LABOUR-BRAZIL: Unemployment Up for University Graduates

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 22 2004 (IPS) - The Brazilian labour market trends of the past few years belie the notion that a university education is enough to ensure one a decent job and a tranquil future.

Unemployment amongst university graduates in Brazil jumped 131 percent between 1995 and the beginning of 2003, while for workers who had only a primary school education it remained relatively stable, increasing just 6.9 percent in the eight-year period.

Alessandra Faria de Macedo, 26, graduated with a physical therapy degree two years ago. Hers is a typical case: she is looking for a full-time position while working 12 hours a week at a small clinic set up by her colleagues in an outlying neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro.

She earns just over 120 dollars a month, taking in 7.5 reais (2.6 dollars) for every treatment session as part of the contracts the clinic has with health insurance companies, she told IPS.

Of the 60 in her graduating class, only two found full-time work in the profession for which they were trained. Others found jobs in other areas, mostly in the informal sector, or went on to study something else, like management or advertising.

Or they are scraping by in a situation of underemployment like De Macedo.

Her hope is that more job opportunities will be available with the post-graduate degree in acupuncture that she has almost completed. Another possibility is a public sector job: the city of Rio de Janeiro is planning to hire 130 physical therapists over the next few months.

To apply for that job, De Macedo is taking a course specific to the work she would be doing. In the class are 80 people, and more than 70 are unemployed, she said.

With a stagnant national economy since the 1990s, the vast majority of the new jobs created in Brazil are for low-skilled workers, according to a study by the Sao Paulo municipal government’s Secretariat for Development, Labour and Solidarity, but based on official national statistics.

The past few years have been dramatic for workers pushed into the informal market and lower wages by a declining formal labour market. From 1989 to 2001, the number of unemployed people in Brazil increased more than four-fold, from 1.9 million to 7.8 million, according to figures from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

Millions of higher paying jobs disappeared. In 2002, just three in 10 new jobs were in the formal market, with the rest being informal jobs, self-employment or domestic work.

"Intellectual unemployment" is a new phenomenon in Brazil, because for the past several decades a university education guaranteed a good job, says Marcio Pochman, the Sao Paulo secretary of development and labour.

The current situation has forced many graduates to settle for work in areas that require less training or education than they have, he said, adding that this squandering of ability was confirmed in the cases of 425,000 Brazilians with tertiary degrees last year.

This panorama gives the lie to the thesis that more training reduces unemployment, says Anselmo Luis dos Santos, professor and researcher at the Centre for Union and Labour Economy Studies, at the University of Campinas, near Sao Paulo.

That neoliberal economic idea is a way of "blaming unemployment on its victims," just as in the past the trade unions and their demands for higher salaries were blamed, Dos Santos said in a conversation with IPS.

He said today’s high unemployment rate – hovering around 12 percent, according to official reports – is due in large part to two converging factors: the lack of economic growth and the proliferation over the past decade of new university degrees at private institutions.

>From 1992 to 2001, 2.87 million students graduated from Brazil’s universities, but just two million new jobs were created that were in keeping with their qualifications, Dos Santos added.

In general, experts reckon that the Brazilian economy would have to grow more than five percent a year to absorb the 1.5 million young workers who enter the labour market annually – and who are the principal "victims" of unemployment.

The lower quality of teaching at some of the private universities contribute to the fact that holding a degree has lost some of its former status as a professional advantage, said the labour expert.

Furthermore, big companies, especially in industry, have made deep cuts in the number of university graduates on their payrolls, replacing them with new technologies and new management models, which eliminated many of the tasks in the hierarchy, said Dos Santos.

But from another perspective, in a situation of economic stagnation and high unemployment, companies could increase their education requirements for new hires, given that there is an oversupply of skilled labour. But that would change if there is significant economic growth, he said.