The global economic issue I expect to see in this year’s headlines isn’t a single crisis, but a slow-burning tension that has been building for years: the gap between the realities of people’s economic lives and how state institutions define work, protection and representation.
For more than a decade, I’ve worked alongside organizations of street vendors, home-based workers, waste pickers and domestic workers in the Global South, who operate outside standard employment relationships. Daily life is shaped by volatile incomes, firms and employers shifting costs and risk downward, punitive state action, exclusion from social protection, and limited avenues for making their voices heard in economic decision-making.
These dynamics are no longer mainly a Global South concern. In the United States and Europe, technological change is reshaping labor markets through subcontracting, misclassification, platform work and the expansion of informalized service sectors, while labor law, social protection and collective bargaining remain tied to a mid-20th-century model of stable, full-time employment.
As this gap widens, it is increasingly playing out politically through a crisis of representation. Workers outside traditional labor institutions struggle to see themselves reflected in economic policy. The result is that it is experienced as something done to people rather than with them, with implications for democratic legitimacy as much as for labor standards.
Laura Alfers is the international coordinator at WIEGO, a global network that supports workers in informal employment, especially women and those living in poverty.