By: Lilia Aguilar Gil
Losing your job from one day to the next is something that for the vast majority of people truncates projects and goals in the best of cases, but in the worst of them, it means not having the resources to cope with day to day life, it is stop having income to pay for food, rent, transportation to look for another job, and if there is a family, its support. One solution to this scenario is unemployment insurance.
Unemployment insurance is a monetary or in-kind support to the worker who loses his job, so that he can look for work while protecting his family’s economy, is a component of the contemporary welfare state tested in 72 countries. In Mexico, only the capital has it, and its purpose is to offer an economic incentive, in addition to promoting the labor reintegration of people through training and a job bank.
The Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) recognizes that the existence of unemployment insurance schemes has made it possible to activate rapid responses to the loss of employment of formal wage earners and in the process relieve pressure on public resources. However, the crisis has also highlighted the need to move towards integrated and comprehensive schemes for protection against job loss in order to extend coverage to the most unprotected sectors. Unemployment insurance benefits are normally the first support in the initial phase of unemployment, replacing a proportion of previous income for a limited time.
In the Latin American and Caribbean region, eight countries have this instrument: Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Jamaica, Uruguay and Venezuela, where not only are they intended to temporarily substitute income, but they are a great support for the search for a new job, and overcoming a passive policy, since they are part of an active labor market policy.
In Mexico, in 2013, the Chamber of Deputies had approved a modification to article 123 to include unemployment insurance as a right of workers, however, it remained in the Senate in the freezer and was never finalized. And this despite the fact that, in Mexico, even the 1917 Constitution provided for insurance for “involuntary cessation of work”, but this was never implemented as unemployment insurance.
In recent days in the Social Security Commission, we submitted a favorable opinion about a bill that seeks to reform the General Law of Social Development, to establish the obligation of the Federal Government to create and maintain a social development program that provides protection against unemployment, through unemployment insurance that guarantees the population that loses their job, an income for a maximum of six months, which is sufficient to cover the basic needs of their family.
According to the INEGI National Survey of Occupation and Employment, the rate decreased in 21 states compared to the levels registered at the end of 2019. In Chihuahua, the levels of job vacancy grew .30 percentage points to stand at 2.87% of the population. population, which represents that 50 thousand 950 people are unemployed.
It is not about “making life easier” for those who have lost their jobs, much less promoting “idleness”, unemployment insurance, planned and designed as part of an active labor market policy, considering the best practices in other latitudes, will help people face a situation that could be disastrous for the vast majority of the population.