MEXICO CITY (APPRO) – The first year of the self-appointed “Fourth Transformation” of Lopez Obrador, threw 113,480 Mexicans into unemployment, in addition to worse labor market conditions, including informality and underemployment, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
In the last quarter of 2019, the figure of the unemployed population was 1’942,071 people, while in the same period of 2018, when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office, the figure was 1’828,591 unemployed.
Even worse, since the search for employment is conditioned, the unemployment rate is higher in large towns, where the labor market is more organized; thus, in the most urbanized areas with 100,000 and more inhabitants the rate reached 4 percent.
According to Inegi, the unemployed population refers to those who did not work even one hour during the reference week of the survey, but expressed their willingness to do so and did some activity to obtain it.
Job precariousness skyrockets
Wherever you look, 2019 was a “lost” year for the Mexican economy, which fell 0.1%, affecting the labor market and accentuating its precariousness, as shown by the Inegi.
This is the case of informal employment, in the last quarter of last year, all forms of informal employment totaled 31.3 million people, for an increase of 621,210 Mexicans, or 2% over the same period in 2018, and represented 56.2% of the working population.
The expanded measurement of informality adds the following categories to the definition of informal work: unprotected work in agricultural activity, paid domestic service in households, as well as subordinate workers who, although they work for formal economic units, do so under modalities that evade registration with social security.
In detail, 15.3 million were specifically employed in the informal sector, a figure that meant an increase of 2.8% at an annual rate and constituted 27.4% of the employed population (Informal Sector Employment Rate); 7.7 million correspond to the sphere of companies, government and institutions; 6 million to agriculture and another 2.3 million to paid domestic service.
As if this were not enough, during the quarter of reference the underemployed population in the country was 4.3 million people and represented 7.7% of the employed people, a higher rate than the 6.8% of the quarter October-December 2018.
Underemployment is understood as the need to work longer, which translates into the search for a complementary occupation or a new job with longer hours. In this situation 618,070 Mexicans joined in the first year of the so-called “Fourth Transformation” of Lopez Obrador.
The Yucatan Times
Newsroom
