Coverage was extended to farmers and some secondary workers, and the coverage period was extended from a year to 78 weeks.
Drawing sharp lines between primary workers who are employed full time and secondary workers who are employed part-time makes it easier to treat some workers as cheap disposables without undermining the morale of others.
These included extending benefits to secondary workers hurt by a plant closing -- for instance, those who might have made plastic parts for a television cabinet -- and to service-industry employees and contract workers who typically held jobs in high-technology companies hit hard by the economic downturn.
In particular, Latin American women are likely to act as secondary workers because of the persistent strong attachment to traditional gender roles and the low levels of women's skills and educational attainment in the region.
A possible explanation for the higher sensitivity of female's labor force participation to changes in foreign countries economic conditions is that remittances have a stronger effect on the labor force participation decisions of secondary workers of the household.
Garay and Rodríguez (2005) argue that remittances reduce the incentives to participate in the labor market by increasing the reservation wage for secondary workers; however, they do not verify this statement at all.
Third, if migration is massive in the city or region, secondary workers could engage in market activities given the increase in the real wage due to the contraction of labor supply.
Female labor decisions are more flexible when they are not the only income earners of the household or the principal worker of the family (Kimmel 1998).6 In Latin America, the role of women as secondary workers is reinforced by solid traditional family structures with a strong attachment to traditional gender roles and low levels of women's skills and educational attainment.
First, income elasticity of labor supply tends to be larger for women than for men, particularly for women who act as secondary workers within their household (Michalopoulos et al. 1992; Kimmel 1998; Eissa and Hoynes 1999; Eissa and Hoynes 2004; Naz 2004; Tamm 2009).
Considering women as secondary workers, they are expected to accept a job without mandated benefits more than men, because the gain from these benefits is lower if another member of the household already has them, i.e., their husbands (Galiani and Weinschelbaum 2012).
Second, migration itself, irrespective of the presence of remittances, can affect the labor-leisure decisions of secondary workers in the household, given that some of them may have to take the place of the migrant to compensate the income she previously provided.
