EUSTAQUIO GOMES
After a less than glorious passage through the Chamber of Deputies, the pension reform project goes to the Senate. There it should be discussed for two months, perhaps less, before being voted on by senators. It passed through the Chamber so smoothly – with all the winds blowing in its favor – that, frankly, there are few hopes that it will undergo profound changes in the so-called Upper Chamber. But as, just yesterday, party leaders promised not to limit themselves to stamping the text, but rather to improve it, it is legitimate to believe that some barbarities will be repaired.
Whether or not this reparation happens, the government will have finally concluded the deadly struggle it has been fighting with the different segments of the public sector, which it has insistently called “corporations”. There was a time when the term was milder: “companions”. Now the semantics have turned sour: “privileged”.
In an interview given to Jornal da Unicamp, professor Ricardo Antunes, a more than respectable intellectual on the Brazilian left, points out the gross error that the government committed by demonizing public servants and turning the market, private sector workers and, therefore, against them. Finally, public opinion in general. Worse still: in doing so, he ran the treads of his war tank over all opposing arguments, especially those that pointed out the cheapening of public careers, the injustice towards hard-earned merit and the disincentive to qualified renewal of the public sector.
“It is clear that the new generations, when they see a public career dismantled, broken, precarious and with no prospect of a public retirement, will look for their alternative in the admirable world of the market”, says Professor Antunes. The consequences for universities will not be small.
This injustice is all the greater when it is possible to demonstrate, as Professor Cláudio Salvadori Dedecca does in a brilliant study he has just concluded, that “there is a clear manipulation of information with the aim of stigmatizing public employment”. Dedecca's study shows that, while having higher levels of professional qualification than those in the private sector, workers in the public sector enjoy much more modest remuneration – remaining there for reasons that transcend the market.
If the threat to public careers is bad for civil servants, it is no better for the government, which puts the quality of the State and the services it offers at risk. Which can be said, with Professor Dedecca, that the government is shooting itself in the foot. I assume that the Senate, if it wants, can at least prevent it from compromising its leg, and perhaps the body of the State.