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This paper reviews the principal concepts of social class, occupation, and social stratification, and their contribution to the analysis of the social determinants of health (SDH), and reviews empirical studies conducted in Latin America that use employment relations as an SDH. The review focuses on studies of the relationship between health and social class based on neo-Weberian or neo-Marxist perspectives. A search of the BIREME Virtual Health Library and the SciELO database found 28 articles meeting these characteristics. This relative dearth contrasts with the profusion of papers that use these approaches written in Europe and in the United States, with a long tradition in the analysis of SDH. In this regard, the political and programmatic implications of research on social class and employment relations are different from and complementary to studies of health gradients associated with income and education. Globalization of employment relations requires the development of new concepts to explain and measure the mechanisms of action of the SDH going beyond what is strictly labor related; in particular, the importance in the current Latin American reality of the impact of informal work on health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows the results of a research project on relative social mobility patterns in Spain during the second half of the 20th century. The data were collected by the Spanish National Statistics Institute for the Survey of Incomes and Living Conditions (2005). This empirical material has not been used previously and it provides new data about the last decade of the 20th century. The social fluidity models created by Erikson and Goldthorpe in The Constant Flux (1992) have been applied. In short, this paper confirms that the rates of the social fluidity remain invariant during this period and that the patterns of core social fluidity for European countries closely match the Spanish case. Nevertheless, this mobility regime has certain particularities resulting from the characteristics of Spain's social and economic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]