Encountering Work: Intergenerational Informality, Child Labor, and Malnutrition in Urban Ecuador

This article examines the interconnections among informality, child labor, and child malnutrition in households at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid in urban Ecuador. Through qualitative interviews with 120 adult informal laborers, mostly street vendors, I elicited stories that not only revealed current labor conditions but also reflected upon whole lives engaged in informal work. Interviews uncovered lifelong structural conditions that perpetuate the social and economic inheritances of intergenerational work in the informal sector and intergenerational patterns of a broader, more inclusive form of child labor termed “encountering work.” Social, political, and economic factors related to informality and child labor maintain structural vulnerabilities that contribute to the emergence and exacerbation of syndemic health conditions, most notably through multiple forms of child malnutrition. The children of these 120 informal sector workers, especially those that encounter work in a variety of ways alongside their parents, demonstrate profound childhood nutritional failures that will likely impact them throughout their lives. The challenges related to intergenerational informality, child labor as encountering work, and child malnutrition can only be understood in the context of pervasive, intergenerational poverty. Encountering work is a survival strategy that allows families to subsist in an unequal society that can simultaneously perpetuate vulnerabilities and inequalities in health and opportunity.