Precarious Work Worsens, Fostering Women's Studies

This week's employment picture was mixed. While data from the NGO Accion Ciudadana Frente a la Pobreza revealed that more than 35 million Mexicans work in precarious conditions (27.7 percent of the population), the UN Women launched the Second Chance program to provide high-quality educational content for those who interrupted their education, with a special focus on women. 

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• Keeping track of an employee remotely can be difficult. VenturesSoft has developed an app that uses face recognition to make it easier, said Jorge Kramis, General Director of VenturesSoft Mexico in an interview with MBN. “(The app) uses Face Liveness Detection technology, which can identify if the person on the other side of the screen is a living being. It takes six pictures and analyzes eye movement and gestures. It also does depth analysis, which will not approve a flat photograph. No other application in the world incorporates both face recognition and liveness detection technology,” he explains. Read the complete conversation here.
   

• UN Women launched a communications campaign to promote its Second Chance program, which provides high-quality content for those who interrupted their education, with a special focus on women. Girls and women who attend school are exercising their fundamental human right to education. Unfortunately, it is a right to which not all have access. In Mexico, six out of every 10 people over the age of 15 with no education are women. Likewise, a woman is four times less likely to have access to education or the labor market than a man. Lack of schooling, poverty, unemployment and jobs with poor working conditions disproportionately affect women, widening the gender gap and leaving them in a more vulnerable situation. Read the full article here.

• Less than one-fifth of employed people in Mexico have a decent job, defined as one that provides a living wage and benefits, according to the NGO Accion Ciudadana Frente a la Pobreza. Also, approximately 35 million people who are working do not have a sufficient wage nor social security. Mexico has almost 75 million people of working age and able to work (not counting students, pensioners and people with serious disabilities), of which only 50 million are employed, warns the NGO. It developed an instrument to evaluate employees’ labor situation, based on official data from INEGI, called Semaforo de Trabajo Digno (Decent Work Stoplight). Get the full picture here.

• About 1.6 million workers have quit the outsourcing or subcontracting scheme as a result of the reform approved in April, said this week Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS) Luisa María Alcalde. She added that if the reform is approved in congress, companies will have until September 1 to get into regularization. According to INEGI, there are 4.6 million outsourced workers in Mexico.

• By the end of June, Mexico City had just over 3.2 million jobs registered at IMSS, 216,563 fewer than in February 2020, said Gabriel Funes, Board Secretary of the Mexico City Employers' Confederation (COPARMEX), on Wednesday. “We hope that the Mexico City government can grant more credits and tax benefit programs; it has to motivate both local and foreign investment,” added COPARMEX’s President in Mexico City Armando Zúñiga.