Informalities: An Index Approach to Informal Work and Its Consequences.

So a worker might be a subcontractor for a large firm but not have access to that firm's pension or health policy (and might be too well off to qualify for means-tested noncontributory pension or health programs, even if these were on offer from the government. The COVID-19 pandemic yet again exposed the vast divide in working conditions across Latin America. Melina Altamirano, Sarah Berens, and Franziska Deeg's study of social policy preferences in Mexico closes the issue with a counterintuitive finding: informal workers support social assistance policy at lower rates than formal workers. Many governments struggled to provide social assistance and employment relief to workers and businesses without formal documents (Blofield et al. 2020; Filgueira and Blofield 2020; Hummel et al. 2021). First, as governments extend noncontributory social policies, many workers without formal labor arrangements have access to social programs. [Extracted from the article]