The Present and Future of Employment: Ibero-American Context

Abstract

The world of work is changing rapidly. The impact of the current megatrends on the future of employment has been widely debated around the world and became a focus of numerous reviews of international organizations. The Sars-Cov-2 pandemic has added even more urgency to the discussion and has affected more countries, including Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns and related global recession of 2020 have created a highly uncertain outlook for the labor market and accelerated the arrival of the future of work. COVID-19 has shown us how rapid change can destroy jobs. But at the same time, it must be recognized that the labor market has fundamentally changed within just a few months of the pandemic with the spread of some non-standard employment such as tele- and platform work. Thus, the COVID-19 became a catalyst for the rapid changes that will define the future of the labor market in different parts of the world. But, as some results show, digital transformation in employment brought serious inequalities, called the digital divide with its multidimensional impact. For example, a new digital gap has emerged between the global North and the global South. Through these optics, the article attempts to summarize the results of studies that are monitoring how labor markets are changing in different regions of the world. And the main aim is to better understand the specifics of the situation in Spain, Portugal and Latin American countries which collectively are integral parts of the Ibero-American community. To achieve the goal, the principal tools of scientific analysis were used, including collecting and analyzing a significant body of empirical data from international sources and publications of national departments for labor and employment. The review helped to identify the basic features of the current moment and possible prospects in the development of the employment sector in Iberoamerica. Following the principle of comparative analysis research, the author comes to the conclusion that, on the one hand, the processes similar to the global trends are present, but, on the other hand, the peculiarities determined by the national characteristics of the Ibero-American content are quite obvious.