Informalidad en América Latina y precariedad laboral en Ecuador. Período 2019- 2020.

Abstract

The labor precariousness defined as a situation suffered by workers, characterized by instability in hiring and the violation labor rights (Padilla, 2019). Labor informality includes people who receive income from jobs that are not regulated by a legal framework (Fortún, 2019). By 2019, Ecuador had a panorama of labor precariousness, underemployment corresponded to 17.8%, where 45% corresponded to people in a dependent relationship. In Latin America, it was already in a worrying situation since economic growth in the region was 0.8%. Although there was an increase of 3.7 million jobs, 35.5% were in the informal sector. By 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic will affect the labor market, not only weakening formal jobs, but also making existing jobs more precarious. This paper proposes to analyze the determinants of labor precariousness for the Ecuadorian market for the year 2019. In addition, it seeks to identify the factors of labor informality for Latin America in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic during 2020. For this reason, two logistic models (Logit) will be estimated using for the first case the data from the National Survey of Employment, Unemployment and Underemployment (ENEMDU) to 2019, and for the second case the Coronavirus survey of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB/Cornell) to 2020 was used. The results obtained suggest that people with precarious and informal jobs have similar profiles. It is observed that young people, older adults, women, and workers with low levels of education are more likely to be in precarious and informal employment.