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Paper short abstract:

Female home-based workers in urban Algeria use the many tactics to run their own small businesses. While they don't rely on legal protection, these workers create a relationship of mutual trust with merchants and customers as well as use social networking services as marketing strategies.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation examines the many tactics that female home-based workers use to generate more stable incomes in Algiers, Algeria. As most of these workers are informal and small business owners, they manage to cope with barriers by using plural tactics and strategies. According to participant observations and interviews of almost 40 workers in 2015-2016, these female owners have variable and fluid formal/informal statuses depending on their individual situation and marketing strategies as they learn how to access the market through experience and expanding their network outside the home, or using social networking services (SNS). Because Algerian women's home-based work mainly consists of cooking and confectionery, handicrafts, and dressmaking, these workers use SNS, especially to adopt other workers' designs or colours to invent goods for sale and to publicize their work to seek new customers online while working at home. These workers lack legal protection and therefore must create a relationship of mutual trust with similar small merchants and individual customers to avoid risks such as non-payment or cancellation without notice. Consequently, this study finds that home-based workers' statuses, whether formal or informal, does not necessarily protect against commercial risks. Rather, these workers rely on informal and personal mutual networks to obtain regular business partners or customers. Although they occasionally have to take risks as business owners, it is important for them to keep these risks to a minimum and continue working to obtain constant and certain revenues.