Unrecognised and Undervalued: Informal Women Workers in Tamil Nadu’s Coastal Industries

Abstract

What does it mean to work every day in conditions that are structurally unsafe, legally unrecognised, and emotionally exhausting, yet considered normal? In India’s informal economy, millions of women face precisely these realities every day. This article examines how working conditions in the seafood and coir processing industries in the coastal Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu shape the psychosocial well-being and economic circumstances of women in the informal workforce. Combining feminist approaches to informality with cognitive stress theory, the study draws on original survey data collected from 120 women across two sectors. While previous research has documented the economic marginalisation of informal workers, this study shifts the focus to the lived experience of informal labour, particularly the accumulation of stress in environments marked by legal ambiguity, wage insecurity, and institutional neglect. What emerges is not merely a catalogue of disadvantages, but rather a pattern of chronic psychosocial strain that challenges our understanding of informality itself. Why does perceived stress persist even where sectoral, income, or employment differences exist? And what happens when stress becomes an embedded condition of survival? Rather than offering prescriptive answers, this article invites readers to reconsider the relationship between gendered labour, invisibility, and the everyday experience of stress in informal work. In doing so, it highlights the urgent need to address not only the working conditions of women, but also the institutional silences that allow these conditions to persist.