Museu da Republica

The working population of Brazil is 69 million people, 60% of whom work on an informal basis (with no fixed employer, paying no taxes and never having contributed to social security). Most of these people work as plumbers, electricians or firemen, or they hawk gadgets from city sidewalks.

Between 1996 and 1999, unemployment rose 12% per year. Seventy percent of these informal workers (who work in the underground economy) live in cities with less than 200,000 inhabitants. And about 50% of the poor people belong to families who work underground, with an income of less than $35 per month.

Income for the majority of these people is uncertain and irregular. There are numerous cases of people who started working on the streets selling candies at five or six years of age. Some were able to « move up » to a career where, by the age of twenty-nine, they graduated to repairing chairs on the sidewalk in the Copacabana neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro.

Exploiting kids as young labourers is also a very common practice in Brazil. Although Brazil has had child-labour laws on its books since 1891, most corporations, the government and society seem to have ignored them. Children 7 to 14 years old have ended up working in virtually every industry, from shoemaking to charcoal production to fruit-picking. By 1996, 3.3 million Brazilian youngsters were working.

Today, the number of Brazil’s child workers has fallen to 2.5 million. Yet, many Brazilians privately scorn efforts to end child labour. They note that even the United States once battled this problem and that some American children, especially in rural areas, are no strangers to 12-hour workdays.

In Brazil, child labour is so ingrained that parents rarely criticize the government for not providing better jobs or adequate schooling. Instead, they feel grateful to the farm owner who employs their children, enabling them to help out the family by bringing home a little money for food.

In 1996, international pressure compelled the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to start fighting child labour. The keystone of the resulting initiative is a program that pays parents to send their children to school.

Many projects and partnerships between the state and society have been developed to tackle the problem of child labour. But because people are realizing more and more that getting a job is an unattainable dream, many youngsters hit the streets—either directly, on the informal job market—or they get involved in drugs to try and escape the poverty and misery of their families.

Nonetheless, although common sense would indicate that universal education is a given in a country that provides the basic rights of citizenship—equality, opportunity, freedom of speech and civic responsibility—a vicious circle has formed which involves increased unemployment, exploitation of children, an underground job market and poverty.

The challenge remains to stop looking for a global solution that would eradicate poverty and guarantee employment for all. Ideally, authorities would concentrate on finding alternatives to the vicious circle of poverty which would dissuade lower middle-class parents from forcing their kids into the underground economy and out of school, with the lesser-educated ones going directly into organized crime. Maybe there would be a chance to create conditions more conducive to forming citizens who are more conscious of their minimum rights as human beings.

The participation of a more proactive society with solid references from successful experiences in developed countries might be a start toward reducing the number of Brazilians deprived of education and full citizenship in this globalized society.

Anelise Pacheco, Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil