5. Social Protection and Living Standards in Informal Industrial Clusters

This chapter takes a close look at the debate on social protection generally and within the Nigerian context. It shows that formal social protection in Nigeria is small and not far reaching particularly to informal workers and enterprises. This chapter shows that although the cluster ranks high in terms of the educational level of owners and management, it faces a hostile institutional milieu due to the weak support received from both national and municipal governments, the latter, for the most part, being more interested in extracting rent through multiple taxation rather than supporting the enterprises. In part, due to the embryonic nature of social policy and its enforcement in Nigeria, no formal practice of social protection among all sizes of firms that is backed by the law was found. Notwithstanding, employees identified certain benefits that they received, while CEOs/managerial staff indicated what they gave, and through discriminant analysis a differentiation of the peculiar features that characterized firms that provided such benefits was made.