Economic activity and employment levels surpassed pre-pandemic marks, with a informal employment record of the order of 45% between wage earners and unregistered self-employed. They total more than one million than in 2016 and in total there are almost 9 million employed “in black”.

The occupations with the most informal employment are domestic staff, construction, commerce, industry and agriculture. Y in four activities there are more non-registered than registered: private house staff; farming; construction and private social and health services.

Informal dependent and self-employed workers were the hardest hit by the quarantine and pandemic and are being the most demanded since the restrictions were eliminated. It is because, despite the strong loss of the order of 20/25% suffered by the purchasing power of formal workers from 2017 onwards, informal workers had a greater deterioration, they earn less, they do not have labor or social security rights, and they do not have social security coverage.

The number of workers who are hired by a single employer such as Monotributists so that they are not legally dependent workers, a modality that is increasing month by month. This “figure” is on the rise in the service sectors, favored because in many cases face-to-face work is not required.

Despite of legal and tax risk what it means to have unregistered workers, the taxpayer Sebastian Dominguez explains that due to the high tax pressure on sales (such as VAT and Gross Income) there is a incentive to evade taxes and obtain “black” income outside the control of the AFIP and the Provincial Treasury and CABA.

“This generation of income “in the black” then has its correlate with the realization of expenses in the black. So who avoids they will try to lower the expenses in white so that they do not exceed the declared income. One of the items that they will try to reduce will be the salaries and wages they pay their employees.”

Consequently, says Dominguez, “beyond the labor risks that are generated, they will choose to have employees “black” or declare them but with a lower salary than the real one, for example, through a part-time contract when they work all the day. day”. Also paying a minimum “in white” and the rest “in black”. What is known as “grey” employment.

John Louis Bour, FIEL economist, points out that in addition to the rise in informality among wage earners, “properly measured, it is also growing due to the increase in self-employment. Beyond the informal self-employed (who do not contribute), define as formal those self-employed who pay a fee and thus have access to social services and a pension add “formals” on the edge. Well measured, informality covers almost 45% of all those employed in Argentina”.

Bour adds: “The increase in informality is reflection of the drop in the productivity of the economy. Since 2011, average productivity (GDP/employment) fell by more than 10%; that also explains why real incomes are falling”.

For Bour, “the macro and microeconomic disorder with rising inflation generates a context of declining productivity that is reminiscent of the 1980s. It is not enough to stabilize to improve incomeit will be necessary to propose pro-competitive reforms (more micro than macro) to aspire to get out of so much labor and business informality”.

Both domestic staff and construction are two sectors that have more informal than formal employment. That’s why for Cynthia Benzion head of the Association of Labor Lawyers (AAL) “Law 22,250 of 1980 that regulates construction or the law of work in private homes, with its differences, by creating a differentiated regime have allowed sustaining extremely high levels of clandestinization. This proves that reducing employer obligations only allows increasing business profitability without implying greater legality in hiring “.

Benzion adds that “during the pandemic, the same sector that today influences price formation, well above inflation, returned to the fray with its demands for labor reforms. The idea that removing the current protection of labor laws will generate employment does not withstand empirical testing.”