POLICY OF HUMAN RESOURCES OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: THE EXPERIENCE OF LULA AND DILMA ROUSSEF GOVERNMENTS

Abstract

Since the 1990’s decade and against the high growth of public employment in the six previous decades, the accession of Brazilian government to the principles of “Washington Consensus” highlights the civil service as a key point on the agenda of necessary reforms needed for the resumption of economic growth. Such governments have tended to treat public employment as a tax problem and acted to restrict their size. At the same time, civil servants have gone to live with lost wages due to lack of wage increase policies; the growth of variable forms of remuneration; expansion of temporary and outsourced labour; authoritarian attitude to union representation etc. This paper aims to take stock of various initiatives of the post-2003 Brazilian governments regarding to the shaping of a human resources policy and compare it with the experience of the 1990’s. Through documentary and bibliographic research, it will be realized that the restructuring of several careers, the resumption of public tendering, the establishment of the Permanent National Negotiation Table, pension reform and selective adjustment of public wages are elements that manifest ambiguity as hallmark of human resources policies. In other words, advances in working conditions of civil servants were always accompanied by the maintenance of part of the conservative agenda.