Help Found.

Brazilian trade union Forca Sindical fights for jobs for its members and the community at large.

THIAGO MOLINA, 19, HAS LITTLE MEMORY OF HIS SCHOOL days, and his professional experience has consisted mainly of delivering water from a tank to poor districts and unloading paper from the back of a truck. But his luck changed after spending two months studying graphic design and English at the Workers' Palace, a professional training center run by Forca Sindical, the second-largest union confederation in Brazil. He got a solid job as an assembler at MWM Diesel Motors, an engine manufacturer based in Sao Paulo.

Training seems to be key to finding good jobs in Brazil, as in other Latin American countries. A long period of neglect in education is now taking its toll on the country's unemployed youth. However, Forca Sindical is now trying to help workers find jobs and also train them to find better ones--free of charge.

"Trade unionism is changing in Brazil," says Tadeu Moraes de Souza, a coordinator at a Forca Sindical job center. "In the new reality, the worker needs to receive support not only within the company or the plant, but also within the society as a whole. This is a new role."

The union's job centers have attracted considerable interest from Brazil's low-skilled work force. At peak times, the line to register at one of the Sao Paulo offices frequently snakes all around the building. Last year, the center attended to more than 1 million job seekers and delivered some 150,000 training certificates, mostly in computing, sales and telecommunications. Another 360,000 applicants are still on the waiting list.

It's rare to find a trade union actively fighting for jobs not just for its own members, but also for the community at large. But that's exactly what Forca Sindical is doing--obviously in the hopes of building increased union membership.

Job clearinghouse. The unemployed need all the support they can get in a country where the jobless rate oscillates between 7.6% and 19% of the economically active population, depending on whether you believe official government statistics or the more wide-ranging trade union figures. Laid-off Brazilians also spend a long period on the dole before they locate another job--currently 48 weeks in Sao Paulo, according to the Sistema Estadual de Analise de Dados (Seade), the state-run agency charged with compiling labor data.

So the Forca Sindical job center has become a gold mine for unemployed workers as well as for companies. For every job vacancy, three candidates are short-listed and directed to the plant. Some 60,000 firms of all sizes have registered at the five "solidarity centers" around the country, four in greater Sao Paulo and one in the northeastern city of Recife. Some large multinationals, such as Spain's Telefonica and Portuguese retailer Sonae, have even partnered with the center to recruit new staff.

The center's training is extensive. For example, a telecom repair center was set up in the eastern district of Itaquera in Sao Paulo. There, some 20 agents follow a training course every two weeks to learn how to install and fix telephone lines. "After privatization, there was a huge demand to set up telephone lines and to repair faulty equipment. But the problem was the lack of skills," says Paulo Muniz, operations manager of the job center in Sao Paulo. "This is why we had the idea of this partnership to qualify our people. The worker who gets trained here is almost certain to get a job."

Secking skills. Take Clodoalda Martins dos Santos, 22, for example. Daughter of a retired steelworker and a homemaker, she has been on welfare for a month, since her contract with a temporary agency expired. (She had only worked for 10 months as a hostess at a leisure center.) Four years after dropping out of school, she came to the job center to try to gain the skills she had failed to receive earlier. "In Brazil, the opportunity to study is not given to everybody," she says. "I would like to get a job where I can use my brain. I don't want to get stuck."

Paulo Dejair is a hard-luck case. The 28-year-old has been unemployed for the last three years after he gave up a job selling soft drinks in the streets of the sprawling suburb of Guarulhos. His wife has since left him, taking their two-year-old daughter to go live with her mother in Sao Paulo. "I don't have the resources to take care of her," Dejair says, sadly looking at the floor.

The search for a decent job has embittered him; his disillusionment is apparent as he stuffs his crumpled carteira de trabalho--the employment booklet every worker has to present to employers--into his pocket. Nonetheless, at a time when as many as one out of every five Brazilians are without work, Dejair has already had three or four job interviews, thanks to the Forca Sindical center.

"You cannot lose hope," an attendant says to Dejair, who has just been called to apply for a job as a deliveryman. "There are a lot of people without a job, but now you have an opportunity."