“Guatemala: a workers’ paradise?”, 11 de marzo de 2020

…Guatemala, a country that ranks at the bottom in Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of development and prosperity indicators, has an enviable unemployment rate: 2.9 per cent in 2012 and 2.5 per cent in 2019…

The Better Jobs Index of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) measures working conditions in Latin America with two quantitative indicators (labour participation and employment) and two qualitative indicators (formality and living wage). The regional average was 54.91 out of 100 in 2010 (the first year of the Index) and rose to 57.12 in 2015 (the most recent). In both years, Guatemala ranked last at 38.01 and 44.94 respectively, a significant improvement but still far behind Uruguay, which ranked first in 2010 at 67.98 and in 2015 at 71.91…

Young women face more exclusion (57 per cent) than their male counterparts…According to the International Labour Organization’s 2019 Labour Overview of Latin America and the Caribbean, the Latin American average in 2018 was 17 per cent…

The roots of this growing employment precariousness and the lack of future perspectives for a large portion of young people lie in inequality. Guatemala is one of the most unequal countries in the most unequal region (Latin America) in the world…