IESS recovered 4% of affiliates in 2021, but has not yet overcome the loss of the pandemic

An improvement in formal employment in Ecuador in the midst of the post-pandemic reactivation translated into a 4% increase in those affiliated to the Ecuadorian Social Security Institute (IESS) at the end of 2021, and that is boosted in private company hiring .

There are 3,672,237 affiliates reported by the IESS as of last December. “2021 showed signs of recovery compared to the records of the immediately previous year”, the positive year-on-year variation of 4% shows a sustained increase in records compared to 2020, indicates the entity.

This increase represents 140,643 affiliates activated during the past year.

These records correspond mostly to contracts in companies. An analysis of the Chamber of Industries of Guayaquil indicates that in this sector affiliations increased by 5%. The industry only takes into account affiliations in a dependency relationship and not other types of affiliation such as independent workers, volunteers and unpaid domestic workers.

Affiliates in a dependency relationship total 2,487,685 as of December 2021. This figure includes 92,000 new ones from the private sector. On the other hand, in the public they were reduced by 1%, that is to say that some 4,100 people left the bureaucracy.

Neither of the two sectors has been able to recover to the levels of 2019 and the wave of layoffs caused by the quarantine and closure of companies, for which the IESS exceeded 260,000 disaffiliations.

In 2019 there were 2,661,198 affiliates in a dependency relationship, in 2020 they were reduced by 10% to 2,399,338 and of that loss Social Security has been able to recover 3% at the end of 2021.

September was the month in which more affiliates were gained: 16,000, and the rest of the months the increase ranged between 3,000 and 13,000, according to the detail available to the Chamber of Industries of Guayaquil.

Meanwhile, the IESS breaks down the figures into three groups: 3,097,047 people in compulsory general insurance, which represent 84.3% of the total number of affiliates; 202,559 in the voluntary regime, which is 5.52%; and 372,631 in the Peasant Social Security, corresponding to 10.15% of the total.

The IESS is left without 240,108 contributors in three months of the pandemic

The general insurance includes employees in a dependency relationship and also those who do not, such as self-employed workers, freelance professionals, business owners or sole proprietorships who are independent and affiliate, they are around 279,000 affiliates. Another type of affiliation is unpaid work from home and reaches 332,800 registered.

Based on the 2021 labor indicators of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC), industrialists indicate that adequate employment at the national level remains at a still low level, since only 34 out of 100 Ecuadorians access a job. whose remuneration is equal to or greater than the basic salary ($ 425). The other 61 workers occupy an inadequate employment position and 4 are unemployed.

In 2020, adequate employment as a percentage of the PEA (economically active population) was 30.4% and before the pandemic it was bordering on and exceeding 40%. (I)