Jobs target remains elusive: Almost half still in the ‘informal’ sector with few rights

Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): The economy no longer seems to be doing the job in terms of creating employment in the regulated "formal sector" of the labor market. Getting unemployment down has been one of the government's big claims in the run-up to state and municipal elections later this year.
While joblessness figures have come down, they're still well short of the government's target of five or six percent of a work force last estimated at around 14.1 million people, and rising. And the ratio of people in regulated, secure jobs to those in the "informal" labor market has barely shifted over the last year, according to figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE). According to these -- and skeptics question how the INE can possibly keep count of heads in the informal sector -- 55.4 percent of people in work were employed in the formal sector last April.

The total of 6,469,056 marked a rise of 161,175 on a year before.

• That still left 44.4 percent of the work force out there in the informal sector.

The most visible reflections of this part of the labor market are the stallholders or buhoneros who clog up the streets, often without a license to do so. The INE somehow calculated these people totaled 5,210,888 in April, up 132,399 on a year earlier. By no means are all of these well-qualified professionals working on their own account. They're estimated to total 1,330,955, a little under one fourth.

Over two-thirds of informal workers – 3,454,518, says the INE – are scraping a living in some sort of work. Anecdotal evidence suggests quite a lot of this work is on a casual daily or weekly basis, with little job security or none at all. Even if they work for little companies with five or less employees, many of the rules on job rights don't apply. But if the more peremptory bosses in the formal market hope this will keep unions in line, such sentiment doesn't seem to have filtered down to the rank and file on the factory floor, or at least not yet.

The approach to this year's round of negotiations on collective bargaining agreements has seen the usual rash of labor disputes, protest stoppages and all-out strikes.
Even as the government nationalized steelmaker Sidor, it faced street protests and demands from the steel union, Suttis, for big pay raises. Venalum last week went into what unions vowed would be an indefinite strike.

There are rumblings of discontent in the all-important oil sector, and even talk of trouble in the public administration. The reason for this unrest is not difficult to spot. It's inflation, now unofficially estimated to be galloping at an annual rate of very nearly 30 percent, drowning the full-year target of 19.5 percent recently set by Planning and Development Minister Haiman El Troudi.