Care Work and Crisis in Brazil. New Inequalities?

Since 2015 Brazil has been witnessing an intense shrinking in occupational opportunities as economic crisis intensifies. Surprisingly, care work maintains its continuous trajectory of growth. The presentation will explore the correlates of this intriguing movement from different perspectives. Firstly, it will characterize the profile of those care-workers who achieved to preserve their jobs amidst the transition from intense growth to deep crisis; as we investigate characteristics like sex, race, age, family status, schooling and regional origin the paper will allow us to observe changes in the survivors profiles. Secondly, it will compare care-workers labor conditions (mainly their working hours) and their employment relations (mainly type and length of their contract, and their wages) before and after economic recession, in order to observe if any deterioration has been taking place. Thirdly, it will contrast tendencies observed in care work with changes in the profile of domestic employment in Brazil under the recent crisis; is it possible to assume that different “circuits of care” express different movements when recession intensifies? Since care work is considered a paradigm for the intersection of class, sex, and race, is it possible to consider that this consubstantiality change amidst situations of crisis? Do those changes differ when we observe various forms of work inside the care economy (as institutional care, home care, nannies, traditional domestic service)? To address those questions the paper will rely upon information gathered by the Brazilian National Household Annual Survey (PNAD-Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicilios), complemented with data from the Research on Employment and Unemployment (PED-Pesquisa de Emprego e Desemprego) conducted at the Metropolitan Region of Sao Paulo, the most important concentration of care-workers in Brazil.