Almost commonplace, it has always been said that small and medium-sized companies in almost the entire developed world are large employers. But in recent years, this version has landed in Argentina with a version adapted to the economic scenario that the business universe went through in a context of uncertainty and great changes in economic variables.
The numbers. A recent study carried out by the consultancy Keys Competitive Informationcarried out on the basis of the current CUITs of legal entities (companies), a total of 778,149 were recorded. Nelson Perez Alonso, director of Claves explains that every year they measure markets and need to understand the correlation of employment with the turnover of companies in the more than 100 markets that they are monitoring. “We analyzed the need to understand the potential of geographical areas in terms of supply and demand for products and services, with the CUITs and CUILs databases”, he points out.
Of the total number of registered companies, 34% do not have employees: they are sole proprietorships or they are owners without declared personnel. Another 47% have between 1 and 5 employees and another 12% for companies with a payroll between 6 and 20 employees.
According to the aforementioned Claves report, small and medium-sized companies are the backbone of the economy of any country, so supporting SMEs means, in strategic terms, “stimulating private activity and also the development of entrepreneurial skills”. However, the assertion that SMEs employ between 70% and 80% of formal employment in Argentina would not be verified. In total, if we take a company with less than 90 workers as SME, we have that 45% (3.3 million) are registered there, but if the border is 200 employees the proportion rises to 57% (4 million). In other words, 3 million work in companies with more than 201 employees and if the demarcation is 90 dependents, there are 3.9 million who work in “large” companies.
“The number of SMEs was decreasing because today we do not have more than 778,000, when we have had almost 900,000”, Pérez Alonso points out and interprets what emerges from this study that 80% of employment is settled in the SME network. , but it is also the most informal. “If we take the construction chain, concentrated groups are more likely to have white-formal people,” adds.
The sector that generates the most work, excluding the State (which employs 3.8 million people), is industry with 1.2 million; that is, a third of what the State generates. The Commerce sector today employs 1.2 million people, while the agricultural sector has 325,000 direct formal employees and the automotive industry has 90,000 people.
Reasons. robert vassoloprofessor and researcher at IAE Business School, it is clear that, if there are no large companies, formal employment falls brutally. “A development plan to promote employment needs to take care of all of them, but the tragedy in Argentina is that what falls is formal employment”, he emphasizes. He understands that everything threatens the formality of employment and activities, not only due to tax pressure on the formal sector of companies that is among the most burdensome in the world, but also due to non-salary costs that make hiring more expensive in order.
for his part Gustavo Lazzariwho runs a family-owned cold meat business and is actively involved in the Argentine Chamber of the Industry of Meat Products and Related Products (CAIChA), a member of Copal, formal employment statistics are relevant to assess the degree of inclusion of labor legislation. And Argentina made restrictive legislation. “The non-participation of SMEs in formal employment has more to do with the infeasibility of legislation than with the dynamism of this type of company, because in fact the employment that is growing is informal (and most of it is generated by SMEs). ”, Lazzari stresses.
The businessman believes that there is a prism to evaluate this situation: “to know how inclusive the legislation is and for 12 years formal private employment has not grown consistently and significantly, which shows the infeasibility of labor legislation to create quality jobs ”, he emphasizes. But, on the other hand, he points out that the number of employing companies shows that there is a dynamic in the activity of SMEs that does create employment, but makes it clear that it is not enough. “I would not question the ability of SMEs to create employment, but the nature of the legal regulations so that employment is of a formal nature”he concludes.
As a two-speed system, the base of employer companies does not show all that it really does and even less, the potential that it could develop. The statistics that emerge from the Claves study reaffirm that the very low participation in total employment is not a weakness in itself, but rather hides the precariousness of the institutional framework designed for the reality of large companies.
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