Informal work makes unemployment decrease
August 31, 2017 09h00 AM | Last Updated: September 04, 2017 09h21 AM
Between the quarters ended in April to July this year, more than 1.4 million Brazilians got out of the unemployment line, making the number of employed persons reach 90.7 million persons. As a result, the unemployment rate fell from 13.6% to 12.8%. But job posts were, most of them, offered in the informal labor market. The increase occurred, mainly, among the employed persons without a formal contract (468 thousand more persons) and the self-employed (351 thousand persons). Conversely, the population with a formal contract kept stable (33.3 million).
The data are in the Continuous PNAD, released today by the IBGE. The survey also revealed that the wage bill earned by all the employed population increased 1.3%, going from R$183.6 billion to R$186.1 billion. For the coordinator of Labor and Income of the IBGE, Cimar Azeredo, the increase is very positive for the country's economy.
"The bigger wage bill makes the economy go ahead, since you have more people consuming and, as a consequence, the labor market can get into a virtuous cycle, different from what we saw in the previous months", he says.
Unemployment still higher than in 2016
According to the Continuous PNAD, in the annual comparison, the unemployment rate remained above that presented in the same quarter of 2016 (11.6%) and the number of employed persons with a formal contract fell 2.9%, going from 34.3 million to 33.3 million persons.
Cimar highlights that in this type of comparison the informality trend in the labor market is also seen. According to the researcher, the 15.2% increase in the number of persons working in the food sector is evidence of that.
"Within a year, the group lodging and food had an increase of 683 thousand persons. The rise was, more specifically related to food. This group is typically formed of people that, in order to cope with unemployment, are cooking at home and selling their food in the streets", he explains.
Text: Mônica Marli
Graph: Helena Pontes
Image: pxhere.com
