| Abstract: |
Young people entering the labor markets face several and important challenges.
These issues deepen due to rooted structural barriers such as informality or
precarity, low-paid jobs, and low economic growth in regions like Latin
America and sectors such as tourism (Abramo, 2022). Tourism has great
potential to employ many of these young people because it provides
opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers, it has low barriers to entry
and flexible conditions, and it provides critical skills for their
professional life. However, the youth population needs to reduce the gap
between their available skills and experienced gained and the future
requirements of labor markets to avoid being socially excluded. We apply the
multidimensional poverty methodology developed by Alkire and Foster (2011) to
build a Quality of Employment index (QoE) for young workers employed in the
tourism industry in Latin America for the period 2015-2019. Focusing on two
groups of young workers -super young for those aged 15 to 24 and young those
aged 25 to 35- we consider several aspects of working conditions and discuss
some differences in job quality across countries by gender and education
considering different levels of deprivation in the index. The results suggest
a high level of deprivation in the young workers, specially in the super young
group. However, employment quality increased in both groups for all countries
in the region during the period 2015-2019. |