Brazil: 60% of informal workers rely on “odd jobs” to survive, says study

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – More than 19.6 million Brazilians survive with jobs known as “bicos” (“odd jobs”), about 60% of the 32.5 million informal workers in the country.

The numbers are from the study “Portrait of Informal Work in Brazil: challenges and ways to solve them”, released by Arymax Foundation and B3 Social on Wednesday, June 22, and conducted by Veredas Institute.

The research is based on data analysis from IBGE’s PNAD Continuous National Household Survey (PNAD Contínua) from the 3rd quarter of 2021.

The study divides informal workers into four types. The largest of these, “subsistence informals” (60.5%), include professionals with low or no qualifications who offer services with unstable demand, known as “bicos” (“odd jobs”).

The “informal with productive potential” (16.1%) represent the workers who are not formalized because of the costs involved or the lack of opportunities.

The “informal by choice” (2.3%) are those who can get formalized but intend to stay that way to increase their income.

The professionals classified as “fragile formal” (21.1%) have a National Register of Legal Entities (CNPJ) or signed work papers, but with intermittent contracts, reduction of formal rights, and the threat of returning to total informality.

The Brazilian informal subsistence worker profile is well defined: male, young, black, and with low education. About 75% have incomplete primary education or less.

In the 14 to 17 age group, the group represents more than 80%; in the 18 to 24 age group, informal subsistence workers are 64% of the total.

In the analysis by regions, the presence of this group is especially expressive in the North (49%) and Northeast (45.5%). Most of them work in commerce, vehicle repair, and construction services.

For Marcelo Nery, an economist from Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV), the numbers referring to informal workers have not registered significant oscillations in the country.

Nery highlights income as the primary point to understand this public. “You can see that informality is going down a little, and unemployment is going down a little, which is good news. But it is important to remember that per capita income has decreased. And it has decreased even more in the lower income bracket,” highlighted the economist.

For the general public, including formalized workers, the average real monthly household income per capita in 2021 was R$1,353 (US$260), the lowest value in the PNAD Continuous National Household Panel’s historical series which began in 2012.

In the latest monthly release of the PNAD Continuous, from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, referring to the mobile quarter ended in April, the informality rate was 40.1% of the country’s employed population or 38.7 million informal workers.

The rate had been 40.4% in the previous quarter, and in the same quarter of the previous year, 39.3%.

With information from CNN