Manufacturing Informality

Informalized employment persists and emerges in new forms in advanced and developing economies alike despite its widespread costs in terms of precariousness, unfair competition, and loss of revenues and state legitimacy. To investigate the mechanisms of such persistence, this book reconceptualizes informalization as a tool of labour control and therefore as the result of a continuous negotiation between workers and employers at the workplace level. Theoretically, the analysis draws on a combination of Global Production Networks (GPNs) studies and Labour Process Theory (LPT); empirically, it focuses on garment-footwear GPNs in (Southern) Italy and Albania and draws on extensive, multi-sited fieldwork, interviews and focus groups with workers, unionists, managers, labour inspectors, NGO representatives, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

Through a multilevel study of of anti-informality policies, social contexts, sectoral structures and workplace dynamics, the book explains differentiated informalization patterns within GPNs as the combination of forbearance policies, devaluing social norms and socially embedded struggles between workers and employers at the workplace level.