Labor Day: ‘My dream is to have a formal job’ – 04/30/2023 – Market

“My dream is to be registered to provide security for me and my daughter. I work every weekend, sometimes I even sleep at the station. It’s so far away that I don’t even bother to go back”, says Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus, 35 , who has worked odd jobs as an event coordinator at a crepe buffet since she was 13, when she was forced to leave her parents’ house. Woman, black, living on the outskirts of São Paulo, she has worked as a nanny, hairdresser, manicurist and was a partner of her ex-husband in an engineering company.

Jaqueline was unable to complete her studies and says that her biggest wish is to have a formal job so she can raise her daughter Maria Eduarda, 12, with more peace of mind.

The CLT (Consolidation of Labor Laws) celebrates its 80th anniversary this May 1st, with challenges such as the inclusion of more professionals in the formal job market and the protection of those in positions that have emerged with new technologies, such as transport and of food.

Of every 10 workers employed in the country, 4 have a formal contract and 4 are informal, according to a survey by Ibre (Brazilian Institute of Economics), FGV (Fundação Getulio Vargas) based on PNAD (National Household Sample Survey), IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). The others are divided between self-employed owners of their own business and statutory servants hired by their own municipal, state or Union regimes.

FGV research with self-employed professionals —including self-employed with CNPJ and informal without CNPJ— also shows that 7 out of 10 workers would like to have a work permit. This number rises to 9 out of 10 when it comes to informal workers, that is, 90% would like to be in the CLT regime.

The desire is to have more security: a fixed monthly salary and benefits such as a health plan and food stamps that a CLT job can bring. This “dream” does not come true for several reasons, including barriers imposed by gender, color and race and region of the country —the North suffers more than the South— and low levels of education.

Jaqueline got married at age 15, when she became pregnant with twins. The children died three days after birth. In the second pregnancy, domestic violence caused her to lose the baby. At the age of 21, she divorced and went to live with her daughter’s father, with whom she broke up just over a year ago, after years of violence.

Without help, she raises her daughter alone, with informal jobs. “Opportunities don’t arise for me because of my studies. They see that I’m a presentable person, but when I talk about my studies, the opportunity falls away.”

After two years, Maria Eduarda got a job in a social project in the neighborhood, to take a professional course and, in the future, get the long-awaited formal job.

“Duda is wonderful, she has a maturity that I don’t have. Her studies come first.

Self-employed never paid INSS and fears not being able to retire

Taking care of the children and the house made Carla da Silva Mecca Ischi, 47, leave the job market at the age of 18, after becoming pregnant and getting married. Hired as a young apprentice since she was 15, she never had a formal contract.

Carla stayed out of the market for 20 years and, ten years ago, she returned to work, as a freelancer, as president of a neighborhood association in Artur Alvim, in the east zone of São Paulo.

“I’m self-employed, but I’ve never paid the INSS. We end up leaving it for later. It goes on day to day”, he says. For her, not having contributed to Social Security will be a hindrance in retirement and is what worries her the most. The rent for the house is provided by her husband, who is 50 years old.

Her children, aged 15, 21, 26 and 29 are all “on the way”, as she likes to say, with formal jobs. “It’s always good to have a signed workbook. Now, in the area I’m in, if there’s an agreement where I can have a signed workbook, it’s better for me.”

Intermittent periods of formal employment prevent retirement

Owner of a gas dealership in the far east of São Paulo, Edimar Bezerra Lins, 57, found self-employment a source of income to support his family more than 20 years ago, when he left the formal job market.

Edimar says he has done a bit of everything, but always for short periods and with low salary. “I started working with a formal record at the age of 13, on October 16, 1979. I still remember it today. But I had been working in the fields since I was 10. I did everything, I shined shoes, I was a security guard, I worked in an office, in a restaurant.”

Born in Pernambuco, work was the only way to support himself in São Paulo and routine took him out of school. “I still tried to study, but it was too far away, it took two hours to go downtown, where I worked, and two hours to go back. And the school was even further away; I dropped out. I was going to play football.”

Edimar claims that the lack of guidance on the importance of studying or keeping a job could have made the difference. “I asked to leave my first job. I worked for two years. I had no guidance, there were people only to criticize, never to help. From the last one, as a security guard, there was a cut and I was fired. I received all the rights.”

In 2001, he set up a stall in front of the building where he lived, where he sold various items. “It was like a mall; it sold gas, water, beans, rice, sugar. It was the ‘Shopping do Edimar’. From then on, everything was unregistered, and then I started working with gas.”

The worker even formalized a CNPJ, but is often unable to afford social security contributions, which, for him, is the hardest part of being self-employed. His expectation was to retire a little before the minimum age of 65, since he started working so early, but he will not be able to.

“If someone said to me like this: ‘in the future you’ll need it’, I would have listened. If I could, I had a salary that was enough to survive, I would want to be a CLT. I need those years that are missing to retire.”

Provision of services is the rule in some professions

The Minas Gerais architect Diandra Noemi Carneiro Rolon, 27, knows that she is part of a profession in which contracts for the provision of autonomous services stand out. Since she graduated from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, she has never had a formal job in the area.

“Being CLT or not wasn’t even a question I thought about a lot. I understood towards the end of the architecture course that there was this issue of non-relationship with CLT”, he says.

Diandra had a formal contract between 18 and 20 years old, for short periods, when working in commerce as a temporary worker. According to her, one of the advantages that many point out for not being a CLT operator is the flexibility of hours, but, for the architect, having a time to come in and out would not be an obstacle.

The professional claims that she would earn less if she had been hired by the CLT, but she misses what she believes to be the security of the formal contract: monthly salary guarantee and, in case of dismissal, prior notice, unemployment insurance and access to the FGTS.

Architect and photographer José Henrique Alvarenga de Paiva, 26, resident of Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais, claims to have taken out his work permit for his first job, an internship, but says it was never signed.

“During the course [de arquitetura], we had to do an internship and, in my first internship, because of the office system, it was necessary for everyone to have a work permit. But it was not signed; I made the work card because I needed the number. It’s white, empty,” she says.

Aware that he chose two professions in which self-employed service provision prevails, Paiva says he would like to have experience as a CLT worker.

CLT is ‘narrow door’, says expert

For Hélio Zylberstajn, a senior professor at USP (University of São Paulo) and coordinator of the Salariômetro, which monitors the formal labor market month by month, the CLT is a “narrow door”, which guarantees “generous” rights to those who manage to pass through she.

“Anyone who manages to get through that door has many, interesting and important rights such as vacation, FGTS, 13th, prior notice, overtime premiums and protection upon dismissal. The problem is that, at the same time, it represents a tremendously aged view of the state , a state that takes care of the worker, who is protected like a poor thing”, he says.

The sociologist Clemente Ganz Lúcio, coordinator of the Forum of Union Centrals, union consultant and former technical director of Dieese (Inter-union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies), affirms that the CLT represents a historical process and that, at 80 years old, the legislation still is in formation, with challenges brought by works by application.

For him, there is a mismatch between the intention of labor, social and social security protection of the 80-year-old legislation and the economic growth model that was consolidated in Brazil.

“It is a social protection that means rights such as working hours, working conditions, union protection and social security protection, which did not exist, but which depends on robust and sustained economic growth in the medium and long term, otherwise you have a lack of protection”, he says. .

According to him, the priority at the moment is to address issues related to workers by application. “We need a permanent and continuous process of improving labor legislation, more intensively, because the transformations that lasted decades are now happening almost daily with technology. Our priority is to look at motorcycle apps, fast delivery and people transport . It has 1.7 million workers who need protection.”

Fausto Augusto Junior, Dieese’s technical director, says that, when the CLT came into effect after the consolidation of regulatory laws for the labor market since the 1930s, the labor market model and economic conception that existed was supposed to be more similar to the European one, which has changed over the years.

“It was a more homogeneous labor market, based on the industrial sector, which would formalize the professionals. But Brazil did not go towards what we saw in Europe and today we see a more heterogeneous market. But, if we compare it with South Africa, In the South, for example, we are homogeneous. There, 70% are informal”, he says.

Daniel Duque, a researcher in the area of ​​Applied Economics at FGV Ibre, says that since 2012 —earliest data available in the Pnad, from the IBGE— point to a proportion of around 44% of professionals contracted via CLT, compared to around 36% of informal ones, making the rate of formalized and informal to be considered equal when rounding.

Duque explains that the CLT only had a high prevalence on the informal worker market in the Covid pandemic, in 2020, when most informal workers could not carry out their activities and began to receive benefits from the government.

For him, the CLT needs to move towards a model that welcomes everyone. “I don’t think the CLT is bad; it’s a type of employment contract that exists in any modern economy. Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a need for us to review some rules. The ideal would be for everyone to be in the middle” , he says.