Thiago de Campos, 34, today sells candies on a street near the restaurant where he was a cook and which closed during the first months of the pandemic. “I have been in the profession for over ten years, but they fired everyone, starting with the most experienced.”
The money he earns, which sometimes reaches R$150 in a day, depends on his mother, who got sick last year. He says that the pandemic caused two blows to his career: the resignation and the difficulty of replacing himself in the market with the salary he used to.
“There are even vacancies, but if they paid R$ 2,100 a month, now the offers are almost no more than R$ 1 thousand. For now, I sell sweets, I work as a construction assistant and dream of opening my own restaurant. Things will get better.”
Stories like Campos’s are not uncommon. The impact of Covid-19 was felt mainly by informal and low-paid workers. The post-pandemic period should accelerate the process of digitization of work and the destruction of repetitive and low-skilled functions – and Brazil is not prepared for any of the changes that are to come, according to experts.
Several international reports pointed to significant growth in areas linked to information technology and some of these changes are already taking place in Brazil, albeit more slowly, given the lack of qualifications for the most demanded areas, says JanaÃna Feijó, a researcher in the area of ​​Applied Economics at the FGV/Ibre (Brazilian Institute of Economics, Fundação Getulio Vargas).
“Brazil continues to have a fragile job market, and the recovery after the impact caused by the pandemic has been due to the return of informal work and the maintenance of high unemployment. , it says.
According to the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), unemployment in the quarter ended in November was 11.6%. The rate had a slight drop, but the data also show that the real income of workers fell again on average, to R$ 2,444.
Feijó collaborated on a study published last year, which evaluated the occupations that are expected to emerge in the coming years. According to the survey, the classification “Other Salespeople”, which includes remote salespeople, at home and by phone, should more than double between 2019 and 2029, from 3.27% of jobs to 11.84%.
On the other hand, a slight decrease is expected among physical store sellers (from 7.43% to 7.1%) and domestic workers and office cleaning assistants (from 7.85% to 5.68%).
“Technology brings new opportunities for occupations and the trend is to increase the demand for workers in the so-called green economy, in engineering and in cloud computing. The country needs, however, to be ready to take advantage of this”, says Feijó.
In search of opportunities in a sector that stood out during the quarantine, Felipe Henrique, 21, got a job as an ecommerce assistant at a pet shop chain in São José dos Campos (SP) two years ago.
“I always saw that it was a market with potential and my previous experience, as a logistics assistant, helped a lot. I ended up betting on a sector that was driven by forced digitalization and that should continue to grow.”
“Some professionals maintain linear thinking, expecting a type of work that no longer exists, with predictability in activities, but in an increasingly unpredictable world. We need to change that”, says Daniela Diniz, Director of Content and Institutional Relations at GPTW consultancy.
To reverse the loss of jobs, companies would need to invest in updating those who are already employed, an effort by the education system to train new generations and public policies to retrain the currently unemployed, summarizes Insper professor Sergio Firm.
An IBM study published at the end of 2020, the first year of the pandemic, pointed out that 51% of Brazilian executives had the digitization of their companies as their investment priority over the next two years.
Firpo points out that social isolation and remote work measures, even if gradually reduced, should also make some segments review their practices and application of labor. “The productivity gains that remote work has brought can also cause some jobs to be destroyed.”
According to the expert, the work carried out in different cities and the rise of so-called digital nomads —professionals who work for a company from anywhere— should generate a shift in favor of more skilled workers, while the coffee and cake salesman who set up your stool at the door of a company may be out of work.
PRESSURE ON JUSTICE MUST GROW AND REFORM ENTERS THE SIGHT
In addition to the challenges imposed by the pandemic, with the proximity of the election, a possible revision of excerpts or even revocation of the labor reform approved by the government of Michel Temer (MDB) in 2017 is gaining strength.
According to the labor unions, the changes made to the CLT made hiring more flexible, but also increased the vulnerability of workers.
“The legislation favors precariousness and we don’t know the dimension of the impacts of the pandemic”, says the sociologist of Dieese (Inter-union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies) Clemente Ganz Lúcio.
He says that the expected increase in the number of workers per application and new modalities of virtual work that should emerge will also require a reinforcement of the rules. “In the current government, there is no chance to revise this agenda, but the next one must create a universal protection system.”
The pandemic should also generate greater pressure for labor lawsuits. According to the TST (Superior Labor Court) more than 523 thousand cases were judged from March 2020 to September 2021 – an increase of 24.5%.
For law professor Ricardo Calcini, current legislation was not prepared for the pandemic. “The very provisional measures that were created in the period increased the demands in court and there was an increase in the litigation of issues, such as teleworking and occupational diseases.”
According to exclusive research by GPTW, the pandemic has, in fact, changed the perception that workers have of their professional environment. Mental health became more important for 80% of respondents, while 52.8% said that the company’s benefits policy has not changed.
.
Source: Folha
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
