The Jair Bolsonaro government (PL) included in the 2023 Budget proposal a reserve of R$ 11.6 billion to increase salaries of executive branch servants, an amount sufficient to grant a linear adjustment of at least 4.85% to careers.
The percentage is lower than what the categories had been claiming in demonstrations that took place this year. Central Bank employees, for example, asked for a 27% increase in their salaries, defending the need to make up for past losses.
The government’s intention is to use the inflation forecast for 2023 as a reference for the readjustments, given that it will be lower than this year’s, as shown by the Sheet.
The Special Secretary for the Treasury and Budget, Esteves Colnago, reported that the percentage used as a reference, 4.85%, was estimated based on the assumption that the increase will be effective from January 2023 – that is, there is room for negotiation.
“If you give a readjustment a little later in the year, he [porcentual] could be bigger,” he said.
On the other hand, the government linked R$ 3.5 billion of the so-called rapporteur’s amendments to help compose the reserve for readjustments. This amount is used as a bargaining chip in political negotiations in the National Congress.
Despite the Ministry of Economy’s intention to align the use of these resources with government policies, there is no legal command that obliges parliamentarians to follow this distribution.
Colnago assessed that there is “greater difficulty” in handling this resource during the Budget process in the National Congress. If parliamentarians decide to withdraw it from the reserve for servers, allocating it to other expenses, the space for readjustment may be smaller.
The secretary pointed out that the setting of the reserve still does not constitute in itself a definition of the format of the increases. There is a discussion in the political wing of the government about selective increases, that is, only for some careers.
This year, Bolsonaro tried to contemplate only the police, but the movement triggered reactions from other careers and the president gave up the benefit.
About one million servers have their salaries frozen since 2017. Other categories, with higher salaries, had the last adjustment in 2019.
For the other Powers, the readjustment reserve totals R$ 2.6 billion. According to the technicians, the budget already includes the proposal for an increase presented by the Federal Supreme Court (STF), which provides for an 18% readjustment over two years, raising the ceiling for civil servants to R$ 46,300 per month.
The 2023 Budget proposal also includes a reserve of R$2.85 billion for public tenders in the Executive Branch, according to Federal Budget Secretary Ariosto Culau.
According to him, the forecast is that 32,600 vacancies will be filled through the admission of new civil servants, 21,800 of which are of a generic nature and 10,800 are distributed in federal institutes and universities.
In the other Powers, the forecast of expenses with the appointment of 17.4 thousand new servants is R$ 3 billion.
During the presentation, technicians from the Ministry of Economy pointed out the strong reduction in the number of active servers, as a result of the suspension of tenders in recent years. With no new admissions, the replacement rate of those retiring plummeted.
The number of employees reached its peak in 2017, with 634,200, and since then it has only dropped, reaching 569,200 in June this year. In this context, spending on civil servants should be at 3.4% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by the end of 2022 — the lowest level in 26 years.
Critics, however, point out that the adjustment was based on the commitment to provide services to the population. The INSS (National Institute of Social Security), which in recent years has seen a reduction in its staff due to the retirement of civil servants, submits its policyholders to queues for the granting of benefits.
In the government itself, there is an assessment that this model of adjustment in public spending has run out. Also for this reason, the Budget proposal provides for the holding of new tenders.
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