Teachers' pay in Brazil: an outlook from the Annual List of Social Information (RAIS)

Abstract

The text presents results of a research using as its source the Annual List of Social Information - Relação Anual de Informações Sociais (RAIS) database of the Ministry of Labor and Employment. The objective is to investigate information about paying levels of secondary education teachers working in Brazilian state capitals and, at the same time, to reflect about the potential of this database for the analysis. The choice for an analytical approach related to secondary school teachers is due to the observation that, for the period between 1996 and 2008, the data about these jobs were better informed in the RAIS, despite the fact that its information about the public sector is somewhat irregular. The historical period selected is related to the hypothesis that the funding policy active between 1998 and 2006, which gave priority to fundamental education, could have had a negative effect upon the paying levels of secondary education teachers. In order to analyze the average paying levels, the minimum salary and the Index of Prices to the Consumer (IPC) were used as indexes for comparing purchasing powers during the period. This exploratory study seems to confirm a negative relation, which was expected, between the priority given to fundamental education via funding policies and the paying levels of secondary education teachers. Additionally, it reveals the gap between the valuation of the national minimum salary and the valuation policy of the teaching profession; and, finally, it exposes weak points of the RAIS as a tool to work with data about paying levels of the public sector in a separate way. Nevertheless, the convergence between the results of the present work and studies that looked into other databases indicates the pertinence of continuing these analyses.