Labor Market Inequalities and in-Work Poverty in Four Latin AmericanCountries

SANTIAGO POY PIÑEIRO; EUGENIA DICHIERA

Melbourne

Congreso; XX World Congress of Sociology; 2023

International Sociological Association

Changes in global labor markets are posing challenges to social inclusion through employment, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. The expansion of unprotected, precarious, and low-quality forms of employment (Sehnbruch et al., 2020) is reshaping labor inequalities. Precisely, the working poor, employed individuals living in households with incomes below the poverty line, reflect one of the limits that employment is facing to guarantee decent living conditions.In Latin America, little attention has been paid to in-work poverty (IWP), although some related topics –such as informality and precariousness– have been widely debated. The main objective of this paper is to analyze IWP in four Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay). The ‘hybrid’ nature of the concept of working poverty –which combines the study of labor market and poverty– led to multidimensional theoretical perspectives to explain it. Such explanations often encompass institutional factors, individual, family characteristics of the workers and job attributes. Although we recognize those multilevel factors, this article emphasizes the relationship between IWP and labor market stratification.The four national cases represent different labor market models and welfare regimes. Therefore, the comparative analysis is aimed to provide evidence about the factors that explain IWP in different contexts. The paper relies on microdata from households’ surveys carried out in 2019 by national statistics institutes of each country: the Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (Argentina), the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (Brazil), the Encuesta Suplementaria de Ingresos of the Encuesta Nacional de Empleo (Chile) and the Encuesta Continua de Hogares (Uruguay).