Jair Bolsonaro’s government uses the ILO (International Labor Organization) tribune to give a bragging speech about the revival of the national economy and employment.
Labor Minister José Carlos Oliveira attends the International Labor Conference in Geneva this week. According to him, Brazilian programs are “copied” around the world.
Last week, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) stated that the unemployment rate in Brazil was 10.5% in the quarter ended April. Unemployment still hits 11.3 million Brazilians, although the index is at its lowest since 2016. Another finding is that workers’ incomes are still 7% below 2021 levels and hunger is back.
Today, 17.5 million Brazilian families live on per capita incomes of up to R$105, which is considered extreme poverty. The figure is 11% higher than the 2021 data and 22% more than March 2020. About 5 million people became part of the federal government’s Cadastro Único, which compiles their records.
But in its speech in Geneva, the government took a different stance. According to the minister, “The need to reconcile employment and income protection with urgent public health policies has led us to repeated successful programs around the world such as Emergency Aid”.
“I don’t know where this ‘Brazil’ that the Minister is referring to. Where I come from is definitely not the same as a country on a hunger map where millions of workers are unregistered unemployed,” replied Antonio, a member of the workers’ representation at the ILO and secretary for International Affairs at the CUT. Lisbon.
According to the minister, the program provided instant income to more than 68 million vulnerable citizens “when shops and other workplaces needed to be temporarily closed”. “We have also released additional income so that workers can immediately withdraw the equivalent of $200 from the Severance Pay Fund. A population equivalent to France has been supported in Brazil a few months after the start of the pandemic,” he said.
The minister also noted how assistance measures for employers were adopted. “President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has established BEM, the world’s largest emergency job protection program, which provides additional resources to protect 11 million workers in the formal market,” he justified.
He also emphasized that Brazil is among the 10 countries that invested most in this recovery, with approximately US$ 200 billion. “So we’re starting to see good results now,” he said.
“This is why we are the country with the biggest drop in unemployment in the last 12 months among the G20 countries. With an unemployment rate of just over 10%, this is the best rate in the country in the last 6 years. More than 96 million jobs in the labor market is a historic record. Last year alone “We didn’t stop there, because by April 2022 we had added another 800,000 job forms out of business,” he said.
source: Noticias
[author_name]
