Brazil has 14.1 million people looking for job

Brazil’s unemployment rate dropped one percentage point in the quarter ended in July, going to 13.7 percent in the comparison with the three-month period ended in April. Despite the decline, the country has 14.1 million people in search of a job. The data were made public in Rio de Janeiro today (Sep. 3) by the government’s statistics institute IBGE.

A 3.6 percent expansion was reported in the number of employed individuals—an increase of 3.1 million workers—adding up to a total of 89 million people.

Research analyst Adriana Beringuy said that the employment level rose by 1.7 percentage points to 50.2 percent, the first time above 50 percent since the COVID-19 pandemic started, in March 2020.

“This is the first time since the quarter ended in April 2020 that the level of employment is above 50 percent, which indicates that over half of the population in working age is employed in the country,” she pointed out.

Recovered jobs

She explained that, in both the quarter and the year, formal jobs were recovered. However, employment did not return to pre-pandemic levels.

“If you look from the viewpoint of the employed population, we stand at 89 million. At the very beginning of 2020 we are near 94 million. In other words, we have five million fewer than in the pre-pandemic period,” Beringuy stated.

Formal jobs went up 3.5 percent, an increase of one million people, adding up to 30.6 million in the moving quarter surveyed. Compared to the same period in 2020, the number reaches 4.2 percent. This is the first increase in formal employment since January 2020, year on year, IBGE reported.

The study also found a surge in informal job posts, with an expansion in autonomous employment with no National Registration of Legal Persons and unregistered employment in the private sector. This raised the informality rate from 39.8 percent in the previous moving quarter to 40.8 percent in the three-month span ended in July.