Restaurant workers demonstrate to ask for the reopening in Mexico City in January.GLADYS SERRANO
Mexico recovers employment, but it does so more and more slowly.
The Latin American country closed 2020 with 2.3 million more employed than in the third quarter, according to data published this Monday by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi).
The increase in the employed population represents a significant improvement over the harshest months of confinement: around 80% of the people who stopped working between April and June have returned to work.
Despite progress, the pace of recovery has slowed down and precariousness is consolidating.
The end of the year leaves mixed results.
Since employment bottomed out in the second quarter, the employed population in both the formal and informal economies has shown significant progress and now reaches 53.3 million people.
In the fourth quarter, there were 8.2 million more employed than in the months of strict confinement, when some 10 million people stopped reporting a job.
Even so, pre-pandemic levels have not yet recovered.
People with jobs are 2.4 million less than a year ago.
And the recovery has lost steam compared to the months after the economy reopened.
From the second to the third quarter, employed persons increased by 5.9 million, a jump that is twice as high as in the last months of the year.
The economist José Luis de la Cruz points to "a structural impact on the labor market."
"Despite the reopening, the employed population has no longer recovered in large numbers after October," he says.
The comeback is not the same for everyone.
Women have gotten the worst of it.
In the fourth quarter, 32.6 million men were employed, one million less than a year ago, while 20.7 million women had a job, 1.3 million less than in the same period of the previous year.
School closings have forced many mothers to stay home while their children watch classes on television.
To this is added the blow of the pandemic to small informal businesses that tend to have a strong female presence.
In the last months of the year, these businesses registered 914,000 fewer jobs than at the end of 2019.
By sectors, the hospitality industry and the manufacturing industry remain the most affected by the crisis.
The hospitality industry reported 769,000 fewer employed persons than in the same period of 2019 and industry, a reduction of 464,000.
The fourth quarter of the year coincided with a tightening of restrictions in various parts of the country, including Mexico City and the northern industrial states, in the face of the new wave of infections.
Apart from unemployment, the pandemic has brought with it an increase in precariousness.
Mexico closed 2020 with 3.8 million more underemployed -people with employment who are available to work longer hours- than in the same period in 2019, for a total of 8.1 million, 15.3% of the employed population.
An advance is seen with respect to the hardest months of confinement, when underemployed people climbed to 25.1% of the employed population, although the figure remains above 8.5% before the pandemic.
The economist Marcelo Delajara, from the Espinosa Yglesias Studies Center, points to precariousness as one of the characteristics of the current situation: “This recovery from the third quarter to the fourth is not only small in terms of new employment, but the employed population is in 20% more precarious conditions than before the pandemic ”.
De la Cruz agrees: “The survey shows the advance of the precariousness of the Mexican labor market.
What increased were people who work less than 15 hours.
The rest had a fall ”.