The employment that is growing the most is that of informal wage earners
without the employer making the statutory Social Security discounts
and also among those who contribute by themselves in the form of Monotributo, despite having a dependency relationship with their place of work.
They are called “invoicers”.
In the City of Buenos Aires, these wage earners total 121,500 people,
equivalent to 10.6% of the total
.
A year ago there were 93,500,
8.5% of the total
.
It is a
year-on-year increase of 29.7%.
Compared to 2015, then with a slightly higher total number of employees, this group of employees went from 79,500 (6.6%) to 121,500 (10.6%): 52.8% more.
If these 121,500 are added to the 170,500 wage earners without discounts or retirement contributions, there are a total of 292,000 wage earners or
one in four wage earners who are in precarious employment conditions.
All are official data from the Directorate of Statistics and Censuses of the City of Buenos Aires, which measures the wage earners who contribute to Social Security by themselves.
And that mark one of the forms of job insecurity and one of the reasons for the growth of the Monotributo to the detriment of private registered wage earners.
The national data also shows that,
despite the drop in real wages
(-25% since 2017) and the cost of labor, there is strong growth in informal wage earners, without a retirement discount, as well as in Monotributo contributors, for above other forms of employment.
For its part, according to the Buenos Aires Directorate "a global calculation of the population employed in the informal sector (in the salaried and self-employed categories) during the third quarter of 2022, ranges between 36.8% and 30.1%".
Cynthia Benzion, President of the Association of Labor Lawyers (AAL) told
Clarín
that “unregistered work has unfortunately been a characteristic feature of the labor market in our country.
Various ways of avoiding social security obligations have been designed, ranging from the total clandestinization of the employment relationship, through partial registration, that is,
post-dating the date of entry or registering a salary lower
than that actually paid to the total lack of registration. ”.
All of this –added Benzion- “leaves the worker without social security, without coverage for possible illnesses or accidents or a pension or retirement.
All of these forms constitute
employment fraud
.
But there is an even more perverse form of labor fraud that consists of requiring the worker to register as a monotributista as a condition for obtaining and maintaining employment. The repeated economic crises and the reduction in economic activity and the increase in inflation have created the conditions for these practices to spread more and more”.
From another angle, Juan Luis Bour, FIEL economist, considers that:
Formal salaried employment in the country as a whole
has not grown since 2012.
In CABA the evolution is similar, with a drop in the pandemic and partial (not complete) recovery afterwards. But the most relevant data is that among salaried employees, a growing proportion contribute themselves to Social Security.
This is an indication that there is a demand (from the companies), but not to incorporate stable personnel (dependency relationship).
This part of wage earners who are actually monotributistas who give a periodic invoice to their only or main employer, grows because
companies prefer the risk of a conflict to the cost of a formal contract
.
The risks that the company takes are enormous, and even so, this way of using it grows.
It is the complete opposite of the formality that would arise from formal temporary contracts (which would allow rupture) and could possibly become a dependency relationship if the latter were not a "for life" contract, that is, with enormous rupture costs.
Well-measured informality is also growing due to the increase in self-employment.
Beyond the informal self-employed (who do not contribute), the self-employed who pay a fee and thus have access to "formal" social services and pension sums are defined as formal.
Well measured
, informality covers almost 45% of all employed persons in Argentina.
The macro and microeconomic disorder with rising inflation generates a context of declining productivity reminiscent of the '80s.
It is not enough to stabilize to improve income, it will be necessary to propose pro-competitive reforms (more micro than macro) to aspire to get out of so much labor and business informality.
The CABA statistics reflect that it is not enough that there is a demand from the companies, nor that enormous penalties are imposed, to formalize, but that it is
necessary to change the labor laws.