7 - State care for unregulated labour

Summary

Slow and differential access to formal sector employment

Government intervention in the labour system is concerned primarily with what is known as the formal sector of the non-agricultural economy. Under that common denominator fall the skilled and relatively well-paid part of the working population in wage-jobs, based on regular employment and represented in bargaining rituals by trade unions who seek their membership primarily or exclusively among such workers. They are white- and blue-collar workers, employed in factories and offices, workplaces which produce commodities but which also operate in trade, transport and other branches of the service sector, employees of both private and public enterprises, located in large and small cities or in the countryside. The majority are involved in large-scale industries, under working conditions that are protected by a great many legal provisions. Those regulations concern not only the amount of wages and the procedure to be followed in fixing that amount, but also establish numerous other collective rights, sub-divided according to rank and grade, which may be claimed by the employees involved. The proportion of the working population in wage-employment that is protected in this way is far surpassed in size by the mass of workers who depend largely or entirely for their livelihood on wage-employment outside the formal sector of the urban or rural economy. Because of the lack of reliable quantitative data I have to suffice with a rough estimate of the ratio between the two categories into which the working population outside agriculture is divided.