disaggregations under which the orders of magnitude changed concerning the composition of the
informal labor force in Colombia, which is consistent due to social distancing measures instituted by the Colombian government.
1.2.
Brazilian informal labor market
According to the Brazilian Institute of Statistics and Geography (IBGE), informal workers are identified as: • •
Private sector workers with temporary contracts that do not have their labor card signed; Domestic Workers without the labor card signed;
• Employers and self-employed workers without their business properly registered at the National Register of Juridic Persons (CNPJ) and •
Auxiliary family workers (IBGE 2021).
Brazilian workers that do not possess a labor card signed (carteira de trabalho) do not have insurance,
neither guaranteed labor rights or social security benefits, such as: minimum wage, annual leave, medical leave and others. The beginning of an upward trend in informality began in the 1990s because of the composition effect of two economic events. Firstly, the growth of the services sector – composed by a high rate of informality – and secondly by the retraction of the transformation industry, which was responsible for the production of many formal jobs (Yahmed 2017). Figure 2 expresses the Brazilian informality trend from the first trimester of 2012 until the fourth trimester of 2020.
What grabs our attention is the remarkable difference between the third trimester of 2015 and its last
one. This happens due to the sudden temporal account of self-employed and employers with no registration as part of the informal labor sector. Additionally, the Brazilian 2015 crisis was also a factor in the increasing contingency of unemployed people (Barbosa 2020).
Before 2015 there was stability on the informality levels that is prevented from being analyzed due to the
absence of the self-employed and employer categories. But after 2015 there are several fluctuations, culminating in a new high of 41.1% of informality share in the third trimester of 2019. From this former trimester, there was a trend of decline for the informality rate that reached a new low in the second trimester of 2020 (Costa, The pandemic and the labor market in Brazil 2020). Afterward, this movement is reversed reaching 39;1% of informality, a 3 percent increase for the second trimester of 2020.
8
