via Colorlines
John (a false name) stands at the street corner that I pass by every morning in Oakland, when I walk my dog. An elder black man in his late sixties, John wears the same brown jacket each day, through summer heat and fall chill, and a weathered baseball hat. He shuffles up to cars that line up to caravan over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco and asks, “Do you have fifty cents?” John is also a mobile storefront for “loosies”—or, individually sold cigarettes—hawking them to neighborhood residents for a quarter a piece. On a good day, John pockets $20, a helpful supplement to his monthly Social Security payments, which he says are his only source of income otherwise.
Robert Neuwirth, author of the new book “The Stealth of Nations,” would say that John is a member of System D, an informal economy involving 1.8 billion people (that’s half of the workers in the world) who make their money doing jobs “that fly under the radar, that don’t get registered, incorporated, or licensed, that are not paying taxes (or may be paying less than they should), and are somehow camouflaging their operations.” Neuwirth stresses that his definition “rules out criminal enterprises—those businesses that commit a crime, regarding what they do, and not how they do it.” Excluding activities like drug smuggling, for example, from the informal economy, it still accounts for $10 trillion in global trade annually.
In this country, Neuwirth told me, the informal economy makes up a deceptively small slice of our gross domestic product, 8 to 9 percent, but that translates into $1 trillion in economic activity. And that number is growing. “[There’s] no question that in hard times, when people are desperate for extra income, moonlighting and other forms of cash-only work become important survival mechanisms,” explained Neuwirth.
This can take the form of a teacher, who lost her job and is now running a childcare center out of her home. Or, my friend Marites (also a false name), an Asian-American woman in her mid-thirties who quit her white-collar job only to find reemployment difficult. She survives on the cash tips she earns when volunteering for an LGBT jitney service. These sorts of off-the-books hustles are keeping many families afloat these days, because not much else is forthcoming from the public or private sector.
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Yvonne Yen Liu is a nerd for the racial justice movement. She lives in Oakland, California. You can write to her at 
