The Home as Factory Floor: Employment and Remuneration of Home-Based Workers
Home-based work, defined as nonprofessionals who perform market work from their homes, is an increasingly recognized form of employment in Latin America. The majority of the research on this segment of the labor force relies on small sample, qualit...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, D.C.
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2004/05/4261386/home-factory-floor-employment-remuneration-home-based-workers http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14105 |
| Summary: | Home-based work, defined as
nonprofessionals who perform market work from their homes,
is an increasingly recognized form of employment in Latin
America. The majority of the research on this segment of the
labor force relies on small sample, qualitative data, which
find that home-based workers are women, children, and adults
with disabilities with low skills who work long hours for
low wages. The authors use a large random sample of control
groups of non-home-based workers, including men, in their
analysis and examine the home-based work sector in Brazil,
Ecuador, and Mexico in 1999. Their results show that in all
three countries, women are overrepresented among home-based
workers, particularly older women, those with low levels of
education, and those with children or spouses, unlike men
for whom these factors do not matter. Female home-based
workers earn 25-60 percent less an hour than do
non-home-based working women and they work one-third to
one-half as many hours each week. Home-based working men, on
the other hand, earn 0-17 percent less than do men who do
not work from their homes, and they only work 10 percent
fewer hours a week. The wage and work hour gaps for women
are largely related to marital status, not the presence of
children, suggesting that simply being the primary caregiver
in the household, regardless of the actual time constraints
(children) is the key factor to differences between
home-based working women and those who work outside of their homes. |
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