03/07/2024 – 7:00
The Brazilian government’s payroll is heavy, although not as large as one might imagine. Brazil has about 12% of its workforce in the public service – including states, municipalities, the federal government, and civil and military personnel. The average among OECD countries is 18%. In the United States, it is 15%. However, from the perspective of the cost of this workforce, Brazil stands out with 1.6% of GDP directed, while the average among developed countries is 0.3% and in developing countries – like Brazil – 0.5%.
+ Public career structure needs to be rethought in Brazil, says Arminio Fraga
But more than how much is spent is how. Inequalities such as more than half of civil servants earning less than R$4,000 per month, while the top 1% earns over R$27,000. In 2023, more than a thousand judges earned more than R$1 million.
This type of distortion has a solution. But it requires the willingness of authorities to promote an administrative reform with a review of public careers. These are some of the points addressed by economist Bruno Carazza in “The Country of Privileges: The New and Old Owners of Power,” the first book in a trilogy that addresses the perks and benefits enjoyed by the top executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, based on an analysis of the payrolls of courts, ministries, parliaments and the Armed Forces, among other institutions of the Brazilian State.
Check out the main excerpts from the interview:
There is a lot of talk these days about government spending cuts. Are they cutting these privileges?
We always talk a lot about cutting costs, about administrative reform, and at the same time, we tend to lump all public servants together as if it were one thing.But when we look at the data and compare it with other countries, we come to some conclusions. First, Brazil does not have as many public servants as people usually say and imagine.Compared to the United States and European countries, we have proportionally even fewer public servants than these countries. But the payroll in Brazil is heavier than in these other countries.
Is it because all public servants earn a lot in Brazil? No, it is not. It is because a small elite of the Brazilian public service receives very low salaries that end up burdening the budget.
So, if you take, for example, public servants who work directly with the population, public school teachers, SUS nurses, Public Security professionals, they receive less than their equivalents in the private sector, but when you move up the scale and go mainly to legal careers, this is reversed.
With so many distortions and inequalities in public service remuneration, what is needed to address the issue, for administrative reform?
There are a number of points that we could advance, without necessarily entering into this discussion that has become very ideological in recent years.Every time we talk about administrative reform, there are people who are hyper liberal and think that you need to reduce the State to the minimum possible. which is not appropriate, because we have a country that is very complex, a country that has many inequalities, a country in which the State is relevant. And on the other side you have a very statist vision, linked to many people on the left, who believe that nothing should be done in the State so as not to weaken the provision of public services. But we know that public services in Brazil are not provided adequately.
There doesn’t need to be less state, but there needs to be a better state, more efficient, and to do this we would need to advance on several points.
In this matter of pay, without a doubt, it is essential that we recover the authority that the pay ceiling has. The Constitution establishes that the highest income is that of the Supreme Court ministers. [Tribunal Federal]. This must be respected and that’s it. If not, there is no point in having a ceiling, If 93% of judges earn more than the ceiling, there is no ceiling. So I think the first thing is to regain the authority of the ceiling, this should come from the Supreme Court reforming it, declaring all payments that exceed the ceiling as constitutional.
But in the Judiciary itself, for example, when questioned about their high salaries, the argument is that they deal with very sensitive issues in society, such as freedom and justice, and that they have a very important role. Does this make sense? How do we weigh up who is most important in this social mechanism?
That is the very interesting question. Pwhy it is difficult to weigh up the importance of careers.Without a doubt, legal careers, judicial careers, are very important. But isn’t environmental preservation also important? Or the work of SUS health agents. We have just come out of the federal universities’ strike, where we talked about research and innovation, which is also important for the future of the country.All careers have their justification, and all of them, in general, perform a function that is very essential to society. So, Just because of the importance of careers, you could not justify an income so much above the average of the Brazilian population.
And where could this reform begin?
We should start to change the perspective of paying for the importance of the career, and instead think about systems that evaluate the performance of each of these employees, that pay for their effective contribution, and not extract these high incomes without any type of evaluation, just for career time.
And how did these privileged groups get to this point of so many privileges and manage to maintain them, even though they are unsustainable for public accounts?
They are powerful careers, which make lobby powerful, they can create these benefits for themselves. AndThese careers tend to be very corporatist, So they end up creating a legal system for these benefits, and in the case of the judiciary, it is very strong.
A National Council of Justice and a National Council of Public Prosecutors were created with the reform of the Judiciary, precisely to to carry out administrative control over the acts of the members of these courts. But what happened in the implementation of these councils? They have a majority, their advisors are career members themselves, so there is corporatism that ends up protecting those civil servants who do not make the due contribution.
It is worth remembering that, according to data from the courts’ payrolls, many judges earn more than STF ministers. These are benefits and vacations that boost their salaries. In 2023, more than a thousand judges earned more than R$1 million.
The more the Brazilian State distributes these special treatments to group A, B or C, the State becomes increasingly fragile and we live in ever greater chaos. SWhenever one group is winning on one side, the other is losing in society.
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