The unemployment rate in Brazil rose for the second month in a row and reached 7.8% in the quarter ended in February. The data are from Pnad Contínua (National Household Sample Survey), released this Thursday (28) by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).
The research shows that 8.5 million Brazilians do not have a job.
According to IBGE, the number of unemployed people increased by 4.1% in the quarterly comparison, which is equivalent to 332 thousand more people looking for a job.
Even growing, the number of unemployed people was still 7.5% below that recorded in the same moving quarter of 2023 (9.2 million people).
The number of employees with a work contract in the private sector reached 38 million, without significant variation in the quarterly comparison. This number includes domestic workers.
According to Adriana Beringuy, coordinator of Household Surveys at IBGE, the categories in which the layoffs occurred “have a predominance of informal workers. This helped to keep the number of employees with a formal contract stable.”
The number of unregistered employees in the private sector (13.29 million) remained stable in the quarter. In relation to the same quarter of the previous year, there was a growth of 2.6%.
Average Brazilian salary
Employed Brazilians receive, on average, R$3,110 — an increase of 1.1% in the quarter and 4.3% in the annual comparison. The value is the highest since the quarter ended in November 2020.
The analyst believes that activities involving professionals in the accommodation and food sector were booming in the months of December to February, “even for informal workers in the sector, contributing to this increase in income”.
The real monthly income totaled R$307.2 billion in February 2024, a new record for the historical series started in 2012. The number grew 6.7% when compared to the previous year.
Discouraged and underutilized
The discouraged population registered 3.7 million, an increase of 8.7% in the quarterly comparison, equivalent to an additional 293 thousand people in this condition.
It was the first increase in this contingent since the moving quarter ended in April 2021, when the number of discouraged people reached 5.9 million, during the Covid 19 pandemic.
This category is classified as all those over 14 years of age who were outside the job market and had not carried out an effective search for a job.
The underutilization rate, which calculates the percentage of unemployed people, underemployed due to insufficient hours worked, and the potential workforce, was 17.8%. The underutilized population (20.6 million people) grew 3.4% (or 675 thousand people) in the quarter and fell 4.5% (or 963 thousand people less) in the year.
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Tags: Unemployment rises month row reaches million Brazilians February News
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