Country resumes struggle to make labor relations more dignified and fair – 05/10/2023 – Cida Bento

In this month of May, when we celebrate International Workers’ Day, a date marked by fights for better working conditions, some recent regulations, highlighted below, are promising and allow us to hope:

The approval, by the Chamber of Deputies, of the bill that makes equal pay between men and women mandatory when carrying out activities of equal value or the same function, including in the context the increase in supervision and fines in case of non-compliance;

The policy of valuing the minimum wage, agreed in the document “Pauta da Classe Trabalho” between the trade union centrals and the Presidency of the Republic, remembering here that women and blacks are the ones who earn the most linked to the minimum wage;

The inclusion of information on ethnic-racial belonging in administrative records directed at employers and workers in the private and public sectors, with the aim of subsidizing public policies, sanctioned by the federal government;

The reservation of up to 30% of vacancies for black people in commission positions and positions of trust in the structure of the Executive Branch, including direct administration, autarchies and foundations, announced by the federal government;

The reservation of 10% of job vacancies by the National Employment System (Sine) for women victims of domestic or family violence, approved by the Chamber of Deputies.

There is no doubt that we have a long journey ahead of us to make labor relations more dignified, fair and egalitarian. But there is also no doubt that the journey has resumed.

Florestan Fernandes stated that “work takes root in Brazil through slave labor”, and it is in this context that for 4/5 of Brazil’s history, that is, for almost 400 years, work was “a black thing”. In this scenario, it is urgent to face inequalities at work, particularly racial ones.

Looking at data from the past decade, we see how systemic inequalities in labor relations are. When analyzing this historical series, from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the same period of 2022, we noticed that the restriction of access to the labor market showed a vertiginous growth —the workforce grew by 10.9%, but the growth of people in condition of discouragement grew 110% (Radar Ceert – PNAD Contínua/IBGE – last quarter of 2022).

And, although black people represent 55.9% of the workforce, in discouragement they correspond to 72.7%, with black women being the most affected.

Discouraged people are available to take on a job but cannot find it in the locality where they live; they cannot find work because they are considered too young or too old; they do not have enough professional experience or qualifications and stop looking for work.

The same survey reveals that black people (66.8%) are also the most underutilized in the country, double the percentage of 32.7% of white people. It is estimated that 8 million black women are underutilized; for white men, this contingent is 3 million.

In the last decade, the precariousness rate ^{(low wages, insufficient hours worked, informality, intermittence, lack of stability or lack of guarantee of rights) reached 51.1%, explaining the structural problem of the Brazilian labor market. In the case of black women, precariousness rates reach 63.1%, almost double the rate for white men, which is 39.3% (Radar Ceert – PNAD Contínua/IBGE – last quarter of 2022).}

It is in this sense that measures to qualify work relations, simultaneously contemplating the confrontation of class, racial, gender, age and region inequalities, are welcome.

But such measures require an implementation plan, with deadlines, targets and metrics that make it possible to monitor their impact on reducing inequalities. It’s time to move forward.

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