Calidad del empleo en tiempos de crecimiento

Uruguay has registered in the last ten years a strong dynamism of economic activity and a steady decline in the unemployment rate. However, this does not account for the quality of the jobs created by economic expansion. This research seeks to answer: How has the quality of employment evolved in different contexts of economic growth? Which have been the economic sectors with better performance? What about the quality gap in employment between men and women? To this end, using data from the Household Survey and based on the methodology proposed by Alkire and Foster (2011), this paper proposes the construction of a job quality index which we call Bad Quality Jobs Index (IME for its name in Spanish). The proposed index considers four dimensions on which information is available: income, social protection, informal sector and hours worked. It combines information on the number of people with problems of job quality and the ratio of deprivations suffered by these workers with respect to the total possible deprivations in the dimensions considered. So it allows us to have in a single index information on the incidence and the severity of job quality problems. In turn, it allows comparisons by gender, by industries or by any other category that may be relevant to analyze the labor market, which is a valuable complement to analyze the evolution of the labor market and provides elements for policymaking. We find that even with rising employment rates and increasing average productivity, the evolution of job quality as measured by the IME was quite different in both periods of analysis (1991-1998 and 2003-2011): while in the nineties it was virtually not altered and even slightly deteriorated, in the 2000s it improved significantly. With regard to gender, job quality had improved for both sexes, although the gap between men and women has narrowed. By industry, we find that Construction, Primary Activities and Trade, Restaurants and Hotels Activities registered the greatest improvement in the average quality of jobs.