Monthly Review | Labor Informality and Unemployment in Brazil: Insights from the Perspective of the Relative Surplus Population

Monthly Review | Labor Informality and Unemployment in Brazil: Insights from the Perspective of the Relative Surplus Population

This article will be released in full online March 24, 2025. Using data from Brazil’s Integrated System of Household Surveys, Renata Falavina and Gabriel Ulbricht employ Marxist categories in order to illuminate the concept of the reserve army of labor in the context of underemployment and informal labor in modern-day Brazil. This view, the authors write, shows that the dichotomy of full employment and unemployment fails to capture the complexit…