Brazil’s economic policy, in Lula da Silva’s third presidential term, seems increasingly paradoxical and difficult to analyze even by the most sensible experts. Depending on which side you look at, the result can be very different. It is true that the economic indices, except for food inflation, are nothing to dance with joy about. The number of millions of poor people is not pleasant either.
The paradox has just been revealed by an extensive report by BBC Brazil that offers concrete data and eyewitnesses about the new position of the youngest, who not only appear to be the most affected by unemployment but, on the contrary, are leaving their permanent jobs. in a company to feel free to create their own work.
The issue was not born with the Lula Government, although it does end up worrying him. It was as a result of the covid pandemic when so many workers until then with permanent jobs in companies began to work in their own homes with greater freedom of movement. From then on, the number of people who enjoyed a permanent and secure job in a company took a liking to the freedom of working from home, which led millions to create their own company.
The numbers are significant and could create an earthquake that will force the Government to review its labor and union policy. The latest official numbers are enough and speak for themselves: the Ministry of Labor has announced that in 2023 there will be a whopping 7.3 million permanent and in-person workers in companies who have resigned from their jobs, the largest contingent in 20 years.
According to the confessions of these workers, the adventure has been worth it because they feel in control of their own decisions and end up obtaining many times more profits than in their previous permanent job in a large company. In 2014, 4.6 million workers left a company to try their own luck. Today, in a single year the number has risen to 15.7 million. And the trend that is beginning to worry large industries is that the number of workers who try to create their own resources without feeling tied to the precepts of the large companies in which they worked continues to grow.
All of this is in some way alarming and confusing Lula, focused on the strength of the labor struggles and demands of the large factories and who is observing that those times have already passed and today the world of work and its demands go through other logarithms that coincide. with the digital advance that convulses the old labor canons.
I remember years ago when a friend of mine was working in Italy, who had just retired from his job at a national bank where he had spent 40 years of his life. He was happy because his eldest son was replacing him at his job and he knew she would remain there for the rest of her life until she retired.
Those years no longer exist. Today, job mobility prevails over the stability that spanned a lifetime. Today the labor revolution is moving faster and faster in search of new, more elastic forms of work and in many cases with greater profits. And it is this circumstance that is being consolidated more and more quickly that has somehow disconcerted Lula’s third term, who is discovering that his old union methods are becoming old.
This was evident when, upon reaching his third presidential term, he tried, for example, to regulate, in the style of the past, new professions such as those of Uber or the army of delivery workers who now number millions and who wanted to frame them in the old union clichés. He had to give up because these new professions are precisely looking for new paths and demands in which they feel like small entrepreneurs with much greater margins of personal freedom at work.
All of this may be related to the increasingly striking paradox of a country in which economic indices improve while support for the new Government has not taken off and reveals that disapproval rates are increasing.
And it would not be strange if the difficulty that the Brazilian Government encounters every day in approving its bills in Congress is frustrated by the fact that many of its law proposals are boycotted by deputies and senators from parties that have ministers in the Congress. new coalition government.
And not only in Brazil, but in general the world of work, is taking a turn in direction more in line with the ongoing upheaval of the new digital era that is beginning to affect, to the stupefaction of the old political class, everyone. related to the emergence of a new middle class that is increasingly distancing itself from that of past years.
And it is in view of this new middle class seeking to create its own company that the new governments, if they do not want to enter into a crisis, will need new antennas capable of detecting the tectonic plates that, although still in their infancy, could reach even the traditional concept of to do politics and to put in crisis the bastions of democracy increasingly threatened by the radical parties of an extreme fascist right that step by step is eating away at the pillars of the freedoms that the democratic revolution gave us in the past in the interest of a life where, without seeking an equality that will never exist, it is possible for everyone to live with dignity.
It is no mystery that the three columns of the French Revolution of equality, liberty and fraternity were the fulcrum of a new democracy. But it also cannot be denied that freedom and equality, no matter how worthy they may be, will always be in some way incompatible with each other. If it were attempted, for example, to distribute the world’s wealth equally, very soon that equality would be broken because there would be those who use it to create more wealth and those who would end up squandering it, impoverishing them.
Perhaps politicians should dust off the wise old Latin adage of in medio virtus, that is, virtue is in the middle and not in the extremes, something that today politics tends to forget too often by slipping towards the extremes.
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