Labour Turnover and Women's Work

Susan Cunningham's use of the data from the Relagdo Annual de Informa9oes Sociais provides a good example of the potentialities opened up to researchers by the expansion of statistical sources in Brazil in the past decade. Although some reservations about the reliability of the RAIS data need to be stated, there is no doubt that it represents a considerable advance on previously available labour-force statistics. This is above all the case with respect to data discriminated by sex. All the RAIS tables provide figures for the total population and for women. This compares to the Industrial Censuses which have only had one table with data on male and female workers. In addition, there are tables on turnover and length of employment which are without precedent. Although the figures for later years have not been published, extensive tables for 1979 and 1980 have been circulated to selected institutions by the Ministry of Labour, and it is to be hoped that the current economic crisis in Brazil does not lead the government to regard labour statistics as too politically sensitive to be made available. If the state resists the temptation to suppress the information it is collecting annually (and the signs are not too hopeful, in fact), then researchers will have a much better base for the examination of labour force trends in the 1980s than was the case for the 1970s

Demographic economics · Economics · Labour economics · Sociology · Work (physics · Engineering · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Mechanical Engineering