The Chilean Labor Market : A Key to Understanding Latin American Labor Markets

Kirsten Sehnbruch uses the case study of Chile to show the failures and inner-working of neo-liberal labour policy. She shows in detail what the real policy issue should be, namely the creation of proper institutions and of a corps of competent professionals with relevant skills and powers to operate them. This is extremely timely work, in that institutions are a matter of enormous concern in the international development community of policy-makers, who are desperate to make current orthodoxy work in terms of sustainability, the quality of life, human development and other dimensions beyond GDP growth. "The performance of Latin American labor markets over the last decades is now widely acknowledged to have been disappointing. Neo-liberal structural adjustment policies have not brought the hoped for results, neither in terms of employment generation nor in regard to poverty rates. Kirsten Sehnbruch uses the case study of Chile to show the failures and inner-workings of neo-liberal labor policy. Using Amartya Sen's capability approach, she highlights the importance of the much neglected issue of employment policy in the development agenda, and shows that policy makers cannot focus on just the unemployment rate as their main concern: the quality of employment is at least as important."--Jacket Front Matter....Pages i-2 Introduction: Model Performance or Precarious Employment?....Pages 3-20 Employment in the Development Context: The Contribution of the Capability Approach....Pages 21-45 The Never-Ending Story of Labor Market Reform....Pages 47-71 The Characteristics of Employment in Chile....Pages 73-111 The Development of the Chilean Labor Market....Pages 113-140 Legislation versus Practical Reality: Chile’s Unemployment Insurance....Pages 141-168 Vocational Training: Missing the Opportunities....Pages 169-209 Measuring the Quality of Employment....Pages 211-238 Conclusions: Quality and Quantity....Pages 239-274 Back Matter....Pages 275-339