“What is ‘informal labour’? Discuss the need for and challenges in regulating informal labour in the post-industrial society.” (2019)
Informal labour is work not governed by state regulation or collective agreement: no written contract, no social security, no paid leave and no effective legal recourse. The ILO’s 17th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (2003) moved the definition from the enterprise to the job, so it covers contract and casual workers inside formal firms as well as the self-employed. Daniel Bell (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 1973) expected a service and knowledge economy to bring professional, secure work. Instead, informality has returned at the heart of service and digital economies.
Forms in post-industrial society
- Gig and platform work: ride-hailing, delivery, home services.
- Outsourced and non-standard work: agency security and cleaning; fixed-term, zero-hours and freelance contracts.
- Global care chains: Arlie Russell Hochschild (2000) describes migrant women doing domestic and care work across borders, largely outside labour law.
Need for regulation
- Labour is not a commodity: Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1944) called labour a “fictitious commodity”. Unregulated labour markets tear the social fabric.
- Social citizenship: T. H. Marshall (Citizenship and Social Class, 1950) made social rights part of full citizenship, and informal workers are citizens without them.
- Individualised risk: Ulrich Beck (The Brave New World of Work, 2000) warned of a “Brazilianisation” of Western work, with insecurity borne by individuals.
- Social stability: Guy Standing (The Precariat, 2011) sees an insecure class drifting towards populist anger.
- Dignity and identity: Richard Sennett (The Corrosion of Character, 1998) shows flexibility eroding trust and a coherent life story.
- Unaccountable algorithms: ratings, deactivations and opaque pay concentrate power without responsibility.
- Indian scale: nearly 90 per cent of workers are informally employed (ILO–IHD, 2024), and NITI Aayog (2022) projects 2.35 crore gig workers by 2029-30.
Challenges in regulating
- No identifiable employer: labour law assumes an employer, a workplace and continuity. Platforms call workers “partners”; subcontracting hides the principal employer.
- Misclassification: status is decided case by case. The UK Supreme Court in Uber v Aslam (2021) held drivers to be “workers”.
- Mobile capital: firms relocate to avoid costs; states fear losing investment.
- Jobs versus protection: heavy compliance may push work further underground.
- Invisibility and fragmentation: home-based, domestic and multi-platform workers are scattered and hard to inspect or unionise.
- Portability: benefits tied to one employer fail workers who move across firms, cities and apps.
- Jurisdiction: in India central codes overlap with state gig laws, and platforms have challenged Karnataka’s 2025 Act in the High Court.
Emerging responses
- International: ILO Recommendation 204 (2015) sets out the transition to the formal economy. The EU Platform Work Directive (2024) creates a rebuttable presumption of employment and human oversight of algorithmic decisions, to be transposed by December 2026.
- India: the Code on Social Security, 2020, in force since 21 November 2025, defines gig and platform workers and requires aggregators to pay 1–2 per cent of turnover, capped at 5 per cent of payouts, into a social security fund. e-Shram has registered about 31.9 crore unorganised workers with portable Aadhaar-linked IDs. Rajasthan (2023), Karnataka and Jharkhand (2025) and Telangana (2026) have their own laws.
- Collective action: Rina Agarwala (2013) shows Indian informal workers organising to claim welfare from the state rather than from employers.
Conclusion
Regulating informal labour in post-industrial society cannot mean restoring the old factory contract. It means attaching protection to the worker rather than the job, through portable social security, algorithmic transparency and a floor of rights. Its success turns on whether the portability of labour’s rights can match the mobility of capital.