Applying International Labour Standards to the Informal Economy

In order to provide workers and workers’ organizations, including unions, the tools to use existing ILO conventions and recommendations creatively to elicit new interpretations from the ILO supervisory system which broaden their scope to the obstacles confronting workers in the informal economy, the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) are producing a series of guidelines on a convention-by-convention basis. These guidelines identify the specific issues that workers in the informal economy face that are relevant to that convention and provide; existing ILO jurisprudence on point; and provide recommendations as to how workers and the organizations should frame their comments or complaints to obtain a favourable outcome from the supervisory system. It is our hope that workers and organizations, through consistent use of these guides, will help to develop a robust set of jurisprudence, which can be used to advocate for legal and institutional reforms at the national and regional levels.

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