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tions that follow from this, and employers andemployees are also tied by mutual obligations.Similarly, large businesses have a duty not toexploit smaller ones with which they have productionor distribution ties. Our inclusion of the word‘global’ places a focus on the role and responsibilityof the actors at international, regional,national and local levels, while ‘social’ callsattention to the aim of this initiative, which is toimprove the social conditions of people in poorcountries. Importantly, we have placed the word‘towards’ before ‘a global social contract’ in thetitle of our chapter to emphasise development,process and time horizons.1. Introduction: Purpose ofour focus on Labour RightsThe Commission has identified the issue of labourrights as one of four elements of Legal Empowermentof the Poor. Almost half the world’s populationof 6 billion lives on less than US$2 a day,while a fifth survives on US$1 a day or less. Formost people mired in poverty, the only asset theyown is their own labour. The World Bank estimatesthat for over 70 percent of the poor, findingwork — either wage work or self-employment— is the main pathway out of poverty; 2 but thestark reality, according to the ILO, is that some500 million of the working poor are currently unableto achieve this goal.Informality in the workforce has always beenpredominant in developing countries — but itis also growing in developed economies. For thepoor, informal employment is the predominantform of employment, in which they have no legalidentity as entrepreneurs or as workers. Also,the wider policy environment and institutionallandscape, including systems of legal and socialprotection, are biased towards formal incorporatedfirms and formal organised workers. Often,the poor are shut out of the legally recognisedsystems that would allow them to benefit fromtheir hard work. They are mostly excluded fromthe legal mechanisms that protect their assetsrelated to property or labour. They lack access toa fully-functioning justice system that protectstheir rights regardless of status in life.135The ILO notes that informality is mainly a governanceissue; 3 it is traced to laws and institutionalframeworks that are not responsive to theconditions in which the working poor have alwaysbeen or are increasingly found. The boundaries oflaws and institutional frameworks remain unyieldingto the growing number of poor who are found