Self-Employment in Post-Pandemic Brazil: Intersecting Inequalities

One in four people who work in Brazil is “self-employed”, i.e. has a regular job but no employment relationship. In recent decades, the self-employed have been artificially added to the group of employers to form the extravagant category of Brazilian “entrepreneurs”, applied to name the owners of the means of production and the people who provide services for them as informal workers or as Individual Microentrepreneurs (MEIs) (ABÍLIO, 2021). These characteristics bring great complexity to this segment, which is crossed and shaped by the lasting effects of structural inequalities of class, gender, race and territory.

This study developed a methodology to visualize these intersecting inequalities in self-employment in Brazil through video animations, based on data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD-C), produced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). We compared the data for 2019 and 2023 - a period impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The main results show that the higher the income, the lower the presence of black people and women; the lower the income, the higher the frequency of black people, especially women, in all five macro-regions of the country.

Between 2019 and 2023, there were advances in the formalization of the self-employed, especially in sectors of activity with a greater presence of professionals with higher education, but informality remains the majority. Occupations with a degree became more frequent in 2023, especially in areas linked to care, in a probable reflection of the pandemic years. But even with a degree, black people have a lower income than white people in the same occupation.

The study demonstrates the need for public policies for the labor market that, while focusing on the specificities of the self-employed, also manage to disseminate mechanisms to combat structural discrimination that blocks the possibilities of social ascension for these workers.