II. THE GOVERNMENT ACTIONS

 

II.3 Investing in Human Capital

The third bloc of actions is related to the necessity of investing in and valuing the country's working force. The Ministry of Labor, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and with the Brazilian Vocational Training System is developing a broad program of professional education and training, with the objective of increasing the working force's qualification, in order to make it more capable of facing the challenges that the technological, organizational and managerial changes are imposing upon the Brazilian economy.

Endowing the workers with basic information and multivalence is a requirement of globalization and one of the forms of increasing both the possibilities of employment for the working force and the economy's efficiency. The Federal Government has been giving priority to investment in elementary and high school education, specially those of technical and professional character. This also represents an effort to improve the quality of the Brazilian population's human capital, although the effects of these actions can only manifest themselves in medium-and in the long-run.

The National Professional Education Plan's (Plano Nacional de Educação Profissional — Planfor) objective is to offer, until 1998 and with FAT resources, sufficient professional education to qualify or update the qualification of five million workers. For attaining this goal, the Planfor foresees the articulation of actions and the mobilization of resources from varied professional education agencies, such as universities, public and private school networks, professional training institutions, free schools, trade unions, enterprises and non-governmental organizations. The beneficiaries will be the unemployed, specially the young that are receiving the unemployment insurance, "microentrepreneurs", women that are family heads, and workers at risk of loosing their jobs. The Planfor intends to reach, specially, people at low levels of income and education.

The Planfor is being implemented in a decentralized manner by means of two mechanisms: on one hand, partnerships with various governmental and non-governmental entities; on the other hand, State Qualification Plans (Planos Estaduais de Qualificação — PEQs), elab-orated and administered by the State Labor Secretariats, depending upon homologation and supervision by State and Municipal Employment Commissions, already implanted in all the federation's units and in more than a thousand Brazilian municipal areas. The resources to be channeled to the PEQs are provenient from the FAT (Worker's Assist-ance Fund), and complemented by the counterpart of the states and the Federal District. As for the rest of the partnerships, the FAT resources are used with a complementary nature in relation to other sources which are destined to vocational training. In 1996, agreements were signed with all 27 federation units for the PEQ's execution, whose aims were of 750 thousand trainees and total investment of R$ 280 million. The results, at the end of the fiscal year, reached around 1.1 million trainees, R$ 232 million having actually been applied. The PEQ's 1997 itemizing regi-sters global objectives of 1.5 million trainees and investment around R$ 300 million, which should guarantee, until the end of 1998, at least 5 million trainees and total investment near R$ 950 million.

Table 2
National Professional Education Plan

	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998
Benefited workers	40 thousand	150 thousand	1.1 million	1.5 million	2.5 millions
Amount invested	R$ 20 million	R$ 40 million	R$ 238 million	R$ 300 million	R$ 400 million

The Brazilian Professional Training System (Senai,Senac, Senat, Senar), in its turn, shall train three million workers in 1996, applying resources around R$ 1.2 billion. Those programs shall offer greater equity to the functioning of the labor market.

An Employment Protocol with the BNDES was also established, by which the enterprises that are promoting productive reconversion and structural adjustment programs invest in the working force that has become obsolete by consequence of these processes. These enterprises will be able to pay lower interest and obtain longer financing and grace periods, if they meet the terms of the Protocol. A similar agreement was signed with the Administrative Council for Economic Protection (Conselho Administrativo da Defesa Econômica — Cade) to guarantee vocational requalification of workers affected by enterprise merging or acquisition processes. Besides those, various protocols were signed, consolidating partnerships in the Planfor ambit, with the Solidary Community Program (Programa da Comunidade Solidária), Ministry of Education and Sports, Ministry of Justice and National Women's Rights Council, Ministry of Industry and Commerce and Ministry of Administration and State Reform. This last one, having the National Public Administration School (Escola Nacional de Administração Pública — Enap) as executor, has guaranteed, in 1996, professional requalification of around 5 thousand federal civil servants, and twice this number is expected for 1997.