Lula suggests creating ministry for small and medium-sized companies

Former president and presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) suggested the creation of a ministry of small and medium-sized companies if he succeeds in the October elections.

The speech was made on his second day of the campaign, at a meeting with businessmen.

“Before leaving the presidency, I proposed to create a ministry of micro and small companies. I was aware that it was not possible to deal with the problem of Volkswagen along with the problem of the mechanic that existed on the Volkswagen side,” he said.

Later in the speech, Lula said that, if he wins the elections, his government would create some portfolios. “I don’t know if the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises is working, but it will have to,” he said.

The event, in a hotel in downtown São Paulo, did not count with the formal presence of associations of the category, but with entrepreneurs sympathetic to Lula’s candidacy.

Guests went through a metal detector in a security scheme that has been beefed up since pre-campaign.

Entrepreneurs from the culture, gastronomy and civil construction sectors, among others, spoke. Difficulties in the pandemic and inflation set the tone of the speeches.

The ministry’s idea is based on the reasoning, repeated by several of the entrepreneurs who spoke, that smaller businesses should not have the same treatment given to large companies.

“We tried several times to make separate negotiations at Fiesp [Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo], because there were 16 business groups, and Fiesp never let them. Precisely because she always wanted to take advantage of the smallest, to level our chances of conquest at the bottom,” Lula said. “She always used the weakest as an excuse to try not to negotiate as much as possible with us.”

The candidate defended partial reserve of the national market in government purchases, debt negotiation of entrepreneurs during the pandemic and credit lines for small entrepreneurs.

It would be necessary to “frame” the Bank of Brazil, according to Lula.

“Banco do Brasil seems nice if it has government guidance, because if it doesn’t, its bureaucracy thinks like a private bank. “, he stated.

“We don’t want public banks to have any losses, but we don’t want them to want to have the same profits as the private bank. They have to play a social role in this country.”

Businesspeople at an event with Lula prefer to review, not revoke labor reform

The PT should intensify conversations with the business community throughout the electoral period, a group that offers more resistance.

“Lula doesn’t have majority support in the business sector — nor in the small business sector,” says Tita Dias, a partner at the São Paulo restaurant Canto Madalena.

A member of the PT, she attributes part of the blame to the party itself, for not putting the business community in her speeches. Opposition to labor reform, she says, may also have stunned the group.

The repeal of the labor reform was even debated in Lula’s campaign, which later retreated.

“It is necessary to improve the labor reform”, says Dias. “As a PT member and businesswoman, I think there were important changes in the reform.”

Other businessmen at the event, such as Ignácio Zurita, from Avita Construções, agree.

“An outright revocation is not the smartest thing to do,” he says. “There are good points in it, but others have been exaggerated against the workers,” she said.

He says that in the business world, however, the discussion is controversial.

In June, the coordination of Lula’s government plan decided to exclude the proposal to revoke the reform from the programmatic guidelines.

Today there are 18.6 million small and medium-sized companies, which correspond to more than 90% of all CNPJs in Brazil. MEI, or individual micro-entrepreneurs, are almost 60% of the total.

The last category was created in 2008, during Lula’s second term. The measure, along with the creation of Simples Nacional, was recalled in speeches at this Tuesday’s event.