The Work We Depend On but Rarely See
Who cleans a home, sells food on a street corner, sews products from home, or collects the waste a city leaves behind?
These jobs are easy to overlook, yet they are part of an informal economy employing nearly two billion people worldwide. According to WIEGO, 55% of working women are in informal employment. Domestic workers, home-based workers, street vendors, market traders, and waste pickers are among the groups that keep households and cities functioning while often lacking adequate recognition under labor laws or access to employment benefits.
What interests me is the contradiction between economic value and social visibility. We notice these workers when their work disappears: when a home is not cleaned, a market closes, or waste is not collected. Yet the people performing that work can remain almost invisible within the institutions that define who counts as a protected worker.
This makes “informal” feel like more than an economic category. It raises a question about what societies choose to recognize.
Visibility matters because recognition can determine who receives protection, who appears in policy, and whose problems become urgent enough to solve.
Perhaps the challenge is not to make informal work disappear. It is to make sure the people doing essential work do not disappear from our definition of a worker.
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