ABSTRACT
The previous chapter documented the remarkable diversity in the manual labour market produced by the growth process. This diversity was structured by three major divisions: enterprise size (the formal/informal sectors), skill and gender. This chapter and the next examine the pattern of mobility across these divisions. Here we shall analyse the volume of movement between formal and informal sectors and between skill levels, in the course of workers’ lifetimes, and the degree to which these patterns differed between men and women. We also look at the pace of mobility, i.e. the frequency of job changing, the length of time spent in different jobs, and whether or not women were a more unstable workforce than men. The next chapter describes the career paths which underlay these aggregate patterns. There we shall see how movement towards the highly skilled and better self-employed jobs was achieved and how some workers—particularly women—were trapped in a series of dead-end jobs.
