Informality and employment vulnerability: application in sellers with subsistence work

Area of Science:

• Socioeconomics
• Labor Studies
• Urban Studies

Background:

• Street vendors operate within the informal economy, often facing precarious employment conditions.
• The concept of employment vulnerability is inconsistently applied to informal subsistence workers.
• Lack of clear definitions hinders targeted interventions for this demographic.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the origin, evolution, and application of employment vulnerability in street vendors.
• To clarify the concept of employment vulnerability for informal subsistence workers.
• To propose a refined definition to facilitate social mobility.

Main Methods:

• Literature review of academic and gray literature in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
• Analysis focused on informal economy, social-employment vulnerability, and subsistence workers.
• Geographical scope included Latin America and the Caribbean.

Main Results:

• The informal economy is often conflated with employment vulnerability, creating definitional ambiguity.
• This ambiguity complicates the identification of specific vulnerability profiles for street vendors.
• Existing definitions restrict the development of effective strategies to reduce vulnerability.

Conclusions:

• A precise concept of employment vulnerability is crucial for developing targeted interventions.
• Proposed definition: 'the condition of those who must work by day to eat at night, who have little or no ownership of assets, and who have a minimum structure of opportunities to prevent, face, and resist the critical situations that occur daily.'
• This refined concept links social and employment vulnerability, facilitating a pathway from precarity to social mobility.