Economic Crisis Puts Hundreds of Thousands of Brazilians Out of Work
Pastor Dale Morgan
Economic Crisis Puts Hundreds of Thousands of Brazilians Out of Work*
Latin American Herald Tribune
As the economic crisis begins to bite around the world, the BRIC
economies are not immune, and Brazil is seeing its affects as tens of
thousands of workers are fired and forced to struggle for work in the
streets and 100,000 cars were returned/repossessed since October.
SAO PAULO – The reverberations of the world economic crisis have
resulted in 88,000 Brazilians losing their jobs and turning to working
in the informal economy to survive since October, the press reported on
Sunday, citing a new Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, or
IBGE, report.
The partial report, which was posted on the Web site of the Folha de Sao
Paulo newspaper, analyzed the six metropolitan regions that are taken
into account when measuring the South American country’s unemployment rate.
Since October, the number of informal workers grew by 14.2 percent to
709,000, according to the IBGE figures.
So-called “underemployment” causes people to work more hours each day
without any kind of extra remuneration, and because they’re working for
themselves, so to speak, they must pay all their own health and other
social welfare costs, although most people in the informal economy
cannot afford to pay for those prior necessities anyway.
In January, the informal economy grew by 11 percent compared with the
same month in 2008, and between December and January, Brazil lost 1.6
percent of its regular formal jobs.
Another discouraging piece of data is that in Brazil, because of the
world crisis, at least 100,000 automobiles had to be returned by their
purchasers between October and last week because they had bought the
vehicles with loans on which they could not make the required payments.