Employment and the Crisis. Precarious Work and New Escape Valves

Abstract

At the beginning of 2010, 14 months into the current economic crisis, the most severe in this generation, we must pause briefly to assess employment. It is worth exploring how the occupational panorama has changed with respect to the first three months of the crisis, in which the job market collapse was undoubtedly one of the fastest we have ever experienced. Not only is it necessary to assess the present dynamics of employment, but its relationship to demographics today, characterized by the overwhelming increase of young people entering the workforce. We need to explore the informal sector and labor migration, which in the past decade were the traditional “safety valves” of the labor market and now seem to be encountering strong obstacles that have led to the emergence of new occupational options, some of them highly worrying.