Inequalities in the Brazilian labor market: a proposal for conceptualizing and measuring precarious work under the magnifying glass of intersectionality

Abstract

Acknowledging the centrality of work in people’s lives, this article aims to analyze the ongoing process of precarious work and its different impacts on population groups. The objective was to identify how precarious work operates from the perspective of the sexual division of labor and the historical racial segmentation of the Brazilian labor market. This article presents a proposal for the conceptualization and construction of a multidimensional indicator of precarious work, with results disaggregated by sex and color/race, based on data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey, from IBGE, for the period 2012-2021. The differential of the proposed indicator is that it enables the measurement of precarious work in terms of incidence and intensity of precariousness within the scope of available official Brazilian public statistics. As a result, although women, in general, have shown lower rates of precariousness, they are more intensely precarious than men. On the other hand, black women stood out as the population group most affected by the ongoing precariousness, followed closely by black men, highlighting the importance of analyzing racial inequalities combined with gender inequalities in the labor market.