National Initiatives which Provide Support to the Social Partners to Enable Them to Participate in Social Dialogue on Training - Brazil

Source: ILO/CINTERFOR

Deliberative Council of the Workers’ Assistance Fund

In Brazil, workers’ organizations participate in the Consejo Deliberativo del Fondo de Asistencia al Trabajador – CODEFAT (Deliberative Council of the Workers’ Assistance Fund). This is a tripartite body which is in change of administering the Fondo de Asistencia al Trabajador - FAT (Workers’ Assistance Fund), the largest public fund in the country. The resources of the FAT come from a deduction of 1% on company payrolls, and a part of this is earmarked for financing the policies of the national system of employment. These policies are job centres for the work force, unemployment insurance, vocational retraining, information on unemployment, and programmes to generate employment and income.

The CODEFAT tries to pay out the funds which it administers (the FAT fund) in a democratic and geographically decentralized way. With this aim, it has promoted the creation of Provincial and Municipal Employment Commissions. These are tripartite bodies, and one of their main tasks is the evaluation of applications for credit for training enterprises on the provincial or municipal level.

Resources are used and channelled through Federal States and Municipalities, which for that purpose must set up local committees to consider and discuss their application.

These committees are also tripartite and of equal composition.

This decentralised and participative manner of managing public funds has been an interesting stimulus for innovative experiences. For instance, in the State of Sao Paulo the Employment and Labour Relations Secretariat (Portuguese acronym: SERT), the ILO and the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socio-economic Studies (Portuguese acronym DIEESE) have joined forces to launch a collective process to develop a new vocational training design for the State. The result has been the formulation of a programme called "Learning to Learn", that comprises three Projects: a Public Experimental Centre on Vocational Training; a Permanent Observatory of Employment and VT Situations, and Basic and Specific Skills.

The Public Experimental Centre brings together the three projects in a joint undertaking. A decentralised, participative and democratic working approach has been elected and adapted to local conditions. It is not actually a school, and furthermore it does not require any fixed physical premises. It operates in a flexible and novel way: its role is to "contaminate" or pass on its conception and methodological proposal to other organisations. It has developed a new institutional arrangement bringing different actors together to negotiate the supply and demand of vocational training, and create alliances to meet their interests and needs.

It aims at serving a differential public, with new or specific demands to face the changing world of labour: young persons, adult workers (employed or unemployed), entrepreneurs and employers (from both the formal and informal sectors) as well as sectors that have been traditionally marginalised.

The Public Experimental Centre for Vocational Training came about through an initiative by the Secretary of Employment and Labour Relations in the State of Sao Paulo. This was an attempt to cater for the increasing scale and diversity of the needs for training in that region. A group of 22 specialists representing employers, workers, the government and academics were assembled, with a mandate to outline the training policies to be followed. The interaction and combined work of these specialists gave rise to the idea of creating the Experimental Public Centre for Employment, within the framework of a programme called "Learning to Learn".

The Centre was conceived in such a way as to incorporate the principles of participative, democratic and multi-party work into its structure and functioning. There are government bodies participating in the Experimental Centre project, as well as the union federations CUT and CGT, institutions which belong to the "System S" and the CEETEPS, among others.

Some of the specific aims of the Centre are:

• To meet the specific and permanent demand for the training of young people, adults, and employed and unemployed workers, with the highest possible degree of flexibility, while at the same time seeking to develop active learning, and sharing in the exercise of thought, of work and of citizenship.
• To cater to all sectors of the work and employment market, and to have regional scope.
• To integrate and articulate the efforts and the resources present in the community in activities to promote the integral development of the workers.
• To become a centre for the diffusion of new initiatives in the field of vocational education and training, and a centre for discussion about the world of work, and to generate proposals for public policy in the fields of education, work, the creation of employment, and democratic public administration.

[Top]