Younger and less educated apprentice loses space in companies

The hiring of apprentices by companies in the last decade began to favor young people with higher education, increasingly excluding younger and less educated adolescents.

According to an exclusive survey by Kairós Desenvolvimento Social, based on Rais (Annual List of Social Information), the participation of adolescents under 18 years of age was 65% of the total number of apprentices hired in December 2010. This percentage dropped to 33, 5% in December 2020.

At the same time, apprentices with complete secondary education occupied 19.5% of the vacancies in 2010, rising to 43% in 2020. Another 43.8% are apprentices with incomplete secondary education and only 13.2% were in primary education. Estimates indicate that there are currently around 500,000 apprentices hired in the country.

With this scenario, the Apprenticeship Law, created more than two decades ago to be a gateway for thousands of teenagers and young people to the job market and a mechanism for inclusion, has failed to fulfill its social and productive function, approaching an internship modality, says Elvis Cesar Bonassa, director of Kairós.

The legislation establishes a list of priorities for hiring vulnerable apprentices, such as low-income teenagers and young people, graduates of socio-educational measures and child labor, who are in institutional care and people with disabilities.

“The idea is to make the program a social and productive inclusion. For other cases, there are internship options and first job opportunities. The law is focused on social inclusion, which was progressively abandoned by companies”, says Bonassa.

He adds that when looking at the social profile of adolescents who live in areas of vulnerability, schooling is usually lower. The younger and less educated, the greater the chances of an apprentice being vulnerable.

“Many companies have invested in ESG practices [de governança ambiental, social e corporativa]but when it comes to the issue of vulnerable young people, they would rather finance any social project in poor areas, which does not generate income for teenagers, than bring these young people into the company’s structure”, he says.

Professional learning makes it possible to unite policies for work and employment, education and social assistance, through the care of adolescents and young people in situations of social vulnerability, insertion of those who were out of school and professional qualification, says Tatiana Gomes Furtado, socio-educational manager of the Salesian Center for Adolescents (Cesam-DF).

The person whose life was transformed by the program was Klismann Alves, 23, a former apprentice at a wholesaler in São Paulo and who now works at a large hospital in the city of São Paulo. “I found out about the program on Instagram and started working as a cashier at the age of 19. It was my first experience as a permanent employee and so I was able to develop myself to achieve my goal, to work in the healthcare field.”

With the remuneration, he was able to pay for additional courses and is currently studying a degree in accounting sciences. “Some large companies should have this idea of ​​putting young apprentices to give opportunities to those who are just starting out”, says the service assistant.

Some companies have also adopted selective processes that end up making it difficult for the most vulnerable apprentices to enter, say entities that act as intermediaries between young people and companies.

Mediation between the two ends takes place through qualifying organizations. According to Febraeda (Brazilian Federation of Adolescents’ Socio-educational Associations), S System entities, such as Senai and Senac, contribute about half of the apprentices in activity; the other half comes from other non-profit associations.

“There are apprenticeship programs in the industry that are specific to those over 18 years old and that do not serve the vulnerable public, but non-profit entities do,” says the president of the federation, Antônio Pasin.

“The social profile of Senai students is of lower income than the average public school. We defend that the learning rules have social justice, but this happens on a sustainable basis”, says Senai’s director general, Rafael Lucchesi.

“It is absurd to take a young person and teach him a ‘make-believe’ activity. But what kind of empowerment do you have when you learn to be continuous or to pack groceries at the supermarket? It will have a beneficial effect on income, but in the end of the program, will be at the same level of human capital that it entered”, he adds.

According to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), Brazilians aged between 18 and 24 earn, on average, R$1,452 per month, almost half the average income of other workers.

“There are organizations with national scope and also capillary civil society organizations, which perform the same type of work, but with a differential: they are inserted in the territory of both the company and the young”, says Terezinha Ongaro Monteiro de Barros, president of the organization SHD (Sociedade Humana Despertar), which works in productive inclusion.

She emphasizes that the Apprentice Law is the only legal provision that deals with youth employability. “In an ideal world, civil society would stop consuming products from companies that do not comply with the quotas established by law or acting with social and environmental responsibility.”

According to experts, even if Rais results that already capture the period after the beginning of the pandemic are not yet available, it is possible to say that the health crisis has worsened the reduction of the most vulnerable apprentices in companies.

“We have been in this business since 2003 and it had been growing, until the pandemic. After the health crisis, our number of apprentices dropped from 85 thousand to 65 thousand”, says Humberto Casagrande, general superintendent of Ciee (Company-School Integration Center). ). “Contracts were expiring and companies did not renew, they were in default with the law because of the pandemic.”

According to Casagrande, young people are selected by the companies, and the association registers, organizes the database that companies use to search for an apprentice. “A portion of companies end up having the wrong view of what an apprentice is, they want to take the young person ready.”

Government changes rules and entities protest

The Apprentice Law obliges medium and large companies to reserve vacancies for teenagers and young people aged between 14 and 24 and people with disabilities (no age limit). The apprentice quota ranges from 5% to 15% of the staff.

In May, the government of President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) published MP 1,116, from the Employs + Women and Youth Program, which relaxed the rules for apprentice quotas.

The change makes it difficult for vulnerable young people to enter the job market, according to entities linked to the topic. One of the changes made by the government determines, for example, that each vulnerable young apprentice starts to count twice.

In addition, an apprentice who is subsequently hired by the company, on a permanent basis, continues to count towards the calculation of quotas for 12 months.

The Young Apprentice program had already been debated in a special committee of the Chamber since December, and the forecast was that the opinion would be presented in June. With MP, the work will need to be redone.

The MP has a deadline to be converted into law until September. When it was published, deputy Marco Bertaiolli (PSD-SP), rapporteur for the Special Committee on the Apprentice Statute, committed to withdrawing these and other points in the Apprentice Statute report.

“The changes proposed in this provisional measure are very bad, they distort the role of learning in Brazil in a very serious way”, criticized Bertaiolli at the time.

“The government argues that it wanted to create incentives for hiring, but when an incentive program is proposed in which the price for it to work is paid by the apprentice himself, something is wrong”, says Pasin.

“We have an apprenticeship legislation that ends up creating impositions on companies and does not generate objective gains from the assistance point of view”, counters Lucchesi, from Senai. He assesses that the MP is in line with what the ILO (International Labor Organization) recommends and should increase companies’ interest in apprentices.

Sought to comment on the MP’s effects on hiring vulnerable apprentices, the Ministry of Labor did not respond.