Millions of informal workers are able to work in the economy without the ability to be subjected to formal fiscal recognition or empirical employment history. The Majdoor Digital Trust-Ledger (MDTL) is a decentralized and privacy-sensitive framework according to which evidence of informal labor is converted into self-sovereign digital assets. MDTL combines Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials (VCs), escrows based on smart contracts, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to implement verifiable, but confidential proof-of-work. The system proposes a 5-layer architecture, i.e. Identity, Credential, Ledger, Privacy, and Verification, which is designed to be scalable, interoperable, and it can be run on resource-constrained deployment. MDTL progresses the agency of workers by creating portable and tamper-evident labor records to allow financial inclusion without degrading privacy.
Frustrated advocates of universal social protection often denounce the long shadow of the English poor laws, pointing to the continued prevalence of means-testing, conditionality (on work and/or behaviour) and parsimony, whilst paying less attention to the English poor laws’ distinctive acknowledgement of public responsibility for the poor through programmes financed out of taxes or other ‘non-contributory’ sources. Some or other of these features of the English poor laws have been reflected – to varying extents and in varying combinations – across much of the world, including contexts where English models were replicated, contexts where those models were rejected, and contexts where their influence was indirect or even not evident. The diffusion of the English poor laws outside of Britain between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries suggests that their widespread appeal was rooted in the possibility they offered for ‘conditional inclusion’: The decentralization of authority meant that local elites were able to offer a vision of inclusion (or social citizenship) whilst at the same time rendering actual provision conditional on the poor allowing themselves to be disciplined according to the norms or interests of those local elites. It was thus their adaptability that has underpinned – and continues to underlie – the appeal of the English poor laws.
Chapter 6 underlines the unique principal structure of the ILO, with 50 percent of seats in its Conference and its Governing Body assigned to national social partners, that is, workers’ and employers’ representatives. Against expectations, this complex principal constellation only has limited effects on proceduralization in the ILO; administrative decentralization of the organization and the growing shift to voluntary financing of technical assistance at field level are at least as important. Instead, there are typical instances of complex P–A constellations in the ILO that one also finds in other cases, such as the special role of the main contributing states in the budgeting procedures, a dynamic that is much more pronounced as a driver of principal complexity than the role of regional groups and of social partners.
This article is based on the research project 'The functioning of sector level wage bargaining systems and wage setting mechanisms in adverse labour market conditions', commissioned and financed by the European Foundation for the improvement of Working and Living conditions, whose support is