ILPC 2026

The increase in job insecurity and temporary labor contracts in the last 30 years has led to a growing interest in the health effects of employment conditions. In Latin America and particularly in Chile, labor market changes in recent decades have been characterized by greater labor flexibility and a “tertiarization” of the workforce (Atria, 2004).  Social epidemiology has been quick in understanding the potential relevance to health of these labour market changes. With the pragmatism that characterizes this discipline, researchers have developed instruments to capture “precariousness” based on several domination and exploitation mechanisms (Vives et al., 2010).

Paradoxically, sociology during the same period struggled with the relevance of traditional concepts and measures of social class, notably those based on the Marxian tradition (Grusky et al 1998; Gorz, 1997; Paluski, 1996). However, neo-Marxian sociologists developed social class measures under the postulate that social classes involve are real mechanisms that have a causal force in the lives of people (Wright, 2016). Among the most popular neo-Marxian social class indicators are EO Wright’s (Wright 2000). This indicator measures social class in terms of employment relationships, while leaving aside the mechanism of exploitation which is nevertheless key in Wright’s class theory (Muntaner et al 2015). The core of theory are the relations of ownership and control of productive resources and their underlying domination and exploitation mechanisms which cause social inequalities, including health inequalities (Rocha et al, 2014). We claim that Wright's theoretical-empirical effort is in some measure relevant to the contemporary class structures. However, the model show an internal inconsistency, since the class theory (including is not reflected in its entirety in the empirical measurement model.

Our aim is to improve Wright’s measurement of social class by adding to it several indicators of domination and exploitation included in contemporary measures of precariousness. Contemporary measures of labor precariousness include de facto dimensional indicators of exploitation and domination. Thus, our strategy allows us to distinguish between more and less dominated workers and more and less exploited workers. We test the predictive validity of our augmented Wright’s class measure with self-reported health. We test the hypothesis that more dominated and exploited workers have worse health than workers who are less dominated and exploited.

We used the National Survey on Employment, Work, Health and Quality of Life, applied in Chile, will be used in 2010-2011 (MINSAL, 2011) and Survey on employment, work, health and quality of life applied in Bogota City in 2013 (FLACSO, 2013) Domination and exploitation indicators were measures were obtained from some domain of the "EPRES" Precariousness Scale (Vives et al 2010).  Exploitation was assessed with the Economic Deprivation scale, and domination was assessed with the Vulnerability, Temporality and Exercises of Rights scales. Additional questions was include in survey 2003 useful to test this approach in other country .We stratified each worker category in EO Wright’s social class indicator (Wright 2000) with high / low exploitation and domination levels using tertile scale scores. Our hypotheses on the effects of high domination and exploitation on self-reported health were been confirmed with the three indicators of domination (temporality, vulnerability and exercise of rights) and with the indicator of exploitation (economic deprivation).

Our scales differentiate between more or less dominated and exploited workers within the same class position thus incorporating these core class mechanisms into a social class measure that relied only on labor market positions (i/e. Worker, manager and owner). In this sense we would have improved Wright's measure by making it more valid according to his own theory by going beyond the relationship in the labor market and capturing domination / exploitation.