Conference Agenda

This study aims to examine the gender disparity in Japan regarding precarious employment and individual well-being under the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic seriously influenced on many business categories in Japan, and as a result, its number of personnel was reduced. The primary target for such a personnel reduction is non-regular workers, and many of whom are females. According to Tokyo Shimbun (2021), as of February 2021, the number of female non-regular workers has decreased by 890,000 compared to the same month of the previous year. According to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (2021), the number of female workers committed suicide in 2020 was 1698, an increase of nearly 30% from the five-year average up to 2019. In addition, as compared from other advanced countries, there is a large gap in the income level between part-time and full-time workers in Japan (The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (2022))

In this study, we both theoretically and empirically explore the following points. First, as compared from males, female workers are more likely to be the target of personnel reduction during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Second, the risk of personnel reduction adversely affects to the workers’ well-being, and as compared from males, the effect is more severe for females. Third, as compared from regular workers, non-regular workers are more financially constrained.

This study uses the data provided by ‘Survey on Changes in Life Awareness and Behavior under the Influence of COVID-19 Infection’ (2020; a) (2020; b) conducted by Japan’s Cabinet Office. This survey investigates changes in life consciousness and behavior under the influence of COVID-19. The survey was conducted to May 2020, June 2020 and December 2020. The survey area is nationwide, and appropriate sampling is conducted according to the population ratio. Regarding the analysis of well-being, the survey asked about the six items.

As a preliminary analysis, we performed an empirical analysis by using the data obtained from the survey. As compared from other attributes, female non-regular employees are more likely to be anxious about their work and future life. The policy alternative to mitigating the gap in employment condition between regular and non-regular workers will help to improve the labour market situation in Japan.

It has been documented in the recent literature on the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on gender inequality across the world (Dang & Nguyen, 2021) and even more complicate ones in the developing world and the Global South (Agarwal, 2021). This paper examines the effects on work and labor market outcomes of men and women in rural Vietnam during the period 2019-2021. Although rural areas were less hard hit by the outbreak, the sufferings born by rural workers are not less severe given the majority (over 77%) belongs to the informal or small-scale household farming sectors, with no access to social protection.

In particular, we examine how rural women in the informal economy faced job loss, reduction in labor supply and earnings changes. Using the microdata from the labor force survey of over 26,000 individuals in rural Vietnam in 2021, we employ multinomial logit models on work and income changes. Although among female workers, only 4.1% of women reported a job loss and 41% reported a reduction in hours of work as compared to 5.1% and 38.9% of men respectively, there are significant heterogeneous effects between genders and across sectoral formality while controlling for individual characteristics, human capital (including ICT skills), age groups and household demographic structure. Similarly, self-reported income reduction was found more prevalent among informal workers (80%) as compared to those in the formal sector (64%). To confirm the results of the above models with self-reporting information by workers, we also test a more comprehensive model on the real labor earnings by incorporating the Covid-19 infection

rates across provinces in 2020-2021 to measure the pandemic impact on rural workers through a gender lens and from the sectoral perspective.

Our findings shed light on the possibility of recovery approaches to ascertain more decent work for rural women. By contrasting the econometric results with individual coping strategies through employment adjustment or training, and with the government transfer and support schemes, we contribute to the ongoing policy debate on the efficacy of recovery measures in developing and emerging economies in the Global South in the post-Covid-19 era.

India’s informal labor markets took staggering losses in the Covid-19 pandemic. Women in these markets were particularly vulnerable. Inequalities in access to job opportunities, use of digital technologies, coverage of social protection programs and the responsibilities of child-care have placed them at a considerable disadvantage on what was already an uneven playing field with male workers. This paper explores how affiliation with a local women’s organisation contributed to resilience among informal women workers in 10 states of India in early 2022. Our research focusses on the programs of SEWA Bharat, the national federation of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a member-based trade union and organisation of women workers in the informal economy established in Gujarat in 1972, and its state-level organisations and unions. We focus on ten states: Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and West Bengal.

Our data comes from a telephonic survey that was conducted by female research assistants using in the 10 program states in February-March 2022. We study a sample of 1308 respondents, sampled from a pool of SEWA members across states. Women were asked about their livelihoods, family life, their engagement with welfare schemes and their physical and mental health. Drawing on this quantitative data, we highlight the challenges faced by women informal workers in four critical areas: mental stress, inadequate entitlements, absence of childcare and disruptions due to Covid19. We find that almost three-quarters of women respondents had at least two of the four types of crises. The crises were deeply interlinked, reinforcing each other regardless of a woman’s age, social status or family structure. Communities with a long history of housing women’s collectives were, however, better able to manage these crises and showed greater resilience in the face of pandemic disruptions. We draw on case studies and examples to illustrate that the solidarity and social protection from such programs contribute to women’s support structures and enable them to recover from the setbacks of the pandemic by addressing these interlinked crises simultaneously.

In times of widespread and multifaceted crisis, informal workers tend to suffer disproportionately due to the precarious nature of their livelihoods and limited access to social protection. Informal worker associations have been shown to be important providers of both informal cushioning, and facilitators of social insurance to protect workers facing idiosyncratic shocks. But what happens to these associations and their ability to cushion informal workers when in addition to various idiosyncratic shocks they also face covariate shocks? During COVID-19 informal workers globally were hit by the combined effects of the virus and the aversion strategies adopted to contain it. In both Kenya and Tanzania, the pandemic presented the informal economy with social and economic shocks and tested the ability of associations to cushion workers. Using data of informal workers in urban areas of Kenya and Tanzania this paper investigates the hypothesis that social protection delivered by associations is more fragile under covariate shocks. The paper examines how associations in the sectors of construction, micro-trade and transport have responded to COVID-19, focusing on the challenges and capacities to provide and uphold social cushioning in times of multiple and covariate crisis. The comparison between Kenya, where restrictions were strictly implemented, with Tanzania, where the existence of COVID-19 was largely downplayed, allows for an assessment of country-level differences in tackling the pandemic. The comparison between sectors, which prior to the pandemic were shown to spur different kinds of worker associations and types of assistance, reveals how sector specific characteristics might influence both the challenges faced and responses to the pandemic. The findings reveal country- and sector-level similarities, but also some differences in crisis responses. In both countries, micro-traders largely continued with their daily activities whilst informal transport workers were significantly affected by the lockdown. Amongst construction workers many lost their jobs or were unable to find work due to restrictions on movement. As for associations, the picture is mixed with some of the more established ones remaining fully operational, especially in the Kenyan transport sector, whilst others restricted their activities and provided limited financial assistance or redirected their focus to other more achievable services such as training on COVID-19 related health and safety measures. Thus, whilst associations respond well to one-off individual shocks, they are often not resilient enough to carry workers through a nationwide crisis, pointing to the need to improve formal social protection systems to better handle covariate type shocks.