Unemployment rises to 7.8% and reaches 8.5 million
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The unemployment rate in the country rose to 7.8% in the quarter ended in February compared to the quarter ended in November. Today, around 8.5 million workers are looking for work in the country – 332 thousand more.
The data is part of the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) and was released this Thursday (28) by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
For Adriana Beringuy, coordinator of Household Surveys at IBGE, the recent increase may have to do with the time of year. “People who, eventually, had interrupted their search for work in December and returned to looking for a job in the early months of the following year,” she said, regarding the results presented.
Still according to IBGE, despite the recent increase, unemployment in the country is still lower than it was a year ago. In the same period last year, the rate was 8.6%.
The number of people working in the country remained stable when comparing the quarter ended in November to the quarter ended in February. There are 100.2 million. This is 2.2% more than what was recorded last year: 99.1 million workers.
The number of employees with a work permit in the private sector reached 37.995 million, a new record in the Continuous PNAD series. In the year, it grew 3.2%.
The underutilization rate (percentage of the population that would like to work more than they already do) reached 17.8% at the end of February, 0.5 points higher than in November. Still, it is 1 point lower than that of February 2023.
The underutilized population is 20.6 million. It grew 3.4% in the quarter and fell 4.5% in one year.
The number of discouraged people (who gave up looking for work) reached 3.7 million people, an increase of 8.7% in the quarter. It was the first increase since April 2021, during the pandemic, when the number of discouraged people reached 5.9 million.
The average income of employed people reached R$3,110, an increase of 1.1% in the quarter and 4.3% in the annual comparison.
Editing: Vivian Virissimo
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