Haddad says government will ‘take grenade out of pocket’ of servers with salary readjustment

The Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad (PT), said this Tuesday (7th) that the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) will “take the grenade out of the pockets” of civil servants with the negotiation of salary readjustments for categories.

The current administration has reopened the permanent negotiating table with civil servants, which had already operated in previous PT administrations and will be led by the Minister of Management and Innovation in Public Services, Esther Dweck.

The intention is to grant a salary adjustment later this year, after at least four years of freezing. Most servers have been without salary replacement for six years.

“The objective here is to get the grenade out of your pockets”, said Haddad during the table’s reopening ceremony. The event has representatives from 80 union entities, in addition to government ministers.

The grenade quote refers to a statement by former Minister of Economy Paulo Guedes at a ministerial meeting on April 22, 2020. The video of the meeting was released by order of the STF (Federal Supreme Court) at the request of the former Minister of Justice Sergio Moro, who accused former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) of trying to interfere with the Federal Police.

In the video, Guedes appears celebrating a law passed at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, which authorized aid to states and municipalities, but had as its counterpart the freezing of readjustments.

“Everyone thinks they’re distracted, they hugged us, fooled around with us. We’ve already put the grenade in the enemy’s pocket. Two years without a salary increase”, said Guedes at the time.

This Tuesday, Haddad directly criticized his predecessor’s statement. “That scene at the Planalto Palace is one of the most shameful scenes I’ve ever seen in my life. How can someone who is at the head of such an important ministry say that public service is an enemy to be destroyed, as if it were an enemy of war?”, he said. .

The 2023 Budget already reserves BRL 11.6 billion for increasing the remuneration of active, inactive and pensioners of the Executive Branch.

The biggest impasse at the moment is whether or not this readjustment will include the military, a category that obtained the greatest benefits during the Bolsonaro administration.

The intention of the new government is to apply a linear percentage for the categories. Last year, members of the Bolsonaro administration estimated that the amount provided for in the Budget would be sufficient for a 4.85% increase as of January. As the readjustment to be negotiated for this year will be valid for a smaller number of months, it will be possible to increase this percentage.

If the military are included, however, the replacement will be more timid for the other categories, given the need to maintain the expenditure already foreseen in the Budget.

Therefore, there is a discussion about the exclusion of the military from the negotiation. There is, however, a political risk involved in this option, since the relationship between the current administration and the Armed Forces has already begun to be strained.

In January, Lula dismissed the then army commander, General Júlio Cesar de Arruda, in the midst of an open crisis of confidence following the January 8 attacks in Brasília.

The calculation of members of the current government is that the military were contemplated by increases and benefits in the previous management, while the other servants had frozen salaries.

In 2019, the Bolsonaro government proposed and approved a law that modified the retirement and pension rules for the military, but stipulated a series of increases in the salary of the category. The law also increased the amounts of additional qualification (paid according to the category of courses taken by the military), among other bonuses.

Meanwhile, around 1 million active servants, retirees and pensioners have their remuneration frozen since January 1, 2017, when the last increase installment was granted.

They are servants of agencies such as Anvisa (National Health Surveillance Agency), IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), Ipea (Applied Economic Research Institute), Funai (National Indian Foundation), Abin (Brazilian Intelligence Agency), in addition to of medical careers and related to Social Security.

The categories in this group had an average increase of 10.8%, proposed during the Dilma Rousseff (PT) government and which was divided into two years (2016 and 2017).

Another 253,000 servers had the last readjustment applied on January 1, 2019. It was the fourth installment of a total average increase of 27.9%. In this second group are State careers, such as the Federal Police and the Federal Highway Police.

Executive servers increased the charge for salary replacement after the approval, at the end of 2022, of salary increases for STF ministers, in addition to the President of the Republic, ministers and parliamentarians. With the readjustment, they will have a monthly remuneration of BRL 41.7 thousand as of April 1st of this year, reaching BRL 46.4 thousand as of February 1st, 2025.

As there is a greater gap in careers at the base of functionalism, which already have lower remuneration, there is a possibility under study of promoting two types of linear adjustment: a larger one for those categories that had the last increase in 2017, and a smaller one for the others. , who had their salary updated until 2019.

Negotiations are expected to advance in the coming months. In recent weeks, heads of bodies have already sought out the Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services, responsible for personnel policy, to defend salary replacement for their servers. One of the demands is that the readjustment be made by MP (provisional measure), to be valid immediately.

In a nod of good will, the Minister of Planning and Budget, Simone Tebet (MDB), announced the release of R$ 350 million for the payment of labor rights for civil servants, referring to previous years. The disbursement should benefit around 10,000 employees.

Ministers Rui Costa (Casa Civil), Márcio Macêdo (Secretary-General), Luiz Marinho (Labor), Carlos Lupi (Social Security), Camilo Santana (Education), in addition to Haddad, Tebet and Dweck participated in the ceremony to reopen the table.