Number of young people engaged in domestic work drops by 35% in ten years

Tatiane Ribeiro, 27, still gets emotional when remembering the happiness of her mother, a maid, when she learned that she had passed pedagogy at USP. “I remember how proud she was. I wasn’t just the first of us to graduate, it was her daughter who had passed the entrance exam. That dream was even more hers than mine.”

His mother, Edineuza, stopped studying in the fourth year to work as a maid while still in her teens, in the interior of Bahia. “When we came to São Paulo, we lived in a favela in Itaquera [zona leste de São Paulo], and to save money on the bus, she sometimes slept at her employers’ house. I think she turned all this sacrifice into an impulse to encourage me to continue studying.”

Nearing graduation, she divides her time between internships and work at a community library specializing in black authors. “Since she couldn’t, my mother wanted me to choose my profession. Now, I want to help change the lives of other people from the periphery, prove that we can take our experience to the university.”

Tatiane’s story reflects a significant change: in a decade, the number of Brazilians aged between 14 and 29 performing some type of domestic work — whether formal or informal — dropped by 35.1%, according to data from Pnad (Research National by Household Sample) Continuous.

These workers were 1.308 million in the first quarter of 2012, the first year of the historical series of the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), and now total 849 thousand. They went from 4.7% of the total employed population in this age group ten years ago to 3.4%.

In the same range, domestic work practically remained stable among those over 30 years old, which were 4.647 million ten years ago and rose to 4.759 million at the end of the first quarter of 2022 – a slight increase of 2.4% in the period, according to survey carried out at the request of Sheet by the IDados consultancy.

The presence of younger people in cleaning, gardening, working as caretakers or janitors has been dropping steadily throughout the series, with slight increases.

These one-off increases occurred mainly from 2017 to 2018, with the recovery of the economy after the recession of previous years, and from 2021 to 2022, with the reopening after the impact caused by the pandemic.

“The data show that young people are less likely to perform domestic work than before, a trend that has been going on since before the pandemic”, says IDados researcher Mariana Leite. “It’s certainly a historic shift, when comparing, from the beginning of the series, the domestic work of young people with that of the general population engaged in domestic work.”

When looking at the occupations most carried out by Brazilians aged between 15 and 29, the movement is similar: the function “Domestic service workers in general”, the main one of Pnad’s domestic work group, was the third with the most young people in absolute numbers, with 1 million people in the first three months of 2012.

Ten years later, there were 480,000 workers in this role, and it now occupies the eighth position in the ranking – behind occupations mainly in the commerce and services sectors, such as clerks, clerks and receptionists, in addition to construction workers.

Leite adds that there has been an increase in schooling over the generations. “In Brazil, there was a reinforcement of affirmative measures, such as the quota system in universities. And even if access to higher education is not broad, even the completion of high school has already made a difference.”

‘POOR’S SON DOESN’T HAVE A SECOND CHANCE’

“I passed the university entrance exam, the son of a poor person doesn’t have a second chance”, summarizes Xênia Mello, 37, daughter of a former maid in Curitiba, when narrating the journey she took from her home to the post office to register for the Law course at UFPR (Federal University of Paraná).

“I sold my books to pay for college entrance exams. It’s a story of overcoming, but it cannot be used as a speech of meritocracy. It is crossed by a lot of suffering and violence.”

Mello went to college with the son of his mother’s boss. “Years later, I realized that many of the resentments I had as a child were a reflection of an economic issue. My mother lived at work for a long time and I was alone in adolescence. This relationship of distance from motherhood made me compare our story to the movie “What Time Does She Come Back?”.”

In Anna Muylaert’s film, released in 2015, Val (Regina Casé) is a maid who moved to São Paulo to try to give her daughter Jessica (Camila Márdila) a better life, whom she left in Pernambuco. Years later, the girl comes to the city to take the entrance exam. The work discusses the relationship between employers and employees and sheds light on the possibility of choosing a profession.

“Like the character in the film, I never thought about working in someone’s house, I was always convinced that I would do something else. And I don’t see housework as something undeserved, I love organizing my house, but I’ve always dreamed of a higher education that would make my job a choice, not a sentence,” says Mello, who is now a civil servant at a public university.

“In recent years, it has become noticeable that when conditions for exit are created and the country’s situation improves, fewer people are subjected to domestic work”, evaluates Tatiana Roque, from the Brazilian Basic Income Network. “For professionals who continue in these roles, it is important to create windows of professionalization, so that old relationships are reviewed with the so-called care economy.”

Despite advances, 4 of the 10 main occupations of young Brazilians still require qualifications lower than high school.

CRISIS AND PANDEMIC AFFECTED FORMALIZATION AND HIGHER REMUNERATION

In addition to the effects of the pandemic, following the behavior of domestic work in the country in recent years also forces researchers to consider the impact of the approval of the so-called Domestic PEC and the effects of the 2015-16 recession and the pandemic on this type of work.

In April 2013, during the Dilma Rousseff (PT) government, Constitutional Amendment 72 was enacted, which established labor rights for domestic workers, bringing the category closer to other workers, with maternity assistance, pension for death and retirement. Complementary measures, in 2015, guaranteed other benefits, such as FGTS, unemployment insurance and night shift allowance.

The formalization was pointed out at the time as a factor of increase in layoffs. Pnad data, however, point to a 3% drop in the number of registered households (of all age groups) between the first quarter of 2013 and the same period in 2014, from 1.87 million to 1.17.

But this contingent of registered workers rose again in 2015 and reached the record for the quarter in the series in 2016, of 2.1 million. According to the researchers, the data suggest that formalization was more harmed by the 2015 and 2016 recession and the pandemic than by formalization.

The IDados researcher recalls that the changes in legislation also did not lead to significant gains in the remuneration of domestic workers. In ten years, real income grew 0.6% for young people and dropped 0.7% for households over 30 years old. In the pandemic period alone, the two groups lost 3.27% and 11.47% of income, respectively.

For Sergio Firpo, columnist for Sheet and economist at Insper, it is important to consider the impact that the pandemic years had and will still have on domestic work, amplifying the insecurity of workers who were not regularized and were left without income overnight and cutting jobs from those who were regularized.

“The pandemic has had the effect of reducing the demand for domestic work. This has had a perverse impact, especially on poor and less educated women.”