IBGE has 90,000 vacancies open for census takers

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) still faces a deficit of around 90,000 workers to work on the Demographic Census, which has been in the field for almost four months with the mission of visiting all of the approximately 75 million homes in All country.

The difficulty in recruiting and keeping the census takers working in the collection forced the institute to extend the work, initially scheduled to extend between August 1st and October 31st.

The IBGE has already trained almost 200,000 census takers. However, only 96,455 of them are working, equivalent to 53% of the total vacancies expected to make the entire survey feasible. The states most in need of new hires are Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

“Across the country, the Census has approximately 90,000 vacancies. According to IBGE technicians in the field, half of that (45,000) is enough for the collection to speed up”, guaranteed the IBGE, in response to Broadcast, Grupo Estado’s real-time news system.

Faced with this difficulty, the federal government published in the Official Gazette this Monday (21), a Provisional Measure making the rules for hiring temporary workers for the Demographic Census more flexible.

“The MP waives the need to carry out a selection process and allows for the inclusion of retirees by the Union, State, Federal District or Municipal social security systems. The activities to be performed by contractors must be ordinary activities relevant to the census. There will be equal conditions in the selection, contracting and execution of the contract between retirees and other competitors or contractors”, informed the IBGE, in a note.

After 113 days of collection, only 154.266 million Brazilians were registered, within a population estimated at more than 215 million people. On Monday, only 63.7% of the 452,246 census tracts were completed. There were 29.6% still in progress, and another 6.7% not even started.

In some regions, the work was more delayed, as in Mato Grosso, where 46.4% of the census tracts were completed, but 30.9% were still in progress and 22.7% had not yet started collection.

“The collection period is still maintained, scheduled to end in mid-December. No further extension is foreseen”, said the IBGE to the report.

Although late, the MP has the potential to solve the problem of shortage of census takers, if it results in “good adherence” of candidates, assess IBGE technicians. As anticipated by the Broadcast on September 23, the IBGE had been trying to combat the slowness of collection with promises of bonus payments for productivity to temporarily contracted census takers. The strategy, confirmed by the agency, has “notably” improved the progress of field work, assessed the institute.

“Strategies differ according to the characteristics and needs of each state, where each superintendent has autonomy to adopt the most appropriate model for their reality. But, in general, in addition to the payment of bonuses aimed at stimulating increased productivity, there were incentives for remuneration through amounts received for transportation assistance and lunch assistance, as well as an increase in the amount paid by each registered household”, replied the IBGE to the Broadcast.

The agency stressed, however, that the Demographic Census budget did not have any complementation to make the bonus viable, remaining the same since its approval in Congress, last year. “Bonuses, reinforcements or incentives are paid with funds from the original Census budget,” the institute said.

The census operation was initially budgeted by the IBGE technical team at more than R$ 3 billion, to be carried out in the field in 2020. Amidst pressure from the government to reduce the budget, the original questionnaires were trimmed, and the budget shrunk to R$ 2.3 billion. In 2021, the amount of only R$ 53 million in the budget sanctioned by President Jair Bolsonaro made it impossible to prepare for the survey to go to the field in 2022.

Later, following a decision by the Federal Supreme Court (STF), the IBGE managed to ensure a budget supplement for the preparations in 2021 and the amount for the collection in 2022, although without the budgeted amount being updated by the inflation accumulated throughout the entire period. delay period.

The information collected by the Census serves as a basis, for example, for apportioning the Participation Fund of states and municipalities, and is also essential for health policies, such as the need to allocate professionals and equipment for care by the Unified Health System (SUS ) and educational policy planning. The data is also used as a basis for sample surveys, such as the Continuous National Household Sample Survey, by the IBGE itself, which collects information on the labor market, such as the unemployment rate, and even for electoral surveys.