Por Akracia – Fenikso Nigra
Brazil ended 2025 with an unemployment rate of 5.6%, the lowest since the historical series began in 2012. The government celebrates. Economists project stability. Headlines announce full employment. Numbers impress.
But what work is being counted?
The unemployment rate measures who seeks work and doesn’t find it. It doesn’t measure quality. It doesn’t measure compensation. It doesn’t measure rights. Someone working three hours a week as an app delivery person appears in statistics as employed. Technically, they’re not unemployed. Practically, they survive on insufficient income with no protection.
Informality in Brazil reaches historic levels. More than 40% of the employed population works without a signed work card, without vacation, without thirteenth-month salary, without FGTS, without guaranteed retirement. These workers exist in employment statistics. They disappear in rights statistics.
The growth of app-based work reorganized the labor market without reorganizing protections. Transport drivers, delivery workers, domestic workers contracted through digital platforms—all appear as employed. The company profiting from this work has no employment relationship, pays no payroll taxes, bears no labor rights costs. It transfers all risks to those who work.
This reorganization is not market failure. It is deliberate project. Technology companies built business models based on classifying workers as “partners” or “entrepreneurs.” Legislation allowed it. The judiciary validated it in several cases. The result is work without rights sold as freedom and flexibility.
The autonomy discourse conceals subordination. A driver who must accept 80% of rides to avoid algorithm punishment is not autonomous. A delivery worker whose account gets blocked for refusing deliveries in dangerous areas is not an entrepreneur. They are subordinate workers without legal recognition of this subordination.
The 2017 labor reform facilitated this precariousness. Intermittent contracts, variable hours, exclusive self-employment—all these modalities expanded jobs in statistics while contracting rights in practice. The number of employed grew. The share of wages in national income fell.
Defenders argue that flexibilization generates jobs. Numbers apparently confirm: unemployment fell. But what jobs emerged? Work paying less than minimum wage, without stability, without prospect of improvement. Open unemployment was replaced by generalized underemployment.
International comparison reveals political choices. European countries maintain similar or lower unemployment rates with robust labor protections. Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark operate flexible labor markets without destroying rights. The difference is not technical but distribution of power between capital and labor.
In Brazil, low unemployment coexists with high turnover. Companies constantly fire and hire, taking advantage of permissive legislation. Workers remain few months in jobs, don’t accumulate seniority, don’t achieve stability. They live in permanent state of insecurity even while formally employed.
Domestic work illustrates another dimension of the problem. Millions of domestic workers were formalized in the last decade. They appear in formal employment statistics. But they remain among the worst-paid categories, with exhausting hours and precarious conditions. Formalization without structural transformation merely legalizes exploitation.
Young people face particularly difficult situations. First jobs require experience. Internships pay poorly or nothing. Temporary contracts succeed one another without becoming permanent. The unemployment rate among 18-24 year-olds remains double the national average. When they get jobs, they’re frequently precarious.
Historical experiences show alternatives. During England’s industrial revolution, workers organized production cooperatives controlled by those who actually work. Argentina has a strong tradition of recovered factories managed by workers. Brazil has a solidarity economy with thousands of collective enterprises where results and decisions are horizontal.
These alternative forms don’t eliminate work risks. But they distribute control and benefits among those who work, not concentrate them in distant shareholders. App cooperatives controlled by drivers and delivery workers exist in various cities. They function but face unequal competition with platforms operating under accumulation logic.
The problem is not just precarious work replacing protected work. It’s a structure that allows some to profit extraordinarily by exploiting millions’ labor. App companies are worth billions. They share a tiny fraction of this value with those who actually produce the service.
The response is not to defend unemployment as better alternative. Unemployment is violence. But precarious employment is also violence, just distributed in ways that don’t appear in main statistics. Someone working twelve hours daily for less than minimum wage is technically employed but lives in constant material insecurity.
Recognizing metric limitations doesn’t mean ignoring it. Unemployment rate matters. Fewer people desperately seeking work is better than more in this situation. But it must come with questions about quality: how much does this work pay? How many hours does it require? What protections does it offer? Is there prospect of improvement?
Uncritical celebration of the historic record hides these questions. It presents a number as absolute achievement when it is, at best, partial achievement. At worst, it’s a statistical figure masking growing precariousness.
Between accepting precariousness as employment’s price and demanding dignified work for all, no neutrality is possible.
The number may be record. Reality is not victory.
In struggle we continue—dignified, free, and untamable.
