One in four workers in the popular economy are young people between the ages of 18 and 24, according to Renatep data. The reason that this proportion is so high lies in the functioning of the labor market: young people – and especially young women – are the ones who today find the greatest obstacles to obtaining a registered job. The pandemic aggravated their unequal labor insertion and in recent months, of productive reactivation, the type of employment that has grown the most is precarious. The informal economy is thus the door that remains mostly open for them to enter the world of work.
Some cases in the popular neighborhoods of Greater Buenos Aires illustrate what conditions young people are encountering on their return to activity.
Araceli Andrade lives in La Matanza. She says that her first job was in a socks factory. “They killed me with the hours: I entered at 7 in the morning and left at 6 in the followingnoon, with only one cut for lunch. I went from Monday to Saturday for a salary that was not enough, of two thousand pesos a week. And it was black, “he says to Page 12.
What he calls a factory was actually a workshop with two employees – a typical informal economy venture, with few machines and a minimal production scale.
During the initial months of the pandemic, Nicolas Camarotta worked with the father in his warehouse. “It’s not that my old man is a businessman” he clarifies: the warehouse is a family business in the front room of the house, which gives them to survive. At the peak of the Covid, Nicolás joined socio-community jobs in a soup kitchen of the Excluded Workers Movement. He thus had the income of a Work Enhancement, which is half a minimum wage for a consideration of half a working day.
With the reactivation, Nicolás and Araceli joined a construction cooperative of the UTEP movement, which does urbanization works. Araceli is a bricklayer and Mario is an electrician, trades that they finished learning within the crew.
Limits
“In popular neighborhoods, young people circulate between informality – as salaried workers, but in black – and independent, self-managed work in the popular economy. Those are the two mechanisms through which they get some income from work ”, describes Pablo Chena, director of Social Economy.
His area is in charge of the National Registry of Workers of the Popular Economy (Renatep). Created by the state as a first tool to get to know the sector, in the registry there are 3 million registered. Workers between the ages of 18 and 24 make up 26 percent of that total.
To gauge what we are talking regarding, you can see what happens to young people of the same age group when it comes to getting a job in the private sector: there, young people do not reach 7 percent.
If the cut in the popular economy is made among those between 18 and 35 years old, they add up to 64% of the total, which shows that the sector has a markedly young population.
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Source: National Registry of Workers of the Popular Economy
What are the jobs that young people do the most in the popular economy?
Renatep processed your data to observe it. The branches that have the most young people registered are personal services and trades (almost half are workers and cleaning workers), socio-community jobs (basically in soup kitchens) and popular commerce (street vendors and street vendors).
In black
Since mid-2020, when the bakery where he worked closed, Mario became a street vendor. He sold floor rags and racks that he bought in bulk and offered house to house. In December he found a job as a potholer in a food court. He left the street vendor to work from 6 to 11 in the morning and from Monday to Saturday for 2,500 pesos a week (a pay below even the 10,267 per month that marks the indigence line). But following two weeks he was burned in the kitchen. He had no contract, no salary receipt, or ART. Nor was he part of any type of union or social organization that gave him support.
Chena does not deny the worsening in informal work conditions.
“In the economic and labor recovery this year, work had its strongest growth in a self-employment and informality format. The average rate of exploitation of the economy increased. In fact, we see an economy that has production levels that are similar or in some cases higher than the pre-pandemic – the GDP fell 10 points and we are recovering those 10 points, but the levels of poverty and inequality are not going down- “.
“Obviously, we are emerging with a more unequal and income-focused social structure than we had in the pre-ndemic. Something that always happens in a crisis ”.
make difference
Inside the popular economy, there are more loose workers than organized ones – the movements group some 500 thousand workers, less than 10 percent of informal work – but where there is organization, the panorama improves sharply.
In construction cooperatives such as the one made up of Araceli and Nicolás, for example, there is the most advanced in terms of recovery of rights. The articulation with the State – and the pressure that the social organization manages to sustain – made its workers able to access salaries equivalent to those of the UOCRA agreement for the private sector – in their own way, since they complement withdrawals from the cooperative with an Empower-; They also have ART, transportation to the workplace, lunch, work clothes.
The textile poles of the social organizations are another example of good results: today their salaries are above the average offered by the informal textile sector and in many places the workers have nurseries. In other words, there was a construction to recover social security benefits, historically associated with employment. But clearly they are a development with a marginal volume, still testimonial.
Young people have, on the other hand, unemployment rates that are double the average – unemployment in the third quarter of 21 fell to 8.2%, but among young people it exceeded 16%. In the case of men up to 29 years of age, it is 16.6%. In young women it rises two percentage points more and unemployment reaches 18 percent.
