Reconceptualizing paid informal work and its implications for policy: some lessons from a case study of Southampton

Drawing upon case study evidence from Southampton, the aim of this paper is to show that paid informal work is not merely an economically‐motivated peripheral form of employment that should be eradicated due to its fraudulent and exploitative nature. Instead, paid informal work is revealed to be mostly conducted for family, neighbours and friends for social rather than economic reasons and is thus more akin to unpaid community exchange in the private sphere than to formal employment. Moreover, finding that such work currently reinforces, rather than reduces, the social inequalities produced by formal employment, the challenge for social and labour market policy is argued to be not to find ways of eradicating such work but to identify vehicles for harnessing it amongst the jobless. The paper thus outlines three alternative institutions of accumulation — Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), Employee Mutuals and Community Service Employment — which possess the potential to mitigate the plight of those who are excluded not only from employment but also from adopting informal coping strategies.