Bolsonaro Claims Unemployment Currently Affects 10 Million Brazilian Workers

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – President Jair Bolsonaro said on Thursday, May 7th, that Brazil “is close to ten million people with a signed worker’s record book who have lost their jobs,” but failed to present statistical data to support the decline in the formal labor market in the country to that extent. According to him, of the 38 million self-employed, 80 percent have lost their purchasing power.

A dismissal of ten million, as the President quoted, would show that the pandemic of the novel coronavirus alone was able to cut virtually one-third of the formal labor market in Brazil. The country today counts some 33 million workers with a signed worker’s record book.

When challenged by journalists regarding the source of the figure, Bolsonaro said that it had been reported by the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes and that he himself, the President, had been surprised.

He said he has found that in a small-sized business with five employees, practice shows that three have been dismissed. Regarding the data on the self-employed, Bolsonaro said it came from the International Labor Organization (ILO), despite not going into details.

When asked about the source of the data and how the economic team assessed its impact on the labor market despite the measures implemented with public resources to preserve jobs, the Ministry of Economy said it “would not comment”.

The General Register of Employees and Unemployed (CAGED), which collects this data and is managed by the Special Secretariat of Welfare and Labor, has its normal disclosure process suspended because companies are struggling to submit data during the pandemic, and a change occured in the ministry’s data systems. The last publication, released in January, referred to the close of 2019.

The closest indicator would be the number of unemployment insurance applications, which totaled 804,538 between early March and the first half of April 2020. Another 200,000 applications are expected to be repressed due to the closing of the SINE (Employment agency) branches, as officials from the economic area announced last week.

In other words, according to official figures from the Ministry of Economy, unemployment as a result of the pandemic would have reached one million people, an increase of 150,000 compared to the same period last year.

The Continuous National Household Sample Survey (Continuous PNAD), an IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) survey on the labor market, shows an improvement in the formal labor market in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2019 – the most recent data released by the body. The number of employees in the private sector with a worker’s record book increased by 178,000 in this comparison.

In contrast

The economic team’s discourse has moved in the opposite direction. On Thursday, Bruno Bianco, special secretary of Social Security and Labor, released a video on social networks celebrating the maintenance of 6 million formal jobs from negotiations to reduce working hours and wages or suspend contracts.

The government plans to spend R$51.2 (US$12.8) billion to pay workers’ benefits, in compensation for the temporary loss in wages. As a result, it hopes that the crisis will result in a much lower number of layoffs, around 3.2 million.

The President’s statement was given on the same day that Bolsonaro was pressured by industrial sectors to implement measures to restart economic activity. He welcomed the entrepreneurs along with the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes. The group then headed on foot to the Federal Supreme Court (STF), where they met with Presiding Justice Dias Toffoli.

The President signed and published on Thursday, May 7th, a decree that includes the building sector and industrial activities in the list of essential activities, which may operate during the Covid-19 pandemic, provided that “the Ministry of Health’s regulations are followed”.

The rule comes at a time when an increasing number of municipalities have either implemented or discussed enforcing lockdown measures in an attempt to halt the spread of the disease.

“We will responsibly introduce additional categories, observing the Ministry of Health’s regulations. Because otherwise, after the ICU, it’s the cemetery, and we don’t want that for Brazil,” said Bolsonaro.

Source: O Estado de S. Paulo