Resumo

POY, Santiago; ROBLES, Ramiro  e  SALVIA, Agustín. The Argentine urban occupational structure during the recent phases of growth and stagnation (2004-2019). Trab. soc. [online]. 2021, vol.22, n.36, pp.231-249. ISSN 1514-6871.

The objective of the article is to examine the Argentine urban labor market during recent political-economic phases. Several studies addressed the performance of the labor market during the post-crisis decade of 2001; however, there is a lack of comparative analysis considering the later phases. The hypothesis is that during the whole period persisted a matrix of economic-occupational heterogeneity, which expressed in insufficient labor demand in the most productive sectors, in employment quality gaps and in a pattern of economic inequality between different sectors. The paper follows a quantitative strategy based on microdata from the Permanent Household Survey (EPH). The paper shows that: a) throughout the period, employment in the microinformal sector represented more than 4 out of every 10 jobs; b) while between 2004 and 2013 the labor demand in formal enterprises linked to the domestic market increased, this trend was later reversed, showing a raising precariousness in the labor market; c) although the quality of employment improved between 2004-2013, in the whole period almost half of the jobs were precarious, and also employment quality showed a strong correlation with economic-occupational sector; d) the structural heterogeneity of the labor market shaped a pattern of rigid inequality between economic-occupational positions with consequences on workers’ living conditions.

Palavras-chave : Structural Heterogeneity; Labor Market Segmentation; Income Inequality; Poverty.