Source: G1

Ibre / FGV researcher says that informality should increase with the law.
Secretariat of Policies for Women and the union bet on regularization.

Approved last Tuesday (26) by the Senate, the so-called PEC of domestic workers gives more rights to professionals in the category. According to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), however, most of these workers are still informal.

Of every ten domestic workers, only three were registered in the employment card, according to data from the National Household Sample Survey (Pnad) of 2011. The informality rate among these employees reaches 69%, and is even higher among women , which are more than 93,6% of this market. For them, informality is 70,7%, against 53% among men.

The data takes into account workers such as drivers, caregivers, monthly employees and even day laborers, forming a universe of 6,6 million workers.

According to the Union of Employees and Domestic Workers of São Paulo (Sindoméstica-SP), informality among monthly workers reaches 63%, with the other 47% having a portfolio.

“It is one of the most informal sectors of the economy, for sure”, says Fernando de Holanda Barbosa Filho, professor at the Brazilian Institute of Economics of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (Ibre / FGV).

Informality is even more pronounced in the Northeast region, where only 14% of domestic workers have a formal contract, against 36% in the Southeast.

Between 2001 and 2011, the formalization rate among domestic workers grew by 31,8%, while the number of domestic workers grew by 11,95%. Between 2009 and 2011, the rate rose by only 3 percentage points, from 26,4% to 29,3%, a difference considered small by the National Secretary for the Evaluation of Policies and Economic Autonomy of Women, of the Secretariat of Policies for Women of the Presidency of the Republic, Tatau Godinho.

Greater or lesser formalization?
Tatau believes, however, that the formalization will increase with the Domestic PEC.

“The expectation is that the legislation will increase formalization because we believe that there is an increase in the recognition in Brazilian society that this is a right”, says Tatau. “I do not believe it will decrease, even because those who are very afraid are because they do not comply with what they already have today.

The same opinion has the president of Sindoméstica-SP, Eliana Gomes Menezes: “it should improve because the boss will respect employees more. Today, several people came to ask questions about how to formalize ”, he says.

But researcher Fernando de Holanda Barbosa Filho, from Ibre, believes that PEC das Domésticas will increase the degree of informality in the market due to the increase in labor costs. “Regarding the law, what is observed is that it tends to increase informality, possibly there will be an exchange (from housekeepers to day laborers), replacing one type with another. The government is going to anticipate a natural process, since this work was being reduced, but it would take some years ”, says Barbosa.

The average salary of domestic workers is increasing at a high pace between 2009 and 2011, according to PNAD. The increase was 18% for workers with a formal contract and 29,7% for those without a formal contract.

The researcher, who develops the Underground Economy Index (IES) in partnership with the Brazilian Institute of Ethics in Competition (Etco), believes that the adjustment will not be immediate; it should happen gradually.

For the Secretariat of Policies for Women of the Presidency of the Republic, the number of domestic workers in the country is already decreasing, partly because women seek other forms of work and partly because families are organizing in another way.

Citing the reduction from 12% to less than 3% in the number of domestic workers who lived in the house where they work, between 1995 and 2009, Tatau Godinho sees a “brutal change in labor relations, domestic life, division of labor between women and men ”. "Society is learning to agree with a relationship that is not servile, it is work".