López Ruiz, María, 1982-Artazcoz Lazcano, Lucía, 1963-Martínez Martínez, José Miguel, 1974-Rojas, MarianelaBenavides, Fernando G. (Fernando García)2015-10-162015-10-162015López-Ruiz M, Artazcoz L, Martínez JM, Rojas M, Benavides FG. Informal employment and health status in Central America. BMC Public Health. 2015 Jul 24;15:698. DOI: 10.1186/s12889-015-2030-9.1471-2458http://hdl.handle.net/10230/24850BACKGROUND: Informal employment is assumed to be an important but seldom studied social determinant of health, affecting a large number of workers around the world. Although informal employment arrangements constitute a permanent, structural pillar of many labor markets in low- and middle-income countries, studies about its relationship with health status are still scarce. In Central America more than 60% of non-agricultural workers have informal employment. Therefore, we aimed to assess differences in self-perceived and mental health status of Central Americans with different patterns of informal and formal employment. METHODS:/nEmployment profiles were created by combining employment relations (employees, self-employed, employers), social security coverage (yes/no) and type of contract--only for employees--(written, oral, none), in a cross-sectional study of 8,823 non-agricultural workers based on the I Central American Survey of Working Conditions and Health of 2011. Using logistic regression models, adjusted odds ratios (aOR) by country, age and occupation, of poor self-perceived and mental health were calculated by sex. Different models were first fitted separately for the three dimensions of employment conditions, then for employment profiles as independent variables. RESULTS: Poor self-perceived health was reported by 34% of women and 27% of men, and 30% of women and 26% of men reported poor mental health. Lack of social security coverage was associated with poor self-perceived health (women, aOR: 1.38, 95% CI: 1.13-1.67; men, aOR: 1.36, 95% CI: 1.13-1.63). Almost all employment profiles with no social security coverage were significantly associated with poor self-perceived and poor mental health in both sexes. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that informal employment is a significant factor in social health inequalities among Central American workers, which could be diminished by policies aimed at increasing social security coverage.application/pdfeng© 2015 López-Ruiz et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/nLicense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any/nmedium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:///ncreativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.OcupacióAmèrica Central -- Condicions socialsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-015-2030-9info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess