Editorial. Global Formalities and Informalities: Social,Economic, and Political Transformations

Abstract

Labor informality in Latin America is neither an institutional anomaly nor a premodern remnant; it is the contemporary mode of economic and social governance in the Global South. This editorial proposes a structural reading of informality as a political device that secures the competitiveness of global capitalism through the externalization of risk and the dispossession of rights. The evidence presented in the dossier shows that the phenomenon takes multiple forms—platformization of domestic work, outsourcing of security, rural women’s overload, subjectivation of precariousness, and devaluation
of health care—but all refer back to the same logic: the erosion of social citizenship and the hollowing out of work as a right. Informality is not the absence of the State, but its selective and functional presence that enables the transfer of value from feminized, rural, and peripheral sectors to economic elites. In this way, the real economy of care, community health, and everyday
subsistence sustains what statistics fail to capture. Contemporary struggles over work go beyond the factory and shift toward social reproduction, territories, and daily life, which compels a rethinking of “decent work” as a democratic horizon rather than a contractual residue. Recovering the political centrality of care and social reproduction requires dismantling the fiction of informality as an “exception” and naming it instead as a core structure of
peripheral capitalism. Where rights recede, there is no void: there is dispossession.