With the average full-time worker working only 33.1 hours a week, which is virtually the lowest on record, some 40 percent of the families currently on food stamps have "earned income, " the Financial Times reported.

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Contrast that with this startling statistic from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: as of 2010, the average time an American worker stays at a job is less than four and a half years.

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Around 40% of the network still uses outdated analogue technology. (Argentina, which privatised its phones in 1991, has an almost fully digital network.) That, plus equally outdated labour practices, has meant that Brazil's telecoms industry has an average of one full-time worker per 108 lines, less than half the productivity achieved in the United States.

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