Continuous PNAD
Union membership falls to 14.4%, the lowest rate since 2012
November 08, 2018 10h00 AM | Last Updated: November 08, 2018 05h08 PM
Of the 91.5 million employed persons in the country in 2017, only 13.1 million were associated to some labor union, according to the National Household Sample Survey (Continuous PNAD), released today by the IBGE. The union membership rate of 14.4% is the lowest since the beginning of the time series, in 2012, when it achieved 16.2%.
Researcher Adriana Beringuy says that this fall is opposed to the slight recovery of the employed population in 2017. "It's something relatively widespread," Beringuy said. The Lodging and Food sector, for example, grew by 10.6%, an increase of 499 thousand persons, but reduced even more its union membership rate: from 7.6% in 2016, the rate fall to 6.8% in 2017.
"This process of union affiliation does not depend only on the number of persons one activity can absorb, but of its insertion characteristics", says the researcher. "In the case of Lodging and food, we know there is a large predominance of informality, self-employed persons, workers without a formal contract, which leads to lower rates of union membership."
As Beringuy points out, the self-employed were a category with one of the greatest decreases in the union membership rate in the time series: from 11.3% in 2012 to 8.6% in 2017. The impact is large in a population that totals more than 23 million persons in the country. It is important to see where this rate increases or decreases. A context in which more than one million persons lost their jobs with a formal contract from 2015 to 2017 contributes to decrease in union membership," she explains.
