With a new profile, services lead hires
Valor Econômico
One in every two jobs created last year originated in the service sector. From those, half took place among workers related to tourism and to real estate commerce and administration. These categories are the leaders in the openings in the sector that most creates jobs in Brazil and 2009 repeated such pattern. Altogether, according to official data, the service sector currently employs more than 13 million people - little less than the number of workers in commerce and industry together.
Until 2006, the sector created formal jobs at a rate below the sum of the other activities - industry, commerce and agriculture. This scenario has changed over the past three years. In the five first years of the decade, the work market, without the openings of in the services sector, grew 22.4%, while the industry increase the jobs by 18%. After 2006, with the increase in the household income, the ratio was reversed. While the industry, commerce and the field increased their staff by 14%, the service sector grew 16.9%.
In the decade, the heterogeneity characteristic of the sector - that comprises from telemarketing operators to outsourced administrators, including teachers, doctors, motorcycle couriers and waiters - has increased. The services, traditionally concentrated in financial mediation in large urban centers, have changed profile: more activities aimed at the families, such as tourism, restaurants, call centers and transportation have grown.
The rate of generation of jobs in the service sector was above the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in all years of the decade. Among the subsectors covered by the Annual Listing of Employees and Salaries (Rais), until 2008 and by the General Registry of Employment and Unemployment (Caged) last year, those that had greater average expansion in the decade were the sectors of commerce, real estate administration and technical services (56.5% in ten years), and lodging and communications services, with 53.1%. In the past years, however, it is the latter that grows faster. The category includes hotel and hostel employees, and workers in restaurants and snack bars. In the last three years, this subsector increased its share in more than 5% a year.
On the other hand, the period between 2000 and 2009 saw the transport and communications sectors, which includes drivers and also telemarketing and call center operators, go from 1.3 million people to nearly 2.1 million - growth of 48.2% - at the same time in which the sector of financial institutions, represented by bank workers, had the lowest growth - 32.5%.
The strong increase in services last year, responsible for 500 thousand of the 995 thousand jobs created, was good to dampen the effects of the world crisis in the activity and in the labor market, affirm the analysts. For them, a significant part of such expansion results from the endogenous character of the sector since it depends more on the fluctuations of the domestic market, such as internal tourism traveling, meals outside the homes or telecommunications services, than from abroad.