Since June 2020, Diones Coutinho, 39, has been looking for job openings on the internet daily, but to no avail. “In this whole period I was only called for a job interview, which I did online”, says the technician in industrial mechanics and in oil and gas. He is part of the group of 2.9 million workers who have been unemployed for more than two years, the so-called long-term unemployment.
A contingent that is equivalent to about a third of the total number of people looking for a job in the country today, according to data from the Pnad Contínua (Continuous National Household Sample Survey) released earlier this month.
Coutinho, who was an inspector on a ship, was fired after the company announced some cuts because of the Covid-19 pandemic. “At first, I thought that the difficulty in finding a vacancy came from the pandemic, but now the market is slowly returning and I still don’t have an offer”, he explains.
The unemployment rate in Brazil has been falling and dropped to 9.3% in the second quarter of 2022, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). It is the lowest level for the period since 2015. It was at 11.1% in the first quarter.
According to official statistics, the unemployed population gathers those who are out of work and continue to look for new vacancies. Those who do not have a job and are not looking for opportunities do not enter the calculation.
To get around the more than two years of unemployment, Coutinho, who lives in São Gonçalo in Rio de Janeiro, even worked, for a while, at his father-in-law’s junkyard and also took another technical course. “It’s really bad to see that people get a job and you don’t. The psychological is not good, because I have many bills to pay, including the financing of an apartment, this is my biggest debt”, he explains.
According to data from Pnad, in some states the proportion of unemployed who have been looking for a job for more than 24 months is almost half of the unemployed. In Pernambuco, the group represents 48% of the unemployed, followed by Amapá (47.8%), Acre (46.5%) and Rio de Janeiro (45.6%).
The researchers Janaína Feijó and Paulo Peruchetti, from the FGV IBRE (Brazilian Institute of Economics), state that long-term unemployment has gained an increasing share of the total number of unemployed people in the country. A movement that began to be observed after the economic recession of 2014-16. “Since the end of 2021, it has rotated at a level of 30%, which indicates a worsening in the composition of the unemployed. difficult to get a job”, says Peruchetti.
For Janaina Feijó, there is currently a lot of talk about the drop in the unemployment rate, but it is important to be aware of some important nuances. “We have a large contingent, for 7 years, of people who have been looking for a job for a long time and we have not been able to reduce this group”, she says.
The proportion of people looking for a job for more than two years only decreased at the beginning of the pandemic, according to Adriana Beringuy, coordinator of Pnad. “That’s because it increased the representation of those who were looking for less time, people who were fired at the beginning of the pandemic and put pressure on the market in search of work”, she says.
According to Feijó, the demands of the job market underwent intense changes during the health crisis. Employers began to demand more diversified skills and abilities from workers, which makes it difficult for a person who has been out of work for a long time without looking for new qualifications to re-enter.
“When the person shows the resume and is unemployed for a long time, it signals a negative thing. The first thing the employer will ask is: why has she been out of work for two years? It’s strange in the eyes of the employer”, he says.
The long search for work may also have a structural component, according to IBGE’s Beringuy. “They may be people with more difficulty to insert themselves, either because of the qualification required by the market or because of the time they can dedicate to work”, he says.
education
According to microdata from Pnad Contínua collected by researchers from FGV Ibre, in terms of education, the largest share of workers who have been looking for a job for more than 24 months are people with incomplete secondary or higher education. These people corresponded to 52.3% of the group of long-term unemployed in the second quarter of that year. Workers who did not complete high school accounted for 36.4% and those with higher education 11.3%.
The Ibre researcher defends the need to think about public policies aimed at improving the ability of these people to enter the job market.
“People with low education and low purchasing power often don’t even know where to look for opportunities. Having a platform that makes it easy to know what opportunities are appearing, to know what trends are, what to do to requalify is very important”, says Feijó.
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