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The chapter addresses the magnitude of prostitution throughout 39 countries, namely the EU-28 plus Norway and 10 non-EU transition countries, as of the year 2010. According to the authors’ literature review concerning both non-coerced and coerced prostitution, empirical studies prove very scarce. Scant data from representative household surveys on male sexual behaviour document the demand side. Data sources are collected on the supply side in order to design three series of estimates using the following measurements: two from HIV prevalence among female sex workers, two from international NGOs and two from victims of sexual exploitation trafficking. Estimates are tested with an OLS model, an ordered probit and country ranking with respect to GDP per capita, legislation, scale, supply-side and demand-side variables, as well as the share of sex work in the female labour force. Estimates are checked against national accounts adjustments for illegal production on the supply side and consumption expenditure on the demand side, using an average price for sexual services and related earnings; neither a profession nor an occupation, prostitution is an economic activity and sex workers belong to informal employment. Four main findings are the assessment for most likely Estimates, the asymmetry of prostitution regimes regarding the magnitude of sex work, the premium in earnings from prostitution and the inclusion of sex workers into informal employment.

This chapter addresses two sets of related questions. It considers what collective negotiation (“bargaining”) looks like and what it means for informal worker organisations and their members. The chapter focuses on informal workers who are categorised mainly as “self-employed” for legal purposes. While much research has concentrated on informal worker organising, far less is known about the kinds of bargaining in which the resulting organisations engage. We address how informal workers access opportunities to bargain with entities that have some power over the conditions of their work. We also explore some of the ways in which negotiation is combined with other approaches and why this occurs in the case of informal workers. The chapter draws on internal documents from the global research and policy network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) that monitor collective negotiations underway and some published cases. It relies on material from a monitoring of collective negotiations by street vendor organisations, which has been ongoing since 2013 and which co-author Horn conducts through remote interviews and some face-to-face meetings with 32 organisations, combined with selected cases of negotiations by home-based and street vendor worker organisations in several countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The two worker groups—street vendors and home-based workers—provide a contrast in work setting and gender composition. Street vendors operate in the public space and are a mixed-gender group, whereas home-based workers are most often women and work in private space. The chapter examines what self-employed informal workers and their organisations want from negotiation, and how their situation differs from that of formal workers. We develop a typology of negotiations in which informal worker organisations engage and provide country examples for these types of platforms based on case studies as well as the review of street vendor negotiations. A later section discusses how and why informal worker organisations engage in global venues for purposes of negotiation. The conclusion provides reflections and points to directions for future research.

A series of recent research papers commissioned by the ILO provides some key findings on the various challenges of any intervention that aims to transition from the informal to the formal economy, along with the necessary conditions for collective regulation to ensure the effectiveness and legitimacy of public policies in that matter. Indeed, public policies that aim to facilitate the transition to the formal economy must incorporate genuine replacement solutions for the livelihood security of grassroots actors; this is a crucial test for the legitimacy of the project. Faced with exclusion, social fragmentation and anomie, the State’s responsibility is to make “cohabitation” within the formal economy bearable, possible and thinkable. The results of studies carried out among “ordinary people” reveal that household livelihood security is one of people’s main concerns. In this regard, this should form the central plank of any integrated formalisation strategy and a component of a democratic “new deal” between the people and the State. The “deal” includes consolidating local associative movements and creating an inclusive state that guarantees collective freedoms, social justice and the construction of territories where “sustainable good life” is possible.

The advancement of neo-liberalism has informed discourses and practices based on the assumption that government authorities should not or are not capable of assuming the main responsibility of protecting people’s livelihoods. Individuals and communities are increasingly pressured to rely on their own resources to confront hardships. There is a strong body of literature on cooperation models between workers, or between workers, employers, and/or governments. While cooperatives and co-production models often can be associated with the neo-liberalisation agenda, there are also examples of transformative experiences in the waste sector. In many developing cities, in the absence of municipal recycling systems, waste pickers’ organisations have been formed and have been fighting for integration into waste management schemes. By doing so, they complement the formal solid waste systems with a cooperative system based on recovery of recyclable materials. In this chapter we draw from three cases in which waste picker cooperatives are engaged as service providers in solid waste management and also from scholarship on waste governance and co-production with the aim of contributing to the body of scholarship on models of formalisation of the informal waste workers. We claim that waste pickers play a key role in urban metabolism and their organisations have been able to shape alternative routes for creation of green jobs and formalisation routes through their struggles for social protection, for decent work, and for acknowledgement as service providers in municipal recycling schemes. Cooperatives carry out a social function by avoiding socio-economic exclusion, they provide a public health service as service providers in urban solid waste systems, and they are key economic actors in the recycling chain. Given these contributions it is important to analyse waste pickers’ cooperatives under a multidimensional approach and to frame comprehensive policies and regulations that can strengthen coops’ role in furthering decent work. We argue that cooperatives can contribute to decent work by: tackling social and economic exclusion of marginalised groups; creating ways to extend social protection for informal workers; playing a role in enhancing channels of social dialogue and political negotiations; contributing to rights at work by helping in the mitigation of economically vulnerable and physically risky work conditions; and being a source for building women’s empowerment.