ILPC 2026

Employment precariousness has been traditionally conceptualized as the weakening of salaried employment relations. However, in Latin-American countries important proportions of the workforce correspond to own-account work. In Chile own-account work rises over 20% of the workforce, one of the lowest in the region.

Self-employment is generally characterized as a form of informal and precarious employment, lacking job stability and social protection. However, it is heterogeneous in nature, where only some forms correspond to subsistence work for those excluded from the formal labour market. Others correspond to traditional self-employed jobs (e.g. liberal professions and shop owners), and still others to a response to the flexibility regime (flexible production and employment) and hence, the precarization of salaried jobs (e.g., individuals who value the autonomy and control over the work process over the securities of precarious salaried work, bogus self-employed workers, and workers forced into becoming externalized providers).

Adopting a multidimensional approach to precarious employment originally developed for salaried workers, we aim to describe this heterogeneity by identifying types of self-employed workers according to the dimensions of precarious employment that are applicable and in a second moment, to incorporate specific dimensions to own-account work.

Data comes from a nationally representative sub- sample of 1.893 self-employed workers (own-account workers and employers of up to 5 unpaid or temporary workers) from the First National Survey on Employment, Work, Health and Quality of Life (ENETS-2010).

Four of the six sub-scales that make up Amable et al’s Employment Precariousness Scale (EPRES) were used for the analysis of employment precariousness: job stability, incomes, social-protection rights and capacity to exercise time-related rights (13 of the 22 original EPRES variables). The disempowerment and vulnerability dimensions, as well as a variable referring to Occupational health and safety coverage of the social-protection rights sub-scale have been excluded, as they do not apply to self-employed workers. The abbreviated scale demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties in this population.

Latent class cluster analysis was carried out (LatentGold 4.0) based on the four subscales scores. The best-fitting latent class cluster model was selected according to model fit and interpretability of the solution. Descriptive statistics were run for the resulting classes of jobs (SPSS.23).

Six clusters were identified, with average EPRES score ranging from 0.66 to 2.44. Significant differences were observed in their profiles of precariousness, especially relative to incomes, job stability and capacity to exercise time-related rights, giving rise to the following classes of jobs: stable precarious, subsistence autonomous, subsistence precarious, stable entrepreneurs, impoverished entrepreneurs and unstable autonomous jobs.

Significant differences were also observed in the composition of these classes of jobs according to socio-demographic and occupational characteristics and to additional dimensions considered relevant for the analysis of self-employment like their dependency to single suppliers or buyers and the financial risks they assume.

The study results so far suggest that we can speak of different "forms of precariousness" among Chilean self-employed workers, and that the specific dimensions considered to self-employed workers can and shall be integrated in subsequent analyses to refine the typology described above.

*Preliminary results of the FONDECYT project N° 1171105