Employment reacts for first time in the year
Folha de S. Paulo
The work market is far from showing last year's vigor, but it already gives signs of improvement: the unemployment rate in the six main metropolitan regions of the country fell to 8.1% in June, after remaining stable in the first five months of the year under the effect of the crisis. In May, it was at 8.8%. The data is another sign the worst of the world economic crisis may have already passed in Brazil, a trend also pointed in surveys on the confidence of entrepreneurs and consumers on the economy.
On the average of the first half of the year, the unemployment rate was at 8.6%, a little above the 8.3% of the same period of 2008, says the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). In June, unemployment retracted for two reasons: contracting increased and more people left the work market.
In this last case, one of the hypotheses is the discouragement, that is, the disincentive of looking for jobs in view of the situation of crisis. From May to June, the total of employed people increased 0.8% (or 164 thousand people), the best performance since October. Regarding the PEA (Economically Active Population), which includes employed and unemployed people looking for jobs, it grew only 0.2%.
To Cimar Azeredo Pereira, of the IBGE, the labor market had its "first significant improvement this year in June". The IBGE manager of the research emphasizes unemployment also fell due to the lesser search for work, which can signal the increase of discouragement. Data related only to formal jobs of the Ministry of Labor had already pointed to the tendency of recovery, with the generation of 119.5 thousand jobs in June.