Hopelessness, dejection, downheartedness, bleakness. There are many synonyms for the word discouragement. But in present-day Brazil, the word means no more hope to find a job.
Either for lack of money - job hunting is not entirely free - or for having been looking for work for so long that the person no longer sees himself as able to work, discouraged Brazilian workers already amount to 4.8 million people - 4.3% of people at working age, according to IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).
It's an unprecedented rate: more than double the numbers from 2012 and 2015, when the unemployment rate, today at 12.3%, was in the single digits.
Discouraged workers are left out of the unemployment statistics because of certain criteria in the official surveys. Because of that, they feed spreadsheets with numbers that twist reality: the higher the number of discouraged workers, the lower the unemployment rate.
Discouraged workers are counted within the bulk of 65.5 million people out of the workforce, a label reserved for students and retirees, for example.
So, jobless people are classified into two groups. Nurse Santa Alves, truck loader José Modesta, and Neusa Francisca dos Santos, who worked as a housekeeper, that already lost all hope so they don't even leave the house to hunt for a job, are not considered unemployed.
Unemployed are people like Priscila Figueiredo, kitchen assistant Jeniffer Aparecida dos Santos e cleaner Doralice de Souza, whom, while having less and less money to take a bus or print a resume, are still searching for work.
According to Belinda Mandelbaum, professor of social and labor psychology at University of São Paulo (USP), discouraged works are not only left out of the statistics. Slowly, they are transferred to a sort of social limbo in real life. "They end up not being able to come and go as they please because they have no money for public transportation or gas. It creates a sort of social immobility because discouraged workers become restricted to their family circles," she says.
(Larissa Quintino and Paulo Muzzolon)
Translated by NATASHA MADOV
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