Ten years of stagnation: without new private employment, public and informal employment grows

Over the past ten years the economy has almost stopped growing and the same has happened with private registered employment, what economists and politicians like to describe as “quality work”.

On the contrary, and despite the stagnation of activity, public employment has not stopped growing. Data from the ministry indicates that while private employment is now 0.4% lower than in 2012, public employment (at three levels of public administration and in state-owned companies) grow by 30%. Variants of registered work have also grown but of lower quality, such as the monotax and above all the social monotax.

But the socioeconomic deterioration accumulated in the recession can be seen in another increasingly important variable: employment reportsl.

According to the economist Ramiro Castineirafrom Econometric consultancy, “There are already 7.6 million informal workers, of which 5 million are unregistered wages and another 2.6 million are unregistered self-employed workers ”.

Castiñeira said: “The lack of economic growth in the last decade has reconfigured Argentina’s socio-economic structure. The informal continues to thrive in the face of the disregard of white private employment, and it also lowers wages at all social echelons”.

In fact, this week there was a lot of talk about formal workers whose income would not exceed the poverty line.

“In aggregate terms, all jobs lost after the 2020 quarantine have been recovered and by the end of 2021 the labor market picture before the pandemic returns, pI have a small salary ”.

the economist Miracles Gismondia specialist in labor issues, wrote a few days ago in the digital magazine Seoul: “Only a third of the workers are under the Employment Contract Law in the private sector. Only 28% of the economically active population (EAP) are registered private employees (that is, they have all the rights), up against 31% 10 years ago. 14% of EAPs are public sector workers, 25% self-employed, 23% informal and 8% unemployed. In other words, there are now more informal and self-employed workers (10 million) than formal workers in the private sector (6 million) ”.

The numbers alone show that the Argentine labor market has continued to deteriorate over the last decade. In a scenario of ongoing political and economic crisis, it is hard to imagine that this situation could be reversed in the short or medium term.