When announcing a possible new minimum, Marinho says that Dilma suffered a coup and attacks Temer and Bolsonaro

The Minister of Labor and Employment, Luiz Marinho, attacked the predecessors of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), Michel Temer (MDB, 2016-2018) and Jair Bolsonaro (PL, 2019-2022), when he announced that the minimum wage may go through a new readjustment this year.

He also repeated the PT argument that former president Dilma Rousseff (PT, 2011-2016) was the victim of a coup d’état in 2016, when she was impeached.

“We are discussing the search for fiscal space to change the value of the minimum wage later this year. If there is fiscal space, we will announce a change to May 1st”, said the minister, in an interview with the Brasil em Pauta program, which will be broadcast at 10:30 pm this Sunday (12) on TV Brasil. Excerpts from the conversation were provided by Agência Brasil.

Marinho said that the “policy of valuing the minimum wage […] beyond inflation” was a hallmark of PT governments that was interrupted in later administrations.

“See, if this policy had not been interrupted after the coup against President Dilma and the dark government of Temer and Bolsonaro, the minimum wage today would be worth R$ 1,396. Check it out: from R$ 1,302 to R$ 1,396 is what would be worth the minimum wage today. Therefore, it was a policy that worked very well”, said the minister.

The current value of the minimum wage, of R$ 1,302, came into effect on January 1, readjusted from R$ 1,212, the last revision made in the Bolsonaro government.

The General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic highlighted, when the change was published in a provisional measure in December, that the new value considered an inflation variation of 5.81%, plus a real gain of around 1.5%.

In early February, the Minister of Planning, Simone Tebet, stated that any further increase in the minimum wage would depend on cutting costs.