Patterns of Risk in Life Course’s Workers of Three Generations in Mexico: Social Change or Historical Inequalities?

Contemporary societies attend a rupture of traditional certainties structured around age, gender and social class. The so called “flexibilization of the life course” would have resulted in a process of individualization that, in general terms, would increase social and individual uncertainty. This, together with the global transformations of the economic field, would explain the existence of labor trajectories not only less predictable and orderly but also less collectively determined. Labor biographies have become less continuous, where unemployment, part-time employment or self-employment are increasingly common events.

Under these premises, the main of the paper is to analyze the accumulation of social risks in the life course of workers of three generations in Mexico. For this purpose, a sequence analysis of the labor trajectories is proposed to identify risk patterns throughout the life course, using data from the Longitudinal Survey on Occupational Insecurity in Mexico (2011). Optimal Matching Analysis is applied to model time-related processes in order to identify labor trajectories typologies.

Findings would indicate that three major types of movement are observed along the trajectories: 1) what I call "structural recurrence of instability" (a permanent transit between unstable situations); 2) fluctuations between security and risk (depending on the stage of the life course) and; (3) "entrapment of risk", which implies few transitions along the trajectories but marked by poor quality jobs and with no possibilities of upward labor mobility. In addition, risk patterns would have changed as the cohorts are younger toward an increase in trajectories with a greater number of transitions and labor states over the life course. Finally, it would also be expected that certain axes of social inequality (gender, social origin and stage of life course) significantly predict the probability of belonging to each of the various patterns found in the research.