RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Gov’t to Reserve Job Quotas for Blacks

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 13 2001 (IPS) - The Brazilian government decided to start with its own employees and those of private companies contracted to provide services to the government to reserve 20 percent of jobs for people of African descent.

The quotas, adopted experimentally three months ago by the Ministry of Agrarian Development on the initiative of Minister Raúl Jungmann, will be made official on Dec 19 by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The measure will first be extended to the Ministry of Justice, and gradually to the entire government.

The affirmative action or positive discrimination measure, designed by the State Secretariat on Human Rights, will requiere that at least 20 percent of jobs in the central government and companies to which the executive branch outsources be reserved for blacks.

The requirement will apply to all future tenders awarded by the government. In Brazil, nearly half of all public services are contracted out to private companies.

“The big challenge is not so much enforcing the quotas, but enabling blacks to rise to leadership posts,” writer Joel Rufino dos Santos, the state of Rio de Janeiro’s under-secretary of human rights, told IPS.

Blacks are present in many government bodies, but only in low- ranking jobs, even though some of them are “as capable as, or more capable than, their bosses,” said Rufino, who is a professor of literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, one of the few Brazilians of African descent to reach such a position.

Minister Jungmann said he decided to resort to affirmative action after certifying that in his ministry, as in the labour market in general, only five percent of the higher-up or better- paying technical and managerial posts were held by blacks.

“Only discrimination explains that small proportion, because the existence of such a gap in capacities is not possible,” said Jungmann, pointing out that blacks and mixed-race persons with African forebears comprise a majority in Brazil.

Actually, official statistics, and even the figures collected by the black rights movement, report that people of African descent represent around 45 percent of the population of 170 million.

That underrepresentation arises from the fact that only 39 percent of Brazilians identity themselves as “pardo” (brown, or mixed-race), while a mere five to six percent describe themselves as “black”.

Affirmative action measures like those which have served as an important tool in the civil rights struggle in the United States since the 1960s face strong opposition in Brazil. The government’s decision to adopt quotas recently fanned the flames of the debate.

Recommendations to apply affirmative action measures were set forth in Brazil’s report to the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa last September. The proposal was not based on a government position, but was approved in assemblies of representatives of the government and civil society.

But President Cardoso expressed his support for that mechanism, seen as one way to redress injustices and inequalities inherited from the past, from the times when Africans, their descendants and indigenous people were enslaved.

The controversy, however, has mainly focused on the adoption of quotas by universities, recommended by those who point out that few blacks and people of mixed-race descent have access to higher education, a factor that tends to perpetuate inequality.

Education Minister Paulo Renato Souza is opposed to quotas in education. His proposal, which has already been implemented, is to create a network of special courses to help blacks and low-income students prepare for university entrance exams.

The problem is that poor students, who attend badly under- funded public schools, are unable to compete with their counterparts from the middle and upper classes, who study in private schools that provide higher quality education.

However, Souza argues that blacks “can make it into the university on their own merits” if they are better prepared.

Positive discrimination measures also face resistance in the judiciary. The president of the High Court of Justice, Paulo Costa Leite, rejected the measure, arguing that the ascent of blacks must occur naturally, through greater efforts in education.

The quotas, according to Costa Leite, aggravate prejudices and are unconstitutional in the form in which they are being instituted, by an administrative decree rather than by law.

But a higher judicial authority, the president of the Federal Supreme Court, Marco Aurelio de Mello, decided to extend the executive branch’s measure to the posts under his jurisdiction, arguing that the quotas are backed by the constitution, which guarantees equal conditions for all Brazilians.

The system is positive even if it does generate suspicions that a black employee has been hired or promoted based on the colour of his or her skin, said Rufino. The adoption of such a measure by the government “generates a new process” and gives a boost to the fight for reducing ethnic and social inequalities in Brazil, according to the writer.