Urban Labor Market Revisited: Why Quality of Employment Matters in Bogota

Using your ties to get a worse job? The differential effects of social networks on quality of employment in Colombia

“…In contrast to what we said for the proctected group, we note a "poor quality trap" process for vulnerable workers, because they do not have weak connections and therefore use mostly strong relationships with similar workers, accessing redundant information about low employment quality job opportunities (Smith 2016). Combarnous and Deguilhem (2016) demonstrate that the quality of employment concept must be situated in legal and social contexts. Despite this necessity, they show that the following six dimensions mark the Following Combarnous and Deguilhem (2016), we opted for a multivariate strategy to formulate the QoE index.…”

“…7 We selected two types of groups; 8 the dimension used for considering the homogeneity of each group was the segment of the labor market in which the members participate. The reason for this is that the labor market segmentation is fairly strong between low and high quality jobs (Farné and Vergara 2015;Combarnous and Deguilhem 2016). In addition, this dimension is linked with income and socioeconomic strata, which summarizes most of the institutional differences in Colombia.…”

“…Confronted with this contrasting literature reviews, we built an original theoretical framework to explain why these heterogeneous results have been observed. We started from the idea of heterogeneity between different social groups in terms of ex post job quality, and we assumed that a clear distinction exists between high and low job quality groups in the labor market (Farné and Vergara 2015;Combarnous and Deguilhem 2016). To obtain a job, a worker may have used different means with distinct effects depending on his group (Bentolila et al, 2010).…”

“…In this way, using the quality of employment concept 1 seems crucial (Osterman 2013;Burchell et al 2014). This multidimensional approach holds a considerable interest, allowing for the precise analysis of employment forms and their further evolution while abandoning the classical typologies of the labor markets in a developing context (Floro and Messier 2011;Farné and Vergara 2015;Combarnous and Deguilhem 2016). In developed countries, few studies have emphasized the relation between social networks and quality of employment (Granovetter [1974(Granovetter [ ] 1995.…”

“…In developing countries, Nordman and Pasquier-Doumer (2015) have documented this issue with an approximation of quality of employment levels through a dichotomy between self-employment and wage employment (Bocquier et al 2010). However, Combarnous and Deguilhem (2016) have shown that this typology is not relevant for dealing with the complexity of urban labor market in Colombia. Indeed, there is no longer a clear divide between job quality for employees and independents, which is in accordance with the idea of a continuum across employment statuses (Tokman 2007).…”