The Transition Of Informal Employment Groups Of Women Welfare Rights Issues

Welfare rights mean the rights and benefits of income, food and clothing, health, housing, employment and social services that are held by the people in modern states, which are the major ingredients of social rights. During the process of china economic reform and society transformation, the informal employment in cities and towns has been increasing, with the significant occurrence of women work as informal employment. In the process of women participation in informal employment, they are difficult to protect and implement the welfare rights of themselves. To a great extent, this results in impeding women development and aggravating gender inequality. Hence, it is necessary to research deeply the welfare rights issue of informal employment women in cities and towns, and to interpret the root of this group's loss of rights from the theory. It will offer some reference for policy making concerning gender equality.This paper researches the implementation of welfare rights of informal employment women in cities and towns from the perspective of empowerment. Adopting the grounded theory as the main methodology, the paper analyses the main factors that affect the welfare rights of informal employment women in cities and towns, which refers to social security and social assistance. On the basis of the grounded theory study, the paper builds up a framework of the welfare rights impairment of informal employment women, and puts forward to a social support practice model for achievement of the goals of empowerment. Based on the study, there are four points:First, the welfare rights impairment of informal employment women consists of external impairment and internal feeling without power.Second, the ideology of welfare of informal employment women hinder them from reaching the welfare rights. During the transformation of society in china, the welfare ideology of informal employment women are subsistence rationality based on community relationship. Subsistence rationality is welfare instrument rationality or welfare action rationality, which has the characteristics of living orientation, community orientation, and comparison orientation. There are interrelated, interacted, and inter-constructive relationships among three orientations above. The ideology of welfare of informal employment women has not only some certain value generality but also some characteristics of history and time. There are immense differences between the type of instrumental subsistence rationality and that of normative rights. The ideology of welfare of subsistence rationality causes indirect blocks for informal employment women to reach the welfare rights, including shaping the powerlessness, impeding the rights awareness, and hindering the rights maintenance.Third, the marginal status of informal employment women hinder them from reaching the welfare rights. During the process of social system reform and social transformation, informal employment women stay in the marginal status of society, suffering from multiple pressures and exclusions from state, market and family. This marginal status aggravates increasingly, resulting in lacking opportunities and resources available for this vulnerable group. This leads to impeding achievement of welfare rights in turn. Direct blocks mainly display reachment of welfare, which means that individual and group have no ability or opportunity to attain the welfare resources needed. Indirect blocks display insufficiency of rights maintenance capacity and restriction of discourse.Finally, there is bilateral and ongoing interaction between social status and welfare ideology of informal employment women. The process of negative interaction includes two mechanisms: oppression internalization mechanism and inferiority accumulation mechanism. Oppression internalization is the process of internalizing welfare ideas, which happens in the following levels in order: experience acquisition, psychological expectation and cognitive change. Inferiority accumulation mechanism indicates that being dominated by the ideology of welfare of subsistence rationality, many informal employment women abandon motive and action of changing environment, which makes their inferiority accumulate continuously and marginal status solidified.So, the social worker must build a social support practice model to help the informal employment women develop capacity, obtain power and resources, and reach welfare rights through overcoming blocks of rights and benefits. In the social support practice model, the goals of intervention focusing on empowerment mainly comprise those of individual empowerment, group empowerment, and policy empowerment.