Project description
Can cash transfers ensure decent work?
Poor working conditions and high levels of exploitation are detected in many areas around the world, affecting the lives of millions. In most cases, such conditions are imposed by the unavailability of decent job positions. The EU-funded WorkFREE project intends to perform pioneering research in the city of Hyderabad in India, where a high percentage of people are employed as waste pickers. The project aims to investigate the potential to change working conditions and achieve decent work by offering unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) to members of this social group and engaging them in participatory action research (PAR) with the members of the project team.
Objective
WorkFREE builds on the widespread empirical observation that everywhere people who are stuck in indecent, exploitative or ‘unfree’ work nevertheless choose that work because doing so represents their best available option, and asks a simple yet potentially revolutionary question: What happens if we just give them money? It will answer this question by creating a world-first social experiment. This will involve a community in the Indian city of Hyderabad typically associated with indecent or exploitative work – waste picking. Members of this community will receive 18 months of unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) and also engage in Participatory Action Research (PAR) with the WorkFREE team. WorkFREE will thus become the first project anywhere to combine research on cash transfers (CTs), PAR and labour (un)freedom. It will also innovate methodologically, employing a unique combination of ethnography, surveys, and participatory qualitative techniques. This will allow the WorkFREE team – myself (the PI), the in-country Research Manager, a post-doctoral evaluation specialist, two anthropology PhD students, and a number of junior researchers at the project’s Indian partner research university – to answer a question at the heart of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): What can cash transfers contribute to the fight for decent work? It will further enable the co-creation of grounded theory around concepts central to the SDGs, including freedom, slavery, consent, coercion, vulnerability, exploitation, emancipation and (in)decent work. This, in turn, could call into question prevailing, hegemonic theorisations of these concepts, along with mainstream approaches to generating those theorisations and the policies with which they are associated. In this way, WorkFREE will push the empirical, theoretical and political boundaries at the intersection of development studies, labour studies, social theory and social policy. Given its focus and approach, it will also contribute to cognate debates around Social Protection (SP) and Unconditional Basic Income (UBI), positioning Europe at the forefront of contemporary efforts to achieve social justice in globalised market society.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences law human rights human rights violations human trafficking
- social sciences sociology anthropology
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
ERC-STG - Starting Grant
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2018-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
BA2 7AY BATH
United Kingdom
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