Abstract
The past 50 years were decisive in reconfiguring Brazil’s labor market. Individuals who once lived off agricultural work moved on to industrial activities and services in increasingly concentrated urban areas. The economically active population changed significantly. Such changes have not gone unnoticed and have stimulated multiple narratives from the literature, which also encouraged changes in the census metrics; the chapter’s first section documents it. Section “Inflections” describes the labor commodification process as indicated by census data from 1960 to 2010, identifying the social segments that have increasingly resorted to the market and mapping the changes on the employment relations. The third section tests statistical models to identify differences in the propensity to resort to the labor market within the period analyzed. The comparison between census years demonstrated how the Brazilian labor market tends to be an increasingly relevant space for working-age individuals. However, individual characteristics also proved to be relevant. Particularly significant were the inflections in the number of women in the market. Despite race is an important determinant for wage inequalities in Brazil, there is no statistical evidence to believe it significantly differentiates individuals with regard to their propensity to engage in economic activity as gender does.
We appreciate the careful reading and thought-provoking insights provided by André Portela Souza, Claudio Amitrano, and Marta Arretche, the leading commentators for this chapter, as well as the methodological support team coordinated by Rogerio Barbosa himself, a constant discussion partner.
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Notes
- 1.
A vast sociological and historiographical literature explored the meaning and content of legislation regulating the labor market during Getulio Vargas’ first administration (1930–1945), from which we highlight such authors as Gomes (1979, 1988), Santos (1979), Vianna (1976), and Erickson (1979). We should also mention analyses on the commodification of social and trade relations in Brazil during the late nineteenth century, carefully organized by Oliveira (1988).
- 2.
As acknowledged by Santos (1979) when coining the notion of regulated citizenship, significantly defined at first as occupational citizenship.
- 3.
Cardoso (2010, pp. 229–230) observed the movement of three variables for the period 1940–1976: the urban EAP, the number of individuals holding the labor contract booklet required to engage in formal jobs (carteira do trabalho), and the number of contributors to social security in Brazil. The last two are proxies for formal employment relationships, but in a rather different fashion compared to the United States. In Brazil, holding a carteira do trabalho just means having a license to search for formal jobs; once registered as a wageworker, the new employment relationship gets recorded in this document and provides access to all rights under labor legislation. This is not the case for informal employment relationships or self-employment. Cardoso showed that issuance of carteiras do trabalho grew 150% more than the increase in the EAP and 230% more than the expansion of welfare beneficiaries. Despite some caution when comparing those growth rates (since the number of carteiras was very low at the starting point), the growth in the issuance of labor contract booklets, i.e., in the number of holders of carteiras, signals a belief in the possibility of including oneself in the formal labor market. Although the use of carteiras had been established since 1932 and made compulsory 2 years later, it is significant that the first major inflection in their number issued only occurred from 1950 to 1960 (Cardoso 2010, p. 230), which signals a time of inflection in the individual propensity to engage within the market.
- 4.
It is not without reason that boundaries were also blurred when defining the category of EAP as operationally translated into the census metric of the time.
- 5.
Two other clues also signal the establishment of a compulsory pattern of labor market engagement at this time. On the one hand, there was the debate regarding unemployment measurement that galvanized sociologists and economists in the 1980s and 1990s and finally resulted in a new metric in the official statistics found in the IBGE’s Monthly Research on Employment (PME) in 2002. On the other hand, there was trade union mobilization surrounding the measurement dispute, which proved so intense that an alternative measure for unemployment – the Employment and Unemployment Survey (PED) – was introduced by the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE); what’s more, it was road-tested precisely in the largest metropolitan region, São Paulo, in 1984, just 2 years after a movement by unemployed people nearly overthrew the first opposition state government elected during the military dictatorship, amidst a deep economic crisis and a significant contraction of job opportunities.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Herein lies another peculiarity of the Brazilian case. While mainstream academics examined the international scale of the decommodification of labor, a correlate of social welfare regimes erected under Fordism, the “glorious years” (among Brazilians) of expanded Fordism (between 1950 and 1970), were free of these social considerations. In fact, in Brazil, this expansion occurred without universalization of wage work as a lasting employment relationship based on a system of limited protection in terms of benefit coverage, which left to private social relationships both the burden of providing the conditions for tackling unemployment as well as the responsibility for supporting and guiding the search of work.
- 9.
For further development of this argument, see Guimarães (2011).
- 10.
The difficulty in counting the EAP creates major problems when comparing censuses prior to 1960 with those after (Paiva 1984).
- 11.
PETI (Programa de Erradicação do Trabalho Infantil, Program to Eradicate Child Labor) and Bolsa Escola were conditional cash benefit programs adopted under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
- 12.
According to data from the International Labor Organization (ILO) (www.ilo.org) for the same period in France, women’s incorporation increased from 0.42 to 0.66; in the United States, it went from 0.39 to 0.68, significantly higher in initial levels than the Brazilian case and much closer to Brazil in ending points. Even in Argentina, a country with late industrialization like Brazil, female engagement reached 0.24 as early as 1960, reaching 0.53 (almost equal to Brazil’s level) over these same 50 years. That is, in every case, we find engagement levels higher than Brazilian rates, and growth occurs at a slower pace than ours. For further details on trends, see Costa (2000) and Cipollone et al. (2002).
- 13.
Commodification also varies according to the level of education. Those who achieved the highest educational transitions (entered into or completed higher education) indicate high rates of participation along with a higher presence of employees and employers, the typical dyad seen in capitalist labor markets. At the other extreme are illiterates, the self-employed, and those working without pay for family members who together are compared with wage employment until the late 1990s.
- 14.
For this purpose, we use a version of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (Oaxaca 1973; Blinder 1973) for nonlinear models, according to Fairlie (1999, 2005). Strictly speaking, this decomposition has been designed for linear regression models where the explained variable is continuous, such as income. Since our interest here lies in the individual propensity to engage in the labor market, we need to use nonlinear methods of estimation, hence the use of Fairlie’s adaptation. The dependent variable in the model is binary, where 1 is for individuals who make up the EAP, regardless of their employment status, and 0 is for other individuals outside the EAP, albeit considered socially eligible according to their age (between 15 and 65 years).
- 15.
Due to the difficulties faced by the IBGE in processing census information in 1960 (the first planned census to take place with the support of modern computers) and our ignorance regarding the sampling procedure used, which defined the microdata sample, we chose to exclude the year 1960 from the results presented in this section. For more details on the particularities of the 1960 census microdata that formed a basis for this decision, see Barbosa et al. (2013) and Barbosa (2013).
- 16.
To this end, the basic model does not include gender and race variables since they were used as criteria for defining groups in the counterfactual exercise.
- 17.
The results of the logit model estimation, from which we prepared the counterfactual exercise, show significant changes in the effect of age (which tends to rise, increasingly indicating that the older the individual, the greater the likelihood of participating in the labor market), just like the effect of age squared, which tends to be increasingly negative (indicating that advanced age increasingly tends to reduce the likelihood of individual engagement). These results show increasing barriers toward engagement among younger and older population, most likely related to the historical evolution in regulating labor supply among young people still of school age and among the elderly, closer to retirement.
- 18.
We should note that this difference is maintained even without incorporating the gender variable in the estimate. Here the results correspond to all individuals included in the analysis, regardless of gender.
- 19.
Guimarães (2012) explores the sociological controversies over the use of the terms “race,” “color,” and “skin color” to define Brazil’s racial classification system. His argument states that the Brazilian system is becoming increasingly based on physical traits and less on the “whitening ideology,” which used to identify color more directly with social status. He argues that the Brazilian system was never based purely on skin color. On the other hand, Brazilian censuses (from 1960 to 2010) do not ask the question “what race are you” but instead “what color are you,” up until 1980 and “what color/race are you,” from 1991 on. That is why we will use the term “color” rather than “skin color,” when dealing with racial self-identification as recorded in Brazilian censuses.
- 20.
We were unable to conduct the exercise involving gender and racial groups using 1970 census data because that year, the survey did not include questions about color or race. In order to conduct an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, models for all groups and years have to contain the same variables.
- 21.
Note, however, that even in the counterfactual exercise, some differences persist, especially since 1991, when nonwhites, male and female, displayed a slightly lower propensity than white groups. These differences can be attributed to inequalities in the average characteristics of people belonging to each of the racial groups.
- 22.
Note that setbacks in social protection policies in a context of such intense commodification of labor may result in the expansion of poverty and inequality levels mainly by rising unemployment and/or poor-quality jobs.
- 23.
Sophisticated academic arguments indicate a reverse trend, i.e., the decommodification of labor in the wake of the construction of welfare regimes based on social policies allowing workers some autonomy with regard to the market circuit.
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Guimarães, N.A., de Brito, M.M.A., Barone, L.S. (2019). Commodification of Labor in Brazil’s Labor Market (1960–2010). In: Arretche, M. (eds) Paths of Inequality in Brazil. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78184-6_14
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