Brazil's Dilma Rousseff's Popularity Ratings Down To 20-Year Low

[MADem]

87. No, looks like that is YOUR error: "Brazil's mounting job losses turn Rousseff bedrock to quicksand"

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-brazil14-20150314-story.html#page=1

RO DE JANEIRO — Luciano Neri, an unemployed former shipyard worker who backed Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff for a second term, now second-guesses his vote. Having lost his job last month, he's taking a course to become a bus driver.

"She screwed up," Neri, 37, said while sipping a beer in a sleepy plaza of Maragogipe, in Bahia state. "I ask myself if when she hands over the government, it's going to be in debt and there won't be employment in Brazil."

Neri's malaise spells trouble for Rousseff. Throughout her re-election run she invoked record-low unemployment as proof of her successful economic policies, even as growth stalled and inflation accelerated. Now, joblessness is finally on the rise - - and so is discontent, even in the northeast region that has long been the stronghold of her Workers' Party. ... The woes of the Paraguacu shipyard, where Luciano Neri was employed, illustrate Brazil's broader difficulties. It holds contracts totaling $4.8 billion to build six deep-water oil rigs for state-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro SA's projects. The yard is owned by Enseada Industria Naval, a consortium of Odebrecht SA, OAS SA, UTC Engenharia SA and Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd.

With Petrobras mired in the biggest corruption scandal in Brazil's history, money has stopped flowing to many of its contractors. The CEP consortium building the shipyard for Enseada, with 82 percent of construction complete, has suspended work due to a "liquidity crisis," according to Enseada. CEP had 5,227 workers last June, and now it has 156. Enseada fired 1,800 workers since November, and about 600 workers continue to build rigs in the unfinished yard.

On March 2, union members assembled outside the Labor Ministry in Salvador to protest rising joblessness and the government's cost-cutting measures. Bahia state's heavy construction union, Sintepav, says it has lost 5,000 jobs in road building over the last six months, in addition to the thousands lost at Maragogipe. They're set to demonstrate again on March 13. .....