Dealing with the Issue of Unemployed Youths in Brazil

The Latin Americanist points us to this IPS story on the exclusion of young people throughout Latin America:

"Seven million young Brazilians and nearly 800,000 youngsters in Argentina swell the ranks of a veritable army of Latin American youths who neither work nor study -- a phenomenon that threatens to continue reproducing poverty unless effective measures are urgently taken to integrate them in society, say experts.
In Brazil, those who do not work or attend school make up nearly 20 percent of young people between the ages of 15 and 24, according to a study on youth development drawn up by sociologist Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz."

I can't address the other parts of Latin America too well, but this is definitely the case in Brazil, and not just among those who cannot afford to go to college. Even those who graduate from the federal universities (the highest level schools in Brazil are public) are having an extremely difficult time finding jobs. Certainly, students who graduate in some areas, such as computer science or international business, aren’t struggling as much as students from other areas, but by and large, most graduates are directly affected. Students in engineering and medicine are finding the job market saturated, a direct result from the military dictatorship’s policies in the 1960s and 1970s of emphasizing these areas as part of the state’s vision of “development” for Brazil. And as difficult as it is in those areas, students who finish with bachelors’ degrees in the humanities and social sciences are having an even more difficult time.

One of my wife’s cousins offers a telling example of the struggles and exploitation students face at the undergraduate level. She was a student at a federal university in Minas Gerais, getting her degree in architecture with an emphasis on historical restoration projects. While in school, she had an internship at the university’s museum. Despite three years’ experience in the museum, she was let go upon graduation because they could underpay some other college student instead of offering her a full-time job and have her take the job of somebody who already worked there as a full-time employee. My wife’s cousin repeatedly tried to get work in historical restoration, but was repeatedly turned away because she “lacked real experience.” The trap here was obvious – she couldn’t get a job because she didn’t have the “experience,” yet she couldn’t get the “experience” without getting a job. She was facing the prospect of having to work some menial job in retail or worse because she couldn’t get a job in her field, a prospect that thousands of college graduates in Brazil face.

However, the Brazilian government has quietly been trying to address this problem. Using federal money, it has begun a series of programs that seek to offer decent (but not great) paying internships to university graduates that help them to gain experience in their fields. My wife’s cousin managed to get a government-funded position working on historical restoration in Paraty, a city on the coast in southwestern Rio de Janeiro state. Paraty not only has beautiful beaches that attract tourists both within Brazil and from abroad; it also has an enormous historical patrimony-district that is protected by law. My wife’s cousin has landed a job with IPHAN (Instito Patrimonico Historico e Artistico Nacional) through this government program to work in Paraty for two years. This opportunity lets her (and others) gain experience in their field and have a job upon finishing undergrad, and gives them a chance to be better equipped for a job market that demands “experience”.

Nor are the programs limited to historical renovation. One of my wife’s friends graduated with a degree in Social Sciences. She was struggling to find a job in her area instead of some job involving menial tasks in retail or as a secretary (pretty women in Brazil have a particularly difficult time, and often end up as secretaries, hired for their looks in an extremely gender-biased and objectifying process). However, through the same broad government efforts, she got a job teaching sociology as part of an integrated program of education in the small city of Macaé, in Rio de Janeiro. The program is designed to help students who underperform or who have particular needs that need to be addressed in school. Thus, while she teaches these students about sociology with an emphasis on their hometown of Macaé, another person teaches biology, using Macaé as its basis; another, history; another, math; and so on. In this case, the benefits from the government program are triplicate: my wife’s friend has found a decent-paying job out of university with a degree in social sciences; the program is helping her to gain experience for the future, when she enters the job market; and children whose educational needs had previously been ignored are now receiving the attention and education they need, with this integrative program focusing on their city helping make learning easier and more accessible to them.

The benefits of these programs are clear. Not only is the government using federal money for these decent-paying “internships” (though they are far more secure and less exploitative than most internships) to help try to address the employment issue among the young. It is directly helping those graduates gain work experience for a job market that is often hostile to those who are “lacking experience” yet for whom the market does little to help them gain that experience. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, local areas in Brazil are directly benefitting. In the case of Paraty, the city gets help improving its historical renovations and protection from people who are educated in these areas, which in turn will help the city protect its land while bringing in more tourist money, thereby aiding the entire area (which includes an indigenous aldeia and a quilombo in the areas around Paraty). In the case of Macaé, the government programs are directly addressing education needs that had been previously ignored, giving disadvantaged students new opportunities and possibly offering a better future than they previously might have had.

To my knowledge, these types of programs seem to aid graduates of the federal university system. There may be other programs I don’t know about that will help students who graduate from private universities, technical schools, or even high schools, but there may not be, too; I only know of direct cases for those who have graduated from the federal universities. And certainly, the programs do not help everybody, so that those in rural areas, the poor, or those facing other economic or social roadblocks may not have the same opportunites being provided for them that the government is offering university graduates. Still, I find it extremely encouraging that, instead of ignoring the problem or chalking it up to the “vagaries of private employment,” the current administration is trying to do something to address this problem. Not only that, the administration has created programs that will and are directly aiding smaller towns like Paraty and Macaé. The fact that the government is doing so in a way that Brazilian society sees real rewards from the investments of the government, both in the opportunity for employment for university graduates and for the ways in which the programs directly aid local communities in Brazil, is extremely encouraging.