The reduction of unemployment to 11.6% in the quarter ended in November had a greater participation of the formal labor market, with a 4% increase in the number of employees with a formal contract in the private sector, compared to the quarter ended in August 2021.
According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which released data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) in Rio de Janeiro today (28), this occupation category had 1.3 million people more and 838 thousand people without a formal contract in the private sector, an increase of 7.4%.
In the self-employed category, growth was 588 thousand people (2.3%), reaching 25.8 million people. Domestic workers rose 6.0% compared to the previous quarter, or 315 thousand people, and 22.5% compared to the same quarter of 2020, reaching 5.6 million people.
The coordinator of Work and Income at IBGE, Adriana Beringuy, said that the positive data reflect the improvement in the labor market after the depressed scenario caused by the covid-19 pandemic, which began in March 2020.
“There was a spike [de desocupação] very sharp there in 2020, in the quarter ended in August, due to that scenario of the expansion of the pandemic, without vaccination and with the restriction measures to combat the pandemic being quite strong. So, this had a very big impact on the job market, with a drop in occupation and the impossibility of a more intense process of searching for work”, he emphasized.
Informality
The informality rate in the quarter ended in November was 40.6% and remained stable compared to the previous quarter, despite the increase in the number of informal workers, reaching 38.6 million.
Informality is close to the peak of 41%, verified in August 2019, when 38.8 million workers were in this condition. The lowest rate in the historical series, 37.2%, occurred at the beginning of the pandemic, in the quarter ended in May 2020, with 31 million people.
Although formal employment has expanded significantly, Beringuy highlighted that informality also played a decisive role in the recovery of the occupancy rate.
“The expansion of informality accounts for 43% of the growth of the total employed population in the quarter. Informality has an important weight in the historical series of the research, but now, during the pandemic, it played a decisive role in the recovery of occupation. This 43% participation in the recovery process has already reached almost 80% at other times. Now, we realize that there is also a greater participation of workers with a formal contract”, said Beringuy.
The IBGE also reported that the population outside the workforce fell by 2.0% in November compared to the previous quarter, a reduction of 1.3 million people in this situation. In the annual comparison, the decrease was 4.6 million people.
Despondent people, who did not look for work but were available, were estimated at 4.9 million, a decrease of 6.8% compared to the quarter ended in August and 14.4% compared to November 2020. underutilization stood at 25%, with 29 million people available to work longer hours.
Performance
The usual real income mass remained stable at R$ 227 billion, with a 4.5% drop in the usual real income, estimated at R$ 2,444, the lowest ever recorded by the survey’s historical series, which began in 2012. same quarter of 2020, the reduction in the average income of Brazilians was 11.4%.
According to Beringuy, the result of Pnad Contínua demonstrates a process of consolidation of the recovery and a spread across the different economic activities, but it is not reflected in the growth of income, also influenced by inflation.
“We have more people working than before, however, with lower incomes. Associated with this, we have an ongoing inflationary process, which is quite negative for real earnings. There is also a dynamic of insertion, we don’t know if it is due to the negotiations between the worker’s labor supply and the demand of those who are hiring; it may be that in this process the worker is not managing to obtain higher remuneration”, he opined.
By economic sector, most of the expansion of occupation came from commerce, with 719 thousand more people, an increase of 4.1%. The industry grew by 3.7%, with an addition of 439 thousand people. The accommodation and food segment, which was one of the most affected since the beginning of the pandemic, increased by 9.3%, with 438 thousand more employees.
The occupancy level was 55.1% in the quarter, recovering after reaching the minimum level of 48.5% in the quarter ended in August 2020. The record of the historical series occurred in November 2013, with 58.5% of people of working age are busy. The number of employed people reached 94.9 million, close to the pre-pandemic level of 95.4 million reached in November 2019.
