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Climate Change, Informality and the Future of Workers: Worker-Led Pathways for a Just and Resilient Transition
04:00 pm · Online
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Grassroot Forum on the Future of Work
The Grassroot Forum on the Future of Work will convene a diverse group of stakeholders to engage in open, inclusive, and forward-looking discussions on the realities shaping workers’ lives today and the pathways toward decent work in the future. The forum places workers at the center of the conversation, ensuring their voices inform practical, sustainable, and worker-driven solutions. Together, we will explore how various actors can work towards an inclusive and more prosperous future.
Past Webinars
Browse recordings from previous sessions
From Informality to Worker-Led Economies: Lessons from SEWA’s RUDI Model
This session explored how innovative, worker-led value chain models can support informal workers, especially women, in transitioning from precarious and fragmented livelihoods into more organized, resilient, and sustainable economic roles. Drawing on the experience of SEWA’s Rural Urban Distribution Initiative (RUDI) in India, the discussion highlighted how local production, collective entrepreneurship, and direct market access can strengthen incomes, reduce dependence on intermediaries, and build more inclusive local economies. Bringing together grassroots leaders, worker organizations, and experts, the webinar also reflected on how such models can be adapted in other contexts, particularly in Africa, and contribute to shaping a more equitable and worker-centered future of work.
Social Protection for All: Rethinking Universalism from the Ground Up
Extending social protection to informal workers remains one of the most pressing challenges for achieving inclusive and equitable labor systems. While universal social protection is increasingly recognized as a global policy priority, millions of informal workers, particularly women,remain excluded from health coverage, pensions, childcare services, and income security mechanisms. At the same time, profound transformations in the future of work are reshaping labor markets. Digitalization, the expansion of platform-mediated work, climate change and environmental transitions, demographic shifts, and migration dynamics are redefining how work is organized and where vulnerabilities emerge. These transformations are creating new forms of work and opportunity, but they are also deepening precarity for many workers in the informal economy, who often remain outside traditional social protection systems. In many contexts, grassroots unions, membership-based organizations (MBOs), and cooperatives have developed innovative community-based protection systems to fill these gaps where state systems remain limited or inaccessible. These initiatives provide essential services such as healthcare, childcare, micro-insurance, pensions, and other safety nets that support workers’ livelihoods and resilience in the face of economic, social, and environmental shocks. This session of the “Voices from the Ground Up” webinar series will explore how worker-led organizations are rethinking universalism from below. It will examine how community-based protection systems can complement public social protection frameworks while responding to emerging challenges linked to digital transformation, climate resilience, and labor mobility. Using SEWA’s integrated social protection model as a case example, the discussion will highlight how grassroots organizations can build sustainable systems that combine worker organization, cooperative structures, service provision, and policy engagement. The session will also reflect on the need for new human-centered economic approaches capable of shaping more inclusive and adaptive social protection systems for workers in the informal economy.
Care Work, Migration and the Future of Workers
This session aims to explore how care work— largely informal, feminized, undervalued, and increasingly shaped by migration— lies at the intersection of informality, gender inequality, social protection gaps, and changing labour markets. The discussion will highlight both the essential contribution of care workers to economic and social well-being, as well as the vulnerabilities they face in the absence of adequate recognition, regulation, and protection.
New Forms of Work and Global Standards: The Platform Economy
The platform economy has become one of the fastest-growing forms of employment, but it often lacks protections and formal recognition for workers. This session will introduce and explain the concept of platform work and its different types, providing participants with a clear understanding of how it operates across sectors such as ride-hailing, delivery services, domestic work, and online freelancing. This webinar at 4:00pm EAT will analyze how global standards such as ILO Conventions can be leveraged to advance workers’ rights, while also identifying where critical gaps remain, particularly in the Global South.
Organizing the Informal: New Opportunities to Organize for New Forms of Work
How are informal workers organizing in new, fragmented, and rapidly evolving forms of work? As the world of work changes, informal workers are developing innovative strategies to defend their rights, negotiate better conditions, and build collective power. This session will explore the new opportunities that emerging and precarious forms of work create for organizing, as well as the strategies, tools, and alliances that workers are leveraging, often outside traditional union structures. It will highlight concrete experiences from the ground, including digital organizing, community-based unions and cross-border networks that are redefining what worker representation looks like in the 21st century.
Formalizing the Informal Economy: Opportunities and Challenges
Recording of our latest ILI webinar. If the embed does not load in your browser, use the button to open it in a new tab.
Informal Workers and the Future of Work: What Do Informal Workers Need?
Recording of our latest ILI webinar. If the embed does not load in your browser, use the button to open it in a new tab.