PNAD Contínua
After dropping for four years, jobs with formal contract rise in April
May 31, 2019 09h00 AM | Last Updated: May 31, 2019 10h53 AM
After dropping for 16 consecutive quarters, jobs with a formal contract in the private sector increase 1.5% in the quarter ended in April, compared with the same period of 2018. About 480 thousand formal job positions were generated, adding up to 33.1 million persons with a formal contract. These are the results of the Continuous National Household Sample Survey - Continuous PNAD, released today by the IBGE.
According to Cimar Azeredo, IBGE´s coordinator of Labor and Income, a significant part of the recovery of the jobs with a formal contract in the year came from the sectors of education and health, low-level workers in mining, construction and transportation, as well as of freelancers. "The increase reflects the beginning of a favorable scenario. This is the first time that formal contracts breathe since the beginning of the crisis in 2014", explains him.
Azeredo adds that this rise in employment with a formal contract was mainly noticed in São Paulo and among women. Even so, the labor market is far from recovering the loss of 14.5 million jobs with a formal contract since 2014.
Unemployment rate hits 12.5% in quarter ended in April
Despite the improvement in the labor market in the annual comparison, the unemployment rate rose from 12% to 12.5% between the quarter ended in January and that ended in April, with more 552 thousand persons unemployed.
Azeredo highlights that this increase is due to the remaining dismissals of the workers hired in the end of last year and laid off in the beginning of the current year. In this comparison, Continuous PNAD registers an increase of 270 thousand jobs with a formal contract, which, according to Azeredo, represent "a stability with an upward trend".
The labor market also worsens if we consider the compound rate of underutlization of the workforce – percentage of unemployed persons, time-related underemployed persons and persons in the potential workforce –, which hit 24.9%, a record in the time series started in 2012. It represents 28.4 million underutilized persons.
The potential workforce also hit a record – registering 8.2 million persons who did not search for a job, but would like to work –, as well as the number of discouraged persons, recording 4.9 million persons who gave up looking for a job. In addition, nearly 7 million persons were time-related employed, i.e., they worked less than 40 weekly hours and would like to work more.
