Quality time emerges as an election issue
Eduardo Giannetti
Carol Carquejeiro/Valor
On lists of issues presented to voters, public safety, education, healthcare, and defending democracy seem more concrete. These are also the subjects that take up the most space in the leading candidates’ platforms—those who believe they may actually have to implement what they put on paper. But for voters, time is king. Working hours, long commutes on public transportation, and the lack of time for life outside work are ever-present concerns in daily life and political choices.
“People today understand that losing time means losing time with family, losing money, and losing dignity,” said political scientist Renato Meirelles, founder and CEO of public-opinion research firm Locomotiva. “The connection between those who govern and those who are governed will be restored only if workers regain some of their time,” said Meirelles, who has studied Brazilian voter behavior for 25 years, particularly among class C—Brazilians with monthly per capita household income of R$610 to R$2,150.
The phenomenon is reflected in the declining status of formal employment, which ties people’s lives to rigid rules and routines. In some younger circles, being formally employed under Brazil’s Consolidated Labor Laws (CLT) has become synonymous with being a loser. According to the Locomotiva team, a popular joke among these groups describes an ironing board as “a surfboard that took a CLT job.”
“To me, what has changed is people’s relationship with time—its monetary value, not only in the economic sense, but its broader worth,” Meirelles noted.
Knowing how much an hour lost waiting in line at a government office is worth—or costs. Or three hours a day on public transportation simply to get to work and return home in a major metropolitan area. Brazilian voters are calculating these costs more carefully every day.
What Meirelles has observed helps explain the decisions of people such as Bruno Leal, a 38-year-old Rio de Janeiro resident. After losing his formal job as an information technology programmer, Leal did not hesitate: he used his severance payment to buy a new Toyota Corolla and became an Uber Black driver. He has received offers to return to CLT employment, but the freedom to manage his own time mattered more.
“As an Uber driver, I can earn around R$12,000 a month. I set my own hours, prioritize scheduled rides, and can still fit in freelance IT work,” Leal said, describing a more peaceful life. Programming job offers have topped out at R$14,000 a month. “It isn’t worth it,” the programmer concluded, having worked at large firms including Ernst & Young.
The ability to organize his own workday and balance work with caring for his elderly parents are freedoms Leal no longer wants to surrender. He has therefore begun saving and investing for retirement. “I don’t believe the National Social Security Institute [INSS] will still exist to pay my retirement benefits 30 years from now,” he said.
For economists concerned about the finances and future of Brazil’s Social Security system, the missing piece is precisely how retirement will be funded, whether through individual savings or collectively by Brazilian society. As alternative work arrangements expand—including Individual Microentrepreneurs (MEIs) and people who sell services through apps—the Social Security system will likely have fewer contributors to finance future retirees.
“Brazilians tend to live in the present, enjoy exciting situations, and engage in magical thinking. Retirement planning is not appealing. Saving requires a great deal of self-discipline,” said economist Eduardo Giannetti, who believes Brazilians appear to want the best of both worlds—choosing what is best in the here and now while relying on magical thinking about the future.
“Government does not generate resources; it merely transfers them from one place to another. Government is one giant tree shaker,” Giannetti observed. “Until Brazil increases productivity, income will remain below the level needed to finance the government.”
Ducilvane Pereira de Araújo, a 51-year-old cook from Maranhão, began working at age 12. She celebrated her 15th birthday aboard an Itapemirim bus that took 72 hours to travel from São Luís to Rio de Janeiro. She accepts as a matter of course the three hours she spends commuting each day from Freguesia, in Rio’s West Zone near Cidade de Deus, to the South Zone. She uses the time to talk and make friends while traveling to her job in a private home. She has been formally employed since 1995.
“I value the security of CLT employment and want my rights guaranteed. Only after I retire through the INSS will I want to open a bar or restaurant to sell my savory snacks here in the community,” Araújo said. Her plans include helping her 13-year-old nephew Arthur study culinary arts at Senac beginning in 2027, to form a future family partnership.
Renato Meirelles
Gabriel Reis/Valor
In Meirelles’s research, many respondents cited humiliation, discrimination, sexual harassment, and workplace bullying as reasons they had lost the desire to remain salaried employees. However much times may change—and have been changing—the desire to stop putting up with indignities is a powerful motivation for people who exchange the security of CLT employment for the uncertainty of self-employment.
“There is a change in preferences among young people and throughout society. People do not want to stop being who they are and place themselves at the mercy [of an employer],” said Giannetti, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the author of several books. A liberal, Giannetti cited Karl Marx, the theorist of socialism, to describe the situation: “The wage worker feels like himself only when he is not working.”
Presidential candidates’ platforms offer proposed responses to this debate in two areas that could also shape voters’ decisions: better conditions for formal workers, particularly through the elimination of the 6x1 schedule—six days of work followed by one day off—and greater freedom, more access to credit, and less bureaucracy for people seeking to start businesses, regardless of their scale.
Brazil’s presidential candidates’ platforms address, or at least touch on, these themes, but analysts consider the proposals insufficient.
“None of them [the candidates]—no one—fully understands this problem,” Meirelles said.
“People want time. They want to be with their families, earn money on their own terms, know that on one day they can make more from a side job or a delivery gig, and that on another they can take their families to Guarujá [on the São Paulo coast],” the researcher said. “This ability to manage your own life, to have control over it, is what gives people dignity,” he added.
During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, opportunities for work mediated by digital platforms increased, while access to banking soared through Pix, Brazil’s free instant payment system. Brazil entered the pandemic with 23% of its population outside the banking system and emerged with only 3% lacking access to banking and money-transfer services.
“Brazilians who previously needed to be formally registered to receive certain payments or obtain a credit-card terminal gained a way to conduct financial transactions through Pix,” Meirelles said.
These new options led to a proliferation of self-employment opportunities. The difference between the periods before and after the pandemic is that, among younger generations, formal salaried employment is no longer synonymous with the aspirational model of success.
According to interviews Meirelles and his team conducted, perceptions have also changed among older people.
“You have older people approaching retirement who believe that receiving one minimum wage a month in retirement was not worth all the effort they made throughout their lives or the opportunities they lost because of the rigidity imposed by the CLT,” Meirelles concluded.
Translation: Todd Harkin
