Housewives face unemployment and reduced income

Rosângela dos Santos, Marli Silva and Damaris Paes share the same profession and the same difficulties: the three domestic workers lost their jobs during the pandemic and face worsening in their working conditions and income, even after the easing of social distance provided by the advance of the pandemic. vaccination.​

The reality of women is no exception among the category. A survey by the cleaning brand Veja with Plano CDE, released at the end of December, showed that 27% of Brazilian domestic workers were laid off during the pandemic. About 40% continued to work, exposing themselves to the risks of contamination by Covid-19.

A minority, 16%, were able to isolate themselves at home and continue to receive their employers’ salary. The measure was encouraged by a campaign by Fenatrad (National Federation of Domestic Workers), so that workers would not be exposed to the virus on public transport and in the homes of contracting families, during periods of greater contagion. It gained strength in March 2020, when a contaminated domestic after contact with her boss became the first victim of the virus in Rio de Janeiro. “But the adhesion was minimal”, says Luiza Baptista, general coordinator of Fenatrad.

Even the workers who benefited from the families’ decision to maintain payments faced difficulties when they returned to face-to-face work.

A resident of Salvador (BA) and a domestic worker since she was 14, Rosângela, 33, was surprised by the requirement that she work on weekends to compensate for paid hours not worked during the initial six months of the pandemic.

“It hadn’t been arranged before. When I said I couldn’t, the treatment changed completely. I was very humiliated”, she says. The case ended up in the Labor Court, and Rosângela has been unemployed since then.

Data from Pnad (Continuous National Household Sample Survey), from the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), show that unemployment, increased informality and loss of income have hit the category hard in the two years of the pandemic. About 6.4 million Brazilians worked in domestic services in Brazil in 2019 —92% were women and 65% were black. At the end of 2020, after 1.5 million layoffs, the contracted workforce was reduced to 4.9 million.

Hiring resumed in 2021, but is still far from the previous level. In October, the country accounted for 5.5 million Brazilians employed in domestic work —4.1 million without a formal contract.

Portfolio registrations grew from 1.2 million to 1.3 million in the previous 12 months. But the average income of registered and informal workers fell in the period: from BRL 979 in the August to October 2020 quarter to BRL 929 in the same quarter of 2021.

In São Paulo, the floor for the category is R$ 1,296.32 per month, for 44 hours of work per week. Daily rates range from R$100 to R$200, depending on the region and size of the house.

The drop in jobs and wages was accompanied by an increase in the cost of living, due to inflation, a reduction in leisure and social interaction, and an increase in demands and overload.

The research carried out by Veja and Plano CDE, which surveyed 522 workers throughout Brazil, also shows that day workers who clean had a lower frequency of contracted daily rates, which culminated in a drop in income and a greater accumulated cleaning load to be done.

The workers also report the incorporation of new obligations into the pandemic work routine, such as the requirement to bathe and change clothes on arrival at work stations, hygiene of all surfaces touched and, in several cases, the cost of protective equipment such as a mask. and alcohol gel from your own pocket.

Reports of bullying and sexual harassment and exposure to “trust testing” (where the employer films the employee without authorization or leaves cash in sight to test her honesty, for example) have also become more common complaints during the pandemic, says the search.

Marli Silva, 45, was released from the family where she worked as a nanny, without registration, as soon as the health crisis erupted. After months of looking for a new position, he started to cover the weekends off with colleagues, in different houses. In one of them, I learned from another employee that the family and children had Covid-19.

“They really needed someone to take care of their family, but they didn’t take care of mine at all,” says she, who has a daughter with a rare disease and a husband with cancer. Both are part of the risk group for Covid-19. Marli began to isolate herself after her shifts and says she is relieved to have found a new employer, who kept her away when the children tested positive for the disease.

Janaína Mariano, president of Sindoméstica (Sindicato das Empregadas e Trabalhadores Domésticas of Greater São Paulo), says that most of the conflicts in which the entity was called to mediate during the pandemic are characterized by frauds related to provisional measure 936, which created the Emergency Employment and Income Maintenance Program.

“These are employers who made contracts to reduce or suspend the employee’s working hours, but kept them working fully and used the amount transferred by the government, originally intended for the employee to compensate for their loss of income with the reduction of the working day, to pay the salary” , it says.

In practice, according to the leader, public money from the benefit intended to reduce working hours was used to make it cheaper for the employer to keep the employee full-time. The cases have been judicialized and are being investigated.

Despite the difficulties imposed by the pandemic and which further weakened the work of the category, 56% of the maids interviewed in the national survey said they had a good relationship with their employers.

“With the current economic scenario, many employers also lost their jobs and had to lay off domestic workers, who now face unemployment and informality.”

Damaris Paes, 53, had been working for five years in the home of an American family in Vila Mariana, in the south of São Paulo. She took care of the boy in the family and helped with the cleaning when the cleaning lady was dismissed. “I always liked working as a maid and the family was great with me,” she says.

The employer, however, received a job opportunity in her home country and, concerned about the conduct of the pandemic in Brazil, decided to return to the US.

Damaris lost her job and decided to pause her professional activity while she looks for another good opportunity and undergoes treatment for her spine, weakened by the intense physical work demanded by domestic activity, which she has been doing since she was ten years old.

“But I know that being able to stop is not an option for most colleagues. The crisis has affected our work a lot. Families want someone, but for us, it’s not paying off.”