Unemployment in Brazil Reaches 11.9 Percent, Highest Since 2012
By Lise Alves, Senior Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The latest national survey on unemployment (PNAD), released on Thursday, December 29th by the Brazilian Institute of Geography (IBGE), showed that for the three-month period that ended in November, the unemployment rate reached 11.9 percent.
The unemployment rate is affecting more than 12.1 million workers, and at the end of November was the highest since 2012.
According to the report, this is the fourth consecutive trimester in which the number of unemployed in the country was over twelve million.
Compared to the same three-month period in 2015, the current figures are 33.1 percent higher, which amounts to over three million additional unemployed. There are currently 90.2 million people working today in the country.
In the three-month period of the survey, the sectors where unemployment increased the most were agriculture, (-3.9 percent) and construction (-2.2 percent).The services sector opened up job positions during the period, especially for the lodging and food groups (+4.6 percent).
In the first eleven months of 2016, there were 858,333 jobs closed, a loss of 2.16 percent in. In the last twelve months (December of 2015 to November of 2016) the number of formal jobs decreased from 40.3 million to 38.8 million, a loss of 3.65 percent.
According to IBGE, the other groups remained stable. According to the IBGE, the employed population includes people in work in the week before the survey took place, that is, people who worked for an employer, those who had their own business, and those who worked without pay to help their family.
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