Do social public policies meet the needs of vulnerable self-employed workers?

MARÍA EUGENIA CASTELAO CARUANA

Porto Alegre

Congreso; II Reunión Iberoamericana de Socioeconomía "Estado, Sociedad y Mercado"; 2015

Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics ? SASE

In several Latin American countries, there are public policies that encourage unemployed individuals from vulnerable households to create self-managed enterprises. Their main objective is to create employment and/or to integrate these individuals by involving them in income generating activities. In order to do so, they generally provide these individuals with access to basic training, credit lines and subsidies. However, it is not clear if these public policies meet the specific needs of their target population to manage sustainable enterprises and to achieve, at least, reasonable working conditions.In Argentina, a set of national social public policies promoting self-managed enterprises has been implemented since 2003. These policies have encouraged the creation and strengthening of self managed associative enterprises within individuals from vulnerable households. The research analyzes the current design and implementation of these public policies (their target population, instruments and their consistency with national legal framework) and their connection with the working conditions facing self-employed individuals from vulnerable urban households.The research is based on information provided by secondary sources -like government reports and regulations and academic research papers- and semi-structured individual interviews to 25 civil servants and 24 representatives of social organizations. In addition, the research relies on information gathered by the National Household Surveys (INDEC) during 2014 in order to describe the socio-economic characteristics of the target population and its working conditions.One of the main findings of this research is that analyzed public policies have addressed issues that are relevant to improve the working conditions of self-employed workers. In doing so, they have weakened certain mechanisms that reinforce social exclusion among this group, like the lack of access to equipment, credit and markets and informality. Some of these policies, however, have increasingly focused on the most vulnerable self-employed workers. This process has excluded self-employed workers with better working conditions but persistent difficulties to access larger loans and dynamic markets and to strengthen their links to the formal economy from public policies´ benefits.These public policies have also addressed the scarcity of social capital among vulnerable self-employed workers. However, the achievements in this area have depended on the economic, human, political, organizational, and information resources and political logic of the intermediary institutions and the public executive units. Furthermore, even though the national State has acknowledged self-employed workers through normative, policies and even changes in its organizational structure (as the creation of the Secretary of social economy), in general it still conceives associative self-employed enterprises as transitional forms of organization for vulnerable workers, conditioning public policies´ impact on working conditions.