ILPC 2026

Over the last four decades, the global transformation of capitalism imposed new conditions on labor. While in some areas of the world there was an exponential growth of waged workers, in others, economic restructuring decimated economic activities that had previously supported well-paid and protected jobs. Whether unemployed workers are reabsorbed under informal or precarious conditions, or as formal workers subjected to harsher market discipline, an increasing number of workers throughout the world now lack some of the protections historically associated with standard employment. Moreover, for an equally large and in many countries growing number of workers, waged labour has become an increasingly elusive reality.

            It is in this context that notions of the informal sector and non-standard employment that had historically characterized work in the Global South acquire renewed relevance. In our presentation we will critically analyze historical debates about the articulation between various spheres of economic activity and the workers within them. We will pay special attention to the idea of the reserve army of labour as a conceptual tool to draw connections between workers in the informal sector, the heterogeneity of the working class and capital accumulation. We will argue that while the concept might be useful in understanding the disciplining role of the growing number of workers that have been made redundant for employers, it might not be equally productive to frame the problem of those workers who do not find a way back into waged work and for whom an unwaged life is the present and future reality under existing capital accumulation strategies Unwaged, however, does not imply marginality to accumulation. On the contrary, there are particular mechanisms through which production and reproduction of waged and unwaged workers in the informal economy are articulated to the core of capital accumulation.