Here’s are some columns from a table from the World Employmentand Social Outlook: Trends 2020 published by the International Labour Organization in January 2020. As the report points out, around the world about 60% of workers have informal jobs; in low-income countries, it’s more like 90%
Read the whole post. The ability to cooperate in groups above the Dunbar number is extremely important for economic development. You might hate big corporations, but they are actually a miracle of civilization, as Tim and others have pointed out.
All fair enough – but the stability of the jobs may be kind of an illusion (look at what’s happening right now) and the correlation of related benefits and security (unemployment, health insurance, retirement, etc.) is largely an artifact of the way our system evolved.
One could imagine a healthcare insurance scheme that was entirely individual, an unemployment scheme that is entirely individual accounts, same for a retirement scheme. Each person would still be insured, but as member of a very large pool (everybody that age in the US, say.) All of which could be much more stable in the event of failures of firms or jurisdictions.
All that said, as I write this on the evening of the 31st of March, covid-19 may well force a great many people into “informal” arrangements in short order. And our system’s LACK of good individual answers for health insurance, unemployment insurance, retirement support, for people NOT in the “big corporation formal systems” is about to bite us.