RIO DE JANEIRO: Thousands of Brazilians lined up Wednesday at a Rio jobs fair, many of them so desperate to escape the country's economic nosedive that they said they'd take anything on offer.
In a symbol of Brazil's precipitous slide into economic hardship, the almost stationary queue stretched right across a large central square.
They were young, old, women, men, and their anxious faces told the story of a country where unemployment in the first trimester was 10.9 percent, the economy is forecast to shrink by 3.88 percent this year and an impeachment trial against the president has triggered political upheaval.
Rubens Antonio, 44, said he had worked at the BNDES national development bank just up the road until he was laid off in 2014. "That's when the economic crisis started. I haven't had steady work since," he said.
At the end of the line was a small tent where a half dozen union representatives collected resumes and took interviews. On offer was something increasingly precious in Brazil: 6,000 jobs.
The jobs, offered by a variety of companies taking part in the collective recruitment event, "range from managers to cooks and painters," said Fabiano Guedes, an organizer.
Guedes said the line had been just as long all day and that by mid-afternoon he estimated 4,000 people had turned up, with many more to come by the evening. Thousands more people would be filing applications online.
"I knew there'd be a lot of people, but not this many," he said. "We're in crisis. Brazil is broken."
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