An explosion in the hiring of temporary workers in the autarchies of the Ministry of the Environment has taken place under the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government. According to experts in public and environmental administration, the loss of permanent employees and the large-scale entry of temporary workers can lead to a precariousness of environmental governance.
An analysis carried out by República.org shows that since the beginning of the Bolsonaro government, there has been a 564% jump in the total number of temporary employees hired at environmental agencies, which include Ibama, ICMBio (Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation) and Jardim Botanical of Rio de Janeiro. The number jumped from 396 in 2019, the first year of the current government, to 2,630 in 2022.
The entity, which aims to improve the management of people who are part of the Brazilian public service, used data from the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) and Siape (Integrated Personnel Administration System), in addition to state and counties.
From 2013 to the current year, the maximum number of temporary servers had been 708, in 2015, with previous and subsequent numbers much lower, in general.
At the same time, there has been an uninterrupted loss of permanent civil servants in the municipalities. The process is already known and has been highlighted with some frequency, with notes of the weakening that this type of context can bring to public services specialized in the environmental area.
Permanent civil servants accounted for almost 90% of the contracts of the municipalities in 2013. In the current year, they represent about 56%.
Most of the temporary contracts are concentrated in ICMBio, according to República.org.
At the same time that the number of permanent employees falls and the number of temporary employees increases, the average salary in the municipalities is reduced.
According to Vanessa Campagnac, data and communication manager at República.org and one of the authors, one of the hypotheses raised, seeing the drop in the payroll, is that the vacancies occupied by temporary workers are of lesser qualification and that there is not a replacement of the permanent servers that have left.
“The data itself is very worrying,” says Campagnac. “The temporary person has another type of commitment to the state and to the public machine. And we can assume, with some certainty, that a permanent bond in an Environment portfolio is more susceptible to receiving training, having professional development that qualifies the performance to provide the best public service. And when there is a temporary one, we cannot guarantee that. It is there filling a hole.”
She considers that, as well as commissioned positions, temporary ones must also exist within the public machine, but that these maneuvers with servers need to be done carefully. “For team management, if this is not conducted well, it can have an impact on the operation”, says Campagnac.
Suely Araújo, a senior specialist in public policies at the Observatório do Clima, says that the signs brought by these data are negative and summarizes the picture as an outsourcing with no requirement for specialization in the environmental issue.
“It is a broader picture of the federal public administration, it is not exclusive to the Ministry of the Environment, but it certainly points to problems, which have repercussions on less effective results in terms of public policies”, says Araújo. “It’s time to revalue the public servant.”
The case of Ibama, one of the municipalities analyzed in the survey, is well known to Araújo, who is the former president of the institute. “There are about 5,000 vacancies for civil servants and not half of them are working. Under the Bolsonaro government, the competition they made for IBAMA and the Instituto Chico Mendes is far from meeting the demands of the two autarchies, but far from it.”
According to Araújo, the public selection prioritized mid-level civil servants and was carried out only as a way of trying to show service in the environmental area.
Since its inception, the Bolsonaro government has been widely criticized for the lack of effective actions in the environmental area and for the continuous and sharp increase in deforestation in the Amazon. Bolsonaro has even been accused of encouraging actions of environmental destruction, considering his speeches against enforcement agents and his defense of actions with broad impact, such as mining in indigenous lands.
The former president of IBAMA also states that, in the context of the reduction of effective servers, since the Bolsonaro government, there has been a greater number of retirements, due to difficulties in acting in the context of the new administration. “Who could retire, retired”, she says.
THE Sheet tried to contact the Ministry of the Environment to clarify the increase in temporary employees, but so far there has been no response.
gender inequality
República.org also analyzed state and municipal data and found, among them, positive signs and others not so much.
A problematic point, according to the analysis, is the low presence of women in environmental executive positions in the states. Only 2 out of 10 executive body leadership positions are held by women. At the municipal level, the value is practically the same.
At the same time, women who reach these positions are more educated than men in the same position. There are 8 out of 10 of them with a postgraduate degree, compared to 6 out of 10 of them. In the municipalities, the numbers are also similar, with 78% of women with a university degree or postgraduate degree, and only almost 52% of them with the same level of education.
In the federal government, almost 29% of positions are held by women, of which about 81% have undergraduate or graduate degrees; among men, these levels of education are achieved by only 47% of civil servants.
“It’s not surprising, but it’s pretty bad,” says Campagnac, noting that similar patterns are found in the job market.
At the same time, there are good examples. Cities in the states of Roraima and Piauà are the least unequal in terms of the presence of women in leadership positions.
The survey also observed which types of training were most offered to public servants. And here comes another positive highlight. States in the Northeast and Southeast more frequently addressed the issue of social participation in forums and committees on the environment. The help of civil society has been gaining more space internationally.
“This investment has taken place so that this participation is qualified. Often because managers are not prepared to deal with that participation, they think that everything is mimimi”, says the specialist from República.org.
This type of concern with civil society gains even more importance, says Campagnac, when considering the context of the Bolsonaro government in which several instances of social participation were terminated. “It’s a light at the end of the tunnel”, says the specialist.
