The real income of Brazilian workers reached a volume of R$326.2 billion in the quarter ended in August this year. The level is the highest since the beginning of the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (Pnad), in 2012. Growth of 1.7% was recorded in relation to the previous quarter, ended in May this year (an additional R$ 5.5 billion ), and 8.3% compared to the previous year (more R$24.9 billion).
The Pnad Contínua data were released this Friday (27) by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
The average real income of workers reached R$3,228 in the quarter ended in August this year, varying 0.6% in the quarterly comparison (which statistically indicates stability) and growing 5.1% in the year.
The increase in the wage bill is also the result of a record number of employed people in the country. In August this year, the total number of people employed reached 102.5 million.
“This employed population is growing. And, although income did not have a statistically significant growth, its variation was positive, at 0.6%. So, when the income of all workers is added together, this mass of income continues to grow”, says the research coordinator, Adriana Beringuy.
The employment level of the population, which shows the percentage of workers in relation to the total number of people of working age, rose to 58.1%, approaching the record level of 58.5%, recorded in the quarters ending in November and in December 2013.
“The employed population is growing at a higher rate than the working-age population. This denotes a heated job market, that is, I have job generation at a level sufficient to account for the growth of the population itself”, explains the researcher.
In the quarter ending in August this year, the lowest number of unemployed people (that is, those who are looking for a job but have not yet found one) since January 2015 was also observed.
Both the growth in the employed population and the drop in the unemployed population explain the drop in the unemployment rate, which reached 6.6% in August, according to IBGE.
Of the ten economic activities surveyed by IBGE, seven showed an increase in job creation compared to the quarter ending in August 2023: industry (4.2%), commerce (2.6%), construction (5.2% ), transport and storage (6%), information and communication (5.7%), public administration, health and education (3.4%) and other services (5.6%). Only agriculture had a loss of employed population (-4.2%).
Informality
On the other hand, the number of informal workers in the country also reached a record volume in the quarter ending in August this year: 39.83 million people, that is, an increase of 1.8% compared to the previous quarter.
Informal workers are those employed in the private sector and domestic workers without a formal employment contract; employers and workers without CNPJ registration; and auxiliary family workers.
The increase was greater than the average growth of the employed population in the period (1.2%). According to the IBGE, jobs without a formal contract in the private sector grew 4.1% in the quarter, also reaching a record level, while the number of workers with a formal contract increased by just 0.8% in the period.
The underutilized population, which includes unemployed people and people who work fewer hours than they could, reached 18.5 million people, the lowest since the quarter ended in June 2015 (18.2 million), which represented drops of 4, 7% compared to the previous quarter and 8.5% in the year.
The discouraged population, that is, those who would like to work and were available, but who did not look for work for various reasons (they would not be able to get a suitable job, they did not have professional experience, there was no work in the locality, they were too young or too old), reached 3.1 million, the lowest number since the quarter ended in May 2016 (3 million). Drops of 5.9% were recorded in the quarter and 12.4% in the year.
