45% of ‘Bolsa Família children’ entered the formal job market – 06/10/2023 – Market

Upon joining Bolsa Família in 2003, Vera Nuzia Boaventura, 52, did not imagine that the benefit would be the first step that would forever change her reality and that of her four children. With the resource, she started to have a little money left over and the cleaning assistant was able to enroll in a computer course that qualified her for a job in the telemarketing area.

A new course would later take the single mother from the outskirts of São Paulo to work in a college library and three of her children got scholarships at the institution. Today she is the coordinator of a Creas (Reference Center Specialized in Social Assistance) in the city of São Paulo.

“Every day, I see myself in these mothers I see. I make a point of telling my story to them, how much I’ve cried for not being able to buy clothes or school supplies for my children, I worked to have the basics and nothing was left. It’s a life permeated with a lot of violence, but looking back makes me very proud.”

The servant says that having a higher education course for herself and the children was the passport to a more dignified life. Her job at the college entitled her to three scholarships – before graduating, she took the opportunity for her daughters to study logistics and her son, administration. Already formed, they could have better opportunities.

“I, who didn’t complete high school, started to move through other realities. Bolsa Família created this possibility of changing my life, and my children could have a future, without needing the program”, he says.

The emancipation of Bolsa Família did not just happen in Vera Nuzia’s house. Around 5.2 million of this first generation of dependents from families in the program, aged between 7 and 16 years old in 2005, were found at least once in the Rais (official survey of the formal labor market) from 2015 to 2019.

This means that 44.7% of the 11.6 million Bolsa Família children accessed the formal job market at least once in the period.

The data are from an exclusive study carried out by researchers from IMDS (Mobility and Social Development Institute), in partnership with the Oppen Social consultancy and a researcher from FGV EPGE (Brazilian School of Economics and Finance, Getulio Vargas Foundation).

The researchers crossed payroll records from Bolsa Família and from Rais (Annual List of Social Information) and were able not only to measure emancipation through working with a formal contract, but also to measure the quality of the job they gained.

In this way, they also discovered that half of these Bolsa Família children who managed to get a formal job were employed in the 20% of occupations considered to have lower pay and with a low number of workers with higher education. Among young people of the same age who were not benefited, the percentage of people in these functions drops from 50% to 32%.

The dependents who graduated from the program were distributed into micro (28%), small (26.4%), large (22.5%) and medium-sized companies (11.6%). A smaller share was still in agriculture (5.9%) and public administration (4.9%).

FORMAL EMPLOYMENT IS THE THERMOMETER OF EMANCIPATION, SAY RESEARCHERS

Bolsa Família is an income transfer program aimed at the most vulnerable population. Conquering formal employment later on by children and young people who participated in the program is therefore not its central objective.

But this is considered a positive side effect, according to the researchers. When the family’s basic needs are met, the horizon for improving one’s life and finding a stable job increases.

It’s as if the mothers and fathers who sought benefit in a time of difficulty for families opened up possibilities for the next generation. Claudio Fernandes, who received the benefit as a teenager, later became an administrative assistant for the government of Tocantins.

“I grew up with Bolsa Família”, said singer Pabllo Vittar, in a 2021 interview.

“It must be remembered that young people who benefited from Bolsa Família were in a precarious situation in the past. Most jobs in Brazil are not good, the country has not been growing at a satisfactory pace for about 40 years and, for those who depended on the transfer of income, it is a huge step forward to be in the formal job market”, says Paulo Tafner, CEO of IMDS.

“There are several indicators showing that those who leave the Bolsa manage to access the formal market, but they are lower quality positions. Being in formal employment brings greater comfort, access to security policies that are more favorable, but compared to the group that did not participate program, they weren’t that close”, says Giovanna Ribeiro, IMDS project coordinator.

She adds that the support network created around Bolsa Família —with conditions such as school attendance and vaccination of children or prenatal care for pregnant women— can help these young people in the future.

“The conditionality of the program as an element that induces investment in the children’s human capital is crucial”, evaluates researcher Valdemar Neto, from FGV, another of the co-authors of the study.

“The Brazilian formal market has peculiarities, informality is high and permanence in employment is low. The more people in the household with a formal contract, the greater the chance of emancipation from the program through income.”

The data also show that 31.8% of beneficiaries with higher education were in the highest income range, while 48% of non-beneficiaries of the same age were in the same situation.

When considering those with complete primary education, it is possible to verify a greater participation of beneficiaries (8.8%) in relation to non-beneficiaries (4.7%) in agricultural activities.

Among those with complete higher education, the highest concentration of non-beneficiaries is in large companies (29.9%), while the highest concentration of beneficiaries is in public administration (27.1%).

Among the main occupations in public administration conquered by these former beneficiaries with a university degree are elementary school teachers (15%), agents and administrative assistants (11%), public service leaders (10%) and nurses and the like ( 3%).

“In addition to the retribution, I tend to believe that ex-beneficiaries want to take jobs that provide income security, they are less likely to take risks in the private sector, they prefer to have a more stable income — and it is very reasonable that this should be the case, given that he lived poverty and wanting to have an income security is a positive thing”, says Tafner.

Even so, young people with a university degree who were beneficiaries of Bolsa Família have lower average incomes compared to non-beneficiaries.

While 4.5% of non-beneficiaries with at least higher education earned more than ten minimum wages, this percentage was 0.8% among beneficiaries. More than half (52.4%) of those who had completed high school had an average salary of 1 minimum wage to 1.5 minimum wages.

“An important measure to improve the program would be to stimulate the continuity of studies. The objective is to think about the mobility of poor children, reinforcing education among this group would make it more representative in the labor market, in better jobs”, says Eloah Fassarella , coordinator of the Oppen Social data lab.

To avoid distorted results, the study considers data up to 2019, which does not include the pandemic period. The researchers should work on a study in the future to assess the effects of the crisis generated by the health emergency on the employment and income of former beneficiaries.

Due to the fact that a large number of them occupy positions with lower pay and education, therefore more fragile, it cannot be ruled out that the emancipation of the program has been lost by many of these families.

At the home of social worker Liliane César, 56, life is also divided between before and after the program. Unemployed, she had to seek help from the government for the first time. “That’s what saved me during the pandemic, I almost got evicted for not being able to pay rent.”

It took four or five months for her to receive the benefit until she got a job with enough pay to put her outside the criteria for receiving the Bolsa Família (currently, the income of each person in the family must be up to R$ 218 per month) .

“The R$600 seems little, but it helped at a time when all I had were odd jobs as a cleaner, every 15 days. I distributed CVs, but I felt invisible.”

She now works assisting families at a Cras (Reference Center for Social Assistance) in Santo André, in Greater São Paulo, seeing work as a way to repay the support she received.

“Today, I’m on this side of the table, but I know the importance of being welcomed. The fact of having gone through all this makes me think that safety is even more important”, says Liliane. Her daughter, now 29 years old, went to live in the United States, where she participates in an au pair program (exchange usually linked to the care of children of a family abroad).

Created in 2003, still in the first term of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), Bolsa Família is considered one of the main banners of the PT. So much so that Lula returned to call him that in 2023, when he assumed his third term – after former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) changed the name of the program to Auxílio Brasil.

More than 21.1 million beneficiaries received, on average, R$670.33 in the first month of the new Bolsa Família. Payments include R$ 150 of the Early Childhood Benefit, for children from 0 to 6 years old.