Nurses’ Job Market Profile in Brazil
Abstract
Introduction: The expression ‘job market’ refers, in general terms, to the dynamics and behavior of the labor force available in the market. It encompasses the relations between employment and unemployment, income levels, working hours, and contractual relations, including wage, workforce distribution in the economy sectors, relations between capital and labor.
Objective: Characterize nurses’ job market profile, within the period 2009-2013, in a northeastern Brazilian state.
Method: Descriptive and cross-sectional study, with a quantitative approach and data obtained from two public databases: the Brazilian Social Information Annual Report (RAIS), by the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment (MTE); and the number of registrations in the Regional Nursing Council in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil (COREN/RN).
Results: Regarding employment agreements, a certain stability was identified within the period, reducing the number of job positions in 2012 and 2013. When comparing data of nurses’ workforce, through records from COREN/RN, to job positions of the RAIS, since 2011, a clear mismatch between the number of job positions and the number of nurses available in the market was found.
Conclusion: It is concluded there is a maintenance trend with worse unemployment, especially among young individuals, if three situations highlighted in 2013 persist: growth in nurses’ educational level, staying in Rio Grande do Norte, and stability or maintenance of a decreased number of job positions available.
Keywords

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access and Benefits of Publishing Open Access).