Spiraling out of control and accelerating. Brazil is dominated by very powerful interest groups, some of them corporate, some of them unions, which lobby for la

Spiraling out of control and accelerating. Brazil is dominated by very powerful interest groups, some of them corporate, some of them unions, which lobby for laws mostly in order to ensure they keep their power. The unions keep wanting stronger labor laws, but these tend to apply in practice only to high-class workers in very unionized professions, while everyone else is lucky to even get a job at all, because the obligations our labor laws create are so insane that most smaller employers need to use legal loopholes just to be able to pay the bills at the end of the month (one of the most common ones is asking workers to open a personal company and paying their company for "services rendered" instead of the worker - labor courts hate this, but they know if they closed the loophole half of the country would be out of a job the next week) The corporations keep trying to make labor laws weaker, but they tend to do so in ways that screw over the lower-class workers while the high-class, unionized workers are able to maintain most of their privileges. It's a terrible situation. To make it worse, our legislative representatives and a large part of the electorate are very much infatuated with the (false) idea that our labor laws actually "protect" all workers, which makes it very hard to reform them. They are kind of a sacred cow to a lot of Brazilians. I don't see it getting better any time soon. (I'm a US-raised Brazilian who currently lives in Brazil, by the way)