Panel SA: What holds app delivery people at home is the price of gasoline and not omicron, says expert

The explosion of the omicron, which caused the removal of contaminated employees and disrupted the operation in several sectors, also affected application deliverers.

In this part of the population, however, staying at home is forced for other reasons, according to Renato Meirelles, president of Instituto Locomotiva.

“This guy doesn’t have the luxury of not working because of the contamination. He just doesn’t have the money to pay for gasoline,” says Meirelles.

There has been a lot of talk about the impact of the lack of manpower for companies in this wave of micron contamination, but what about self-employed workers? What is the impact for them? It is not possible to understand the issue of self-employed workers, workers by application, just by the context of the pandemic. We have to understand the economic context as a whole.

It has the impact of rising unemployment, which is not a detail. In particular, unemployment among young people, who form the largest share, especially in applications. And it’s no wonder that, in the last year, we have 11.7 million Brazilians who have started working through an app. And I’m not just talking about Uber and iFood. I’m talking about the person who is the manicurist who now has a direct customer through GetNinjas, the bar that lost a customer in the pandemic and started selling through iFood, the one who prints a t-shirt and started selling on the Free Market.

We have in Brazil today 34 million Brazilians who earn part of their money per application. Of these, 62% receive half, or more, of their income per application. We are talking, perhaps, about the largest professional sector in the country. And these people are suffering, especially those who work in transportation, because the price of gasoline is soaring.

Historically, we thought of the price of gasoline in two ways: the cost for logistics and the middle class that fuels their car. The pandemic made us see the increase in gasoline through the logic of the fundamental input for application and delivery workers.

And when does a wave of contamination like this current one come? Do these people stay at home? Yes and no. These people don’t have the luxury of social isolation. They are workers who, for the most part, have to sell lunch to buy dinner. Despite the risks and contamination, they cannot afford not to work.

And there is a portion that works from home, either printing caps or making cakes to sell. But this has much more to do with the economic crisis than the virus.

And the couriers? They have been staying at home because they have contaminated themselves with this new variant? They stay at home not because they contaminated themselves. They stay because they don’t have money for gas. He had no alternative when we were in the other variants, which had a higher degree of lethality and we didn’t have a vaccine. Today, he doesn’t have even more, because of money.

Each sector responds differently. How does the favela economy react to this? On favela, crisis is no exception. It’s rule. These people grew up in the crisis, be it health, security, economic. What I call the “if virometer” of the favela is much higher than the average for the Brazilian population.

In the favela there is also a level of solidarity 35% higher than the Brazilian average. This data is measured by donations. On the other hand, these people have a lower level of social protection. And not only because of the economic issue, but because of the housing itself, they have more difficulty in isolation.

They are the people who suffered the most from the delays in emergency aid at the beginning of last year and the uncertainty of what will happen now. And they are people who often work on the street.

That person turns around by going to the internet and the app. And they are workers who, in practice, were responsible for Brazil not stopping.

It wasn’t because of the middle class that Brazil kept walking. It was because of the workers on the bus, cleaning, supermarket cashiers, pharmacy.

They were the ones who were most at risk from the pandemic and who were least protected. And, at the time of becoming a priority public to be vaccinated, they were forgotten to the detriment of those with higher education.

It is not by chance that the rate of contamination in the periphery is almost double the rate of contamination in the rest of Brazil.

What is your assessment of the reaction of governments and what should be done? How do you assess the position of those who have resumed restrictions? Unfortunately, what guides the federal government and some state governments is the electoral logic and not the logic of what is best for people’s lives. And they support this logic through false polemics. One of them is the one that opposes health to the recovery of the economy.

If the risk group gets sick, cannot work, stops consuming, the economy breaks down. But a good part of the rulers are busy transforming a basic, civilizing issue, which is the value of life, into a political dispute.

And there is no recovery of the economy that does not go through income distribution. And it’s not changing the name of Bolsa Família to Auxílio Brasil because of an election. Income distribution occurs when the minimum wage rises above inflation. And that we didn’t see.

X-ray

President of Instituto Locomotiva and member of the IBMEC faculty council, where he holds the chair of consumer sciences. He was founder and president of Data Favela and participated in the commission that studied the new middle class, at the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs of the Presidency of the Republic in 2012

with Andressa Motter e Ana Paula Branco