Conference Agenda

The COVID-19 pandemic involved the urgent need to adjust and expand Latin America’s non-contributory social protection systems to respond to the growing need for assistance from poor, vulnerable and middle-income households. Greater demands for the welfare state’s most important reforms triggered social mobilisation in several countries in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Furthermore, a large part of the literature has focused on the short-term impacts of the crisis, but we need to analyse the medium-term impacts of the social policy expansion. Thus, the COVID-19 crisis is an example of plausibility, but there are serious apprehensions about the sustainability of the innovations introduced recently.

From March 2020 to October 2021, ECLAC reported that 33 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean adopted 468 initiatives, of which 378 were non-contributory emergency measures. Nonetheless, 50.2% of the regional population received an emergency transfer which is more than double the regular coverage of conditional cash transfers. According to the ILO, 30 million jobs in the region were lost due to unemployment and hours reductions. However, the starting point was a lack of comprehensive unemployment insurance. This paper addresses the following research question: what are the short and long-term challenges to including outsiders in social protection programmes in the Latin American region? We examine informal employment during the pandemic and how countries in the region implemented different policies that increased either transfers or labour policies to informal workers. We argue that this resulted in the temporal expansion of the welfare state in the region, which could be seen as a new wave of social policy expansion in the region to the one experienced in the early 2000s. However, as the crisis evolved, the focus changed with a reversal of the policies implemented during the pandemic. Consequently, the social protection response showcases the limitation of the fragmented nature of the welfare systems in the region.

This paper systematically analyses cash transfers and labour policies implemented in Latin American countries, focusing on informal workers, to evaluate the short and medium-term impact of social policy expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic. By conducting this research, this paper contributes to valuing how the expansion of the welfare state during the pandemic in the region adopted a temporal illusion or an institutional response. This study also values and foresees the potential conflicts that the reversal/institutionalisation of social policy innovations could have on social cohesion and democracy in the region.

India has a plethora of social protection schemes and programmes that were put to the test when the Central government of India announced a sudden and complete national lockdown to tackle the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The curfew-like situation thwarted economic and commercial activities resulting in job losses across different sectors; completely restricting the movement of people and social activities leading to heightened panic. Furthermore, access to essential services such as health, transport and education became extremely limited. This paper, ‘Processes of Non-state Relief Work during the Covid-19 Lockdown in Delhi – A Lesson in Inclusive Social Protection’ is based on primary data collected between December 2020 to June 2021 from four informal settlements (slums) in Delhi, inhabited largely by families of workers lacking in social security cover and poor access to social protection. The study makes use of qualitative case study methodology and incorporates a gender-responsive intersectional framework to highlight the various gendered and intersectional vulnerabilities that came to the fore on account of Covid-19 national lockdown, the actors involved, and local collective action by non-state actors in the respective slum areas. In all, 121 semi-structured interviews were conducted in a hybrid mode, whereby interviews were held with participants through an online medium but in the physical presence of a local area facilitator of a civil society organisation.

The study highlights the cruciality of public services such as water, toilets, and sanitation services, as well as adequate housing as a basic right under social protection. Additionally, the need to universalize social protection was ascertained to address the extreme crises faced by especially vulnerable populace living in informal settlements such as inter-state migrant workers. Further, the study emphasises the importance of introducing an employment guarantee programme for the urban poor towards job and income security. Notably, the findings from the study highlight the import of contextual knowledge in identifying specific and intersectional vulnerabilities in providing care and protection, as well as the social capital knitted by the non-state actors to build resilience and social cohesion. Thus, the study challenges the targeted and ‘one size fits all’ approach of social protection by the state suggesting greater state and civil society collaborations for sharing of knowledge and expertise towards a more effective, inclusive, and sustainable social protection and security cover.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the working world was experiencing accelerated changes driven by several factors. Some of the most important being the need of jobs transformation and the development of new technical and soft skills, as well as technological factors, among others. When the pandemic occurred, most of the economic activities stopped due to the lockdown led by the sanitary crisis which boosted the changes that were happening, and the opportunities they brought became more visible.

According to a report published by the International Labor Organization in 2021, during the pandemic, 26 million of workers lost their jobs in the Latin American and Caribbean region. However, formal employment and the economic situation is currently improving in almost of the world. This article aims to analyze whether this improvement is a consequence of the legal actions adopted by governments of Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, -in order to save employments- or just an expected economic reactivation.

The legal labor actions implemented by those countries could fit the term of “flexicurity”, since they provided security for both parties of a labor agreement, as well as flexibility for employers. Some of them were: working hours and salary reduction, special leaves, extraordinary regulations concerning annual leave and remote work, flexible and less stable agreements, among others.

Now that the end of the sanitary emergency was officially declared by the World Health Organization, it is necessary to know the current consequences of the legal measures taken during the pandemic, with special attention to the respect for workers’ rights. Based on that, this article seeks to answer the question: Did the labor laws implemented by the governments of Ecuador, Colombia and Peru achieve their goals related to employment sustainability, social security system straightening and the reduction of the existing gap in the labor market in the Covid-19 pandemic contexts?

The result of the analysis show that in the governments of the countries that were mentioned, the objectives set by governments were partially achieved.