Since the 1970s, a rich and growing academic literature has focused on the formation of divisions between the “formal” and “informal” sectors in industrial economies across the world at different scales of operation. There is a general consensus that, beginning in the 1970s, the hegemonic model of employment was transformed globally, as organized workforces, state-guaranteed workers´ rights and immunities, consolidated and large workplaces and robust systems of national protection gave way to the rolling back of state sectors, diminished state protection, dispersion of industrial units and the break-up of large workplaces and trade union movements.
For more information, see the official CFP for “Formalisation, Informalisation and the Labour Process: Comparative Perspectives.”
Rosemary Feurer is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950, among others. She is working on The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860-1940 and a new biography of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones.