Brazil’s Federal Deputy Walter Barelli from São Paulo, a former Minister of Labor, says that the creation of jobs in Brazil is very slow.
“We need a policy that puts job creation in the middle of the discussion,” declared Barelli, adding that the problem is that 18,000 youths enter the job market monthly in a fruitless search for work. “We have not had adequate job creation policies since the 1990s.”
Ministry of Labor data shows that since January 2003, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office, over three million jobs have been created in Brazil. During the electoral campaign, Lula had promised to create 10 million jobs during his 4-year presidency.
1,083,776 jobs were created in Brazil between January and July of this year. Even though this result is regarded favorably by the Minister of Labor, Luiz Marinho, this year’s figures are inferior to last year’s.
Despite all this, the expectation is that 1.2 million jobs will be created this year. “We are hoping for a good result this year, a little bit less than in 2004, which was really an exceptional year in terms of the economy, especially for the generation of jobs,” he observed. 1.5 million jobs were created last year.
The data are from the Ministry of Labor’s General Register of Employment and Unemployment (Caged), which indicate that 117,473 new jobs were created in July, as against 202,033 created in July of last year. These are all formal jobs, with signed working papers.
Marinho went on to say that the monthly average of jobs created since the start of Lula’s Administration amounts to about 105 thousand, of a total of 3.252 million jobs created over the course of 31 months. According to the Minister, this average should be maintained through 2006.
“Our vision is of an economy that has considerable staying power, and, therefore, jobs will continue to grow each month. Moreover, I believe that 2006 may be able to repeat the exceptional performance of 2004,” he afirmed.
According to Marinho, the expectation for job creation in 2006 is on the order of 5 million. To achieve a better result, he said, the government is counting on jobs generated in the informal sector, in such areas as family agriculture and producers’ cooperatives. These data are including in the calculations of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
ABr