not in terms of timeliness and adequacy and so today I would summarize findings from three different small studies. That's one paper by Beasley et al from the social protection alternatives to COVID-19 service or space. The overseas development institute's review of social protection responses and wego's own 12 city study on the impact of COVID-19 on informal workers. All of these studies had a slightly different focus but perhaps giving a more comprehensive picture overall. So if we look at the space paper which looked at the timeliness of the response across 53 countries some of the commonalities they noticed in more effective responses were in countries where there was already existing social protection infrastructure was strong and already covered the intended beneficiaries so they didn't have to look for new people to join into the scheme. In countries where new recipients did have to be identified countries that could use existing government databases or registries rather than having to find people again tended to be able to act faster but notably this was only the case where the registries had sufficient coverage already and work had been updated on a regular basis. Where governments were able to source funds domestically they were able to react faster often because there was less red tape involved in being able to mobilize those funds and where electronic payment modalities digital you know e-wallets digital transfers etc were available this also enabled a speedier response but again only in countries where there is a fairly high level of digital access and financial inclusion. The overseas development institutes paper by Bastagli and Lowe looked at coverage adequacy and timeliness so this looked at the issues of inclusion and whether the amounts were sufficient as well as the issue of timeliness and they identified four enablers to an effective response again we see the quality and scope of the existing social protection and infrastructure played a big role in the effectiveness of the response again the availability the quick availability of financing was was an enabler and the ability to make contextually appropriate and inclusive adjustments to program design also played an important role so one of the best you know the fastest responses that we saw was from Brazil where they were able to leverage their registries and to just relax the eligibility criteria for the Bolsa Familia program which which included a whole lot of new new new people who could then access the cash relief and the ability to adjust delivery and mechanisms and processes gain according to context so we saw some successful and relatively successful relief responses which also included civil society groups and partnerships with with outside of the state in order to in order to expand the reach of the relief on offer so those were two sort of quite large-scale studies looking from the perspective of the state the we go study sort of was looking from the perspective of informal workers and here we found that out of our total sort of sample of the 12 cities only 39% of informal workers surveyed were able to access government relief during the two periods of time that were covered in 2020 what we also saw was that for those who did access relief cash or food it made no difference to reported food security except in the Indian cities of Delhi and Ahmedabad where a seat of food relief did make a difference to reported household food security so this finding I mean our survey was relatively small and difficult to make big claims off but it has been echoed in other bigger surveys such as that by innovations and poverty action which sort of surveyed 30 000 people and found a similar thing that the relief efforts hadn't made a huge dent or a huge difference to food security which suggests that the benefits were inadequate on the whole obviously there were there were exceptions to that and I think some of them for example Brazil again you know significant reductions in poverty and in South Africa reductions in food and security overall although the majority of workers did not receive any relief in some cities we saw relatively good access where we saw over 70% of the surveyed workers being able to access some form of relief and there were two main variables involved here firstly and again the quality and scope of the existing social protection infrastructure made a difference so informal workers who were already covered under food relief old age pensions or child support grants were more likely to have been able to access the support on offer and also a critical last mile linking role played by grassroots organizations of informal workers sharing information helping with applications advocating with officials on behalf of their members and these these efforts were particularly effective where there was a long-standing relationship between the grassroots organization and and the state so what can we say the lessons are so if we look across these three examples I would say that they're five five sort of things that come out of the or that are highlighted by what we saw in 2020 more universal social protection systems are what we need systems that that cover more of the population across the life cycle these are the kinds of systems that we're able to respond more effectively and we're going to provide the kind of coverage that people need going into the future what is already in place makes a big difference adequate sources of financing for social protection is another big issue and to ensure the adequacy of benefits and again this is going to be a big issue as austerity starts to hit the how of social protection programming is important how systems are designed how programs are implemented makes a big difference to who has reached and I think not enough thought yet has gone into what that means for this group of informal workers you haven't yet been reached COVID-19 has also sped up what is often referred to as the digital welfare state and I think issues around digital and financial inclusion are going to become increasingly prominent in social protection discussions and finally I think we saw the importance of making space for grassroots and civil society participation in the design and implementation and governance of social protection schemes because again that was a critical component to how well systems were able to react I think these are a set of ideas that are perhaps relatively uncontroversial particularly in the social protection world I think the real issue going forward is how they are interpreted because universalism or universal social protection can mean building public social protection systems but it can also mean implementing a low-level safety net and privatizing or dismantling public insurance systems greater financing for social protection can be progressively sourced it can also be regressively sourced for example through increasing taxation on the informal sector which is one solution we're starting to see systems can be designed to be inclusive of some and not others and digital and financial inclusion can lead to real benefits but it can also entrench exclusion and be used to divert enormous resources to the private sector and enable the privatization further privatization of the state and social protection systems grassroots participation can be a constructive whole of society approach to building social protection but it can also be a way of shifting responsibility from the state and onto communities so I mean just perhaps in finishing to say I'd say the terrain of the social protection debate is shifting or it's continuing to shift and the shift has been speeded up after COVID I think it's less and less controversial that social protection is needed and that the state has a role to play in social protection and certainly COVID has has underscored that but I think more and more we're going to have to be engaging in these more complex discussions about what shifts are taking place which is within each of these areas and and who gains from those and why and what this means for informal workers thanks great thanks for those remarks Laura plenty to think about uh our third speaker uh is Barbara Harris White um Barbara would you like to share your screen while I introduce you um I believe you've got some slides to share um while she's setting that up uh let me have a look here not yet um sometimes it just needs a second okay it's happening now uh Barbara um Professor Barbara Harris White is a senior research fellow with the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies Professor Emeritus of Development Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University um thanks very much Barbara I think you're all set to go so the floor is yours thank you Mike um can you hear me perfectly perfectly thank you um I'm going to shift gear I'm sorry for this but um in order to think about how we might recover from the sector that I've been studying since 2015 which is waste I need to say a little bit about before and during as well as after um and my uh insights such as they are come from the study of one small town one of 7 000 in India so they're very specific but I think they may raise questions which are more general now very quickly just what do we need to know about waste to think about waste and covid it's an incredibly rapidly growing unstable sector in India a third coming from agriculture a third from industry and a third from household waste which is which is what we see in this slide this is all consumption waste but there are other kinds of waste waste is classified and it's socially constructed in many incoherent ways and that incoherence is not um a trivial problem it's the responsibility of local government rather than central government and local government is chronically starved of revenue it's completely essential to the functioning of the economy sorry the clear the disposal of waste is essential to the functioning of the economy as well as to public health as part of the economy it's a field of capital um like any other part of the economy it's not very special except that work conditions are oppressive and dangerous um neoliberal practices and new public management combined with tax evasion to usher in a nearer of casualization ad hocory contractualization privatization so that the informal waste economy is completely essential to the formal waste economy that run by a municipality and both are completely essential to the economy as a whole um now looking at how covid has affected that kind of waste economy um it's added a hell of a lot more infectious waste to the consumption waste which is um more or less disposed of um by combination of informal informal labor um before the 2021 surge which must have added a lot more um it's covid waste seems to have added between 17 and 40 percent more nobody really knows and a covid hospital patient generates somewhere between two and 15 times the medical waste as a non-covid patient so of course covid waste has emerged as a specialized subfield in solid waste management and in public health but the themes are all very technical and elite themes to do with um infected surfaces to do with the containment of infection whereas what we know from the informal economy is that a lot of this infectious waste leaks out and this has to be treated as general consumption waste now what happened to the labor force well they were completely ignored in this new academic technical literature um they were noticed in the media in selective ways um op-eds deplored the lack of safety gear and they warned about transmission risks in housing where isolation was impossible and op-eds writers discovered roadside disposable disposals of protective equipment masks all kinds of dirty infectious covid waste and it was seen as a burden on the environment rather than on the labor force from whose life world this new research field seems to be far removed now from telephone interviews what was the experience of the labor aristocracy the people employed by the municipality well as Sally said they are supposed to be essential labor but in fact the municipality was switching expenditure towards its public health response and did not support the municipal sanitation workers who are actually essential to that public health response they might have been given surgical masks but they were given no soap no sanitizer no gloves let alone hazard benefits or any special check-ups or tests or washing facilities so covid related waste adds to consumption waste and increases the risk of exposure to the virus of the people who have to deal with it and this dry waste falls to women to collect um and as I said is combined with infectious dangerous medical waste um the sanitation workers also spent a lot of time figuring out whether they should wait hours and hours and lose pay for free vaccines or pay deterrent costs of private vaccines far in excess of of what they felt their earnings was so they were making a calculation and they were often foregoing being vaccinated I think the take on point is that covid isn't a crisis in the in the sense of an unexpected extreme event nor is it a crisis in the sense of a turning point as so many people hope it is but it's simply mask a serious exacerbation of the shipwork that they have to do every single day now if I've got time I've got about two minutes I would like to move to recovery and the question of what is to be done and before we even ask that question the problems with the policy preconditions which are less spoken about um as Subbu Subramanian said just very recently policymaking to be effective requires assessments of magnitudes and trends of major events based on evidence but in the case of waste what is the evidence in the government could you just move the slides down we're not seeing the slides we're seeing the slides sorry but they're not moving you could scroll down where have you got to still on the cover slide the first slide mm-hmm oh lord I can't do that from here it should just be a scroll the slide I'm simply moving out the slide so if you let me finish I'm I think if you haven't seen the slides that's um that's just bad luck um so I want to finish by talking about recovery and policy and and the question is what kind of evidence because in government waste is invisibilized there's a doctoral thesis coming out of IMM Ahmed Abad on this very topic quite now and I wanted to make a number of points about the constitutive context for policy for waste firstly it's surrounded by poor quality law and loopholes really making us question the intentionality of policymakers then the bureaucratic architecture of policy is fractured um some waste policy is um has a jurisdiction which is territorial other waste policy has a jurisdiction which is networked um and the two don't meet there is a huge amount of informalised practice inside governance inside local government which we cannot just wish away um and the local state realizes that it depends on the informal economy to keep its towns clean and yet it selectively harasses and extorts um the very people that it relies on informally so these are conditions which we have to take on board when we think about waste policy then we realize there is no waste policy there is no policy so if you ask officials and if you ask workers you get very different kinds of agendas of what they feel ought to be done a lot of the officials um uh uh parrot out something they've seen on television they seem to know very little about the waste economy and they feel that the problem is uncivil behaviour by citizens lack of segregation and so on and so forth and you can compare this with the policy agenda of the municipal sanitation workers who see revenue reform as being absolutely crucial public education mechanization decent work contracts and an end to their contemptuous treatment and they see the problems as public toxicity and threats to health and to well-being and what I see is that the policy the utopian policy agenda of officials is very different to the utopian policy agenda of workers they're mutually exclusive um so I'll stop beyond covid is beyond recovery um what you what one sees is that the waste economy is a cultural artifact but the many problems of waste workers as waste workers are only represented through their ungendered identities as dalits and as adivasis the only reform worthy of the conditions in which the waste workers are toiling needs to be very radical waste needs a workforce organised and equipped like the indian army I realise that this will go down like a tonne of lead in wego which is relying on civil society and collective action but the leader of the c2 leader of the waste workers said this waste disposal should be organised by the government of india like the police and the army and not through arbitrary schemes like swatch barrett or cash starved municipality let alone self-help groups and the reason for that is that there are drops in the ocean if we think about them the implications for social poverty policy in a recovery first and foremost waste is a social problem and policies need to be set in place to disengage from patriarchy and from caste there are implications for public expenditure in before waste can be addressed there needs to be an enforcement of fiscal compliance and erosion tax evasion and finally the implication for public policy is to visualise the informal waste economy and I'll leave it there I'm really sorry that you couldn't see my slides well thanks very much Barbara and actually thanks to Ruby who who'd managed to get your slides up and follow it along and towards the end so we we got quite a bit of that so thanks very much for that Barbara and thanks to all three presenters for those for those thoughts and reflections as I mentioned we're very fortunate today to have two distinguished discussants to give their reflections on the presentations we've just heard the first is professor Jayati Ghosh her work will no doubt be familiar to many of you in the audience today she's currently professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the United States and we're absolutely delighted that she's agreed to speak with us today and so I'd like to hand the floor to her thank you very much thank you so much Mike and you know thank you for these really brilliant and very thought-provoking and thoughtful presentations I think in a way they're actually all complemented each other very well because they've brought up the issues which some of them are well known but some of them are actually not that well known and recognised even today and I think that's really important so you know Barbara's discussion of the waste workers I think relates directly into the discussion that Sally mentioned at the very beginning about you know defining what is essential work and how the pandemic in a sense tried created conditions whereby governments have to define essential work which let's face it they have not done very well and it's a very uneven record of success in terms of figuring out what is essential work largely because so much work is still invisible so I think one of the critical things that has come out and this came out also I believe from from what Laura was saying is that you know a lot of the the attempts at dealing with the pandemic responding to it and the subsequent attempts at recovery have talked about work as it is generally recognised in other words employment as it is generally recognised and looked at perhaps alleviating some of the conditions of that employment but many kinds of employment and many kinds of work which are not paid and therefore not recognised immunorated and so on have simply been left out of this so there are two major exclusions one has to do with the types of work that are not being considered in terms of how their conditions can be alleviated the conditions of workers can be improved and bettered and made more viable and it's not just about enterprises it's fundamentally about workers that again is something that governments so far in a lot of the pandemic response have missed but the other thing that came out I think very strongly is that it's not just about the work and employment it is about the conditions of life which affect informal workers particularly in many ways because of the fact that their work is informal and therefore they have no legal and social protections which means that except in the few economies that already had reasonably strong social policy and social protection kinds of measures like Brazil and certainly South Africa more than the rest of Africa and more than South Asia that in all of these other countries informal workers have slipped out of the net of social protection so that what we find is that even in the countries where initially there was some pandemic relief packages they were extremely limited they were not able to identify most of the required beneficiaries and they therefore did not really succeed in alleviating the problem I think Laura was talking about food security not being significantly alleviated what we find now a year and a half later is much worse because there is also shall I say you know basically really fatigue governments are saying well you know we're tired of this we've done enough we're fiscally strained especially in the developing world they are fiscally strained because global capital doesn't allow them large fiscal deficits their revenues have collapsed and in fact what we find is governments doing everything possible now to once again attract capital to invest under any conditions which means that they are loosening regulatory controls even further they are abandoning the kinds of legal protection that were available because of the terrible labour market conditions and because of the attempt to generate employment at any cost and so in a way what is happening is that the informal workers who were hit badly in the first round I mean that was just the beginning we are now seeing a much worse situation certainly in India but even elsewhere in terms of the worsening conditions of informal work in all of this I think another point that Barbara made is absolutely essential just the absence of the data with which to actually consider how we improve conditions so I think going forward I know it's it's it's almost a trope and it's rather stereotypical to say you know we must have more data we must have more information and so on but the absence of information in India we're not even collecting properly the employment data the government turns around and says we have no data on how many migrants had to leave their homes we have no data on how many people are starving we have no data so it's very convenient to say well we don't know so we can't do anything about it we have to insist on adequate data we have to insist on strategies for informal work being looking at the conditions of both work and life of informal workers not just of you know the conditions of work in enterprises per se even in micro and small enterprises and we have to look at all of this in terms of the macroeconomic impact as well because you know the more you ignore these conditions of life and work of informal workers the more you are condemning your macroeconomy as well into continuous downslide because you know you're getting falling consumption you're getting going to get continued declined in aggregate demand and therefore you will not get any investment either so I believe that the presentations that we've had have actually given us very clear pointers into the directions that we have to move and one important direction my final point is public employment and I think it came out clearly in Barbara it came out clearly in what Sally was saying was clearly part of what Laura was saying you can't do any of this without dramatic expansions in good quality public employment at many different levels and that is important even for ensuring decent conditions of life and work for informal workers let me stop here great thank you very much for those insightful reflections we really appreciate that and your time and joining us today finally we're also very fortunate and privileged to have with us professor young bremen whose professor emeritus of comparative sociology at the university of amsterdam and has continued as an honorary fellow at the international institute of social history in amsterdam young we look forward to your insights into this discussion and over to you uh you are muted um or it seems as though you're muted at the moment yeah and I think you might have to leave and come back again the way you did in the in the previous session there um while he does that um uh ruby do we we have a bit of time for questions if people are willing to post their their questions in the q and a um so we have here in the in the chat as well that I think you you might be able to see from yeah I don't see any questions in the chat room but I can certainly see the the chat yes the one just scroll up it's three from the bottom three from the bottom i'm on uh salim okay yeah so while uh yon uh comes back to to join us um the question from the audience is do you think we should differentiate between COVID-19 waste and regular waste um it's not addressed to a particular speaker but uh I think barba would be um uh best place to to answer that question I see she's actually posted something in in the chat to to address that question as it is um barba do you want to say a few words to that question while we wait for yon okay I'm really sorry for yon but I resonate because of my own powerpoint problems it's a very good question um regular waste is um I presume consumption waste the problem is there's no official categories of regular waste you have factory waste you have waste human waste you have um waste on the railways you have waste clogging up public spaces um I think that COVID waste more often than not needs treating as infectious waste and in most societies infectious waste um comes from hospitals and clinics and is formally segregated and treated separately to be incinerated or buried um but the fieldwork with i've done by phone during COVID suggests that a lot of the infectious waste gets muddled up with consumption waste that is the waste that people feel entitled to throw on verges and waste ground um and and so what it does is increase the hazards of waste collection and of segregation and of waste disposal so uh I don't know what other people feel but I feel that the proper response to it will be to treat it um as infectious waste but I know from the UK that that's that that isn't being done a lot of it just simply goes with goes out with regular consumption waste thanks Barbara um anyone else from the the panel um care to pick up on this I think what what the pandemic has done has really uh exposed the fact that we don't deal with infectious waste proper properly and I think Barbara's absolutely right it should be treated as infectious waste but biomedical waste in India and Barbara knows this better than anyone is not properly disposed of a lot of the time there is a huge amount of and I imagine this is true across developing countries because of the pandemic and the fear of infection people are suddenly aware of it so maybe it's a good thing maybe it will now cause some more policy attention to actually you know proper segregation and attention to how you sort them out and how you deal with it but at the moment I think a lot of hazardous waste is routinely mixed up with non-hazardous waste of different kinds with all kinds of future terrible implications for both the health and the environment yeah thanks um that's excellent response I think um are there any other questions that I'm not seeing I doesn't seem like there's any question like oh yes yeah if you don't mind I'll read that out um our financial inclusion and digital inclusion a mechanism for better protection uh or better protecting informal workers or for tapping into informal labor to cut costs what decides which way these modes of inclusion are are used so I think that's an excellently provocative question um so my follow-up question is which panelist has a an immediate response to that question I think it could go to anyone really I can have a have a quick stab yeah I mean I think certainly like never before we've seen the whole digital and financial inclusion issue become such a such a key issue in COVID because suddenly we had the closure of pay points you know physical manual pay points for the giving of cash relief for shutdown so the big question was well how are we going to get cash to people and the solutions were okay we can use mobile money we can use ATMs we can use bank accounts we can use electronic transfers um so immediately if you were on the wrong side of that you were not you know you were it was difficult I mean there was a lot of so we saw many informal workers in South Africa and Mexico India as well really having to launch big challenges to governments to say you can't do it like this we actually do need the manual option um we do need um or organizations stepping into to try and sort of act as the bridge so it was a very real difficulty and for that reason I mean you know the the response then is well to solve that problem we need to make sure there's more that people are included um you know so that the next time there's a crisis like this or the next time something happens they are going to be on the right side of of things but there is attention with that as well in that you know as Kate's has pointed out in her question uh there are a whole lot of you know negative connotations that can come along with digital and financial inclusion um and particularly issues around you know what does it mean for privatizing the state when when effectively a whole lot of of public resources are going to private companies to do this work what does it mean for people's data um you know what does it mean to bring people into you know the banking the banking people make money out of this and is it right so I think it's an important question I don't have the answer to it at all I know that there is going to be a difficult balance to find between the very real practical needs of people to get access to relief uh or to social protection and and the issues that pop up Mike can you hear me now we can hear you clearly and I I know we're running close on time but if the audience will indulge me Jan has prepared just a few remarks um and I propose we give the last word to him so thank you very much Jan thank you and sorry to all participants and to the audience the composite character of the workforce engaged in informal employment impedes dealing with it under one and the same label I shall focus in the very short time now on the bottom ranks the people dispossessed from means of production who moreover are kept adrift in food low food lose mobility either town to city village to town or city or between sectors they are food lose and they remain food lose to to weaken their marketing power my takeoff point is a note in the the the circulated one which said that in order to understand the consequences of pandemic we will have to to realize that the relationship between capital labor and the state urgently needs to be restructured the interventions proposed to improve the miserable plight of the working classes stuck at the bottom of the economy are not going to materialize under the rain of market-driven capitalism this anti-labour regime treats the working poor as a reserve army and aims to cut down the price of their casualized employment to the lowest possible rate the only critical comment I'm now able to make is that the state is adamantly unwilling to find out what transpires in the in the bottom echelons of economy and society it is a system of governments governance which holds no brie for people who are blamed for lacking coping power to satisfy their basic needs the government of India reluctantly collects data on employment and wages of these massive classes and desists from disseminating this unwelcome news as long as possible part and parcel of the same politics and policies of exclusion is the recently declared design of the state machinery to deny all support to households which fail to exert themselves to the level of self-reliance what is still being labeled as poverty or impoverishment should actually be reclassified as pauperism and pauperization the use of this terminology brings us back to an era in which a doctrine of social Darwinism prevailed castigating people in dire straits for their immiseration the ethos of exclusion is more acute in nation states which continue to be organized on the rank social inequality it's an official de-menor made manifest in withholding citizens rights to such down-and-out communities and which also disallows social and human rights activists to raise the claim of inclusion publicly this taboo on supple turn resistance explains why explains why most of the world's immiserated people are amassed in south in the south asian subcontinent although the rate of growth in this economic growth in this region has been quite substantial in the last few decades the pandemic has further widened the already huge gap on both sides of the welfare fence but used to be called the poverty line has taken shape as an unsurmountable barrier the stigmatization of the population on the downside is intensified by depriving these contingents from public visibility and voice as a discriminated and criminalized lot sweeping them aside as the non-deserving poor which also brings us back to the era of social Darwinism their civil absence can be exemplified by figuring out excess mortality due to covid-19 while not acknowledging the presence of people redundant to demand when they were still around they have also remained unregistered in the official counts of the fatality their number is huge particularly in rural areas out of vaccination fear and distrust or even hostility to the haphazard and defaulting medical care the government provides i did my anthropological fieldwork in a state of india which said that and now i'm talking in the gucciatti language the government is my mother and father that belief of the poor in the benevolence of the state has completely exhausted has drained away the state is now looked at with this distrust with hate even more than any other social class these unseen and unheard people were the main victims of the pandemic they have died as unprotected and undocumented as when they were alive thanks for still allowing me mic thank you very much jan and i can't think of a better way to end this session than on on that note we are well and truly over the the time limit at the moment so i would just like to pause for a moment and conclude by thanking the three presenters and both of our discussants we thank you very much for for taking the time to join us today i'd also very much like to thank marty chen from wego and kunal sen from unu wider who really conceptualized these these two panels both of which i understand will be available on youtube so you and you wider in the conference organizers are posting these so form and fame and fortune will likely follow for all of you who participated today so thank you for that and of course a huge thanks to the unu wider team for making this conference possible obviously we wanted to be with you in Helsinki but this is a this is a second best option i think and thanks to everyone who attended today and for submitting those those thoughtful questions and for me thanks to everyone then bye bye great thanks everyone that was fantastic you all kept the time so nicely and i thought the the presentation really complimented each other and thanks for coming back young i might have just run away but you persevered so thanks it was nice seeing all of you yeah and thank you for doing the discussion yeah