Brazil approves a 40-hour week and two days off ten days before the runoff

Brazil’s Senate on Wednesday approved, by 75 votes to one, a cut in the maximum working week from 44 to 40 hours with no reduction in pay, ending the so-called 6x1 schedule of six working days and one day off and extending to two the days off for formal-sector workers. The reform, which according to Reuters benefits some 37 million people, comes ten days before the presidential runoff between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro.

“The end of the 6x1 schedule is more than a change in working hours. It is more time to live, to rest, to be with family, to watch your children grow, to take care of yourself,” said Lula, who made the shorter working week one of his legislative priorities and a pillar of his campaign. The measure will take effect 60 days after its promulgation.

Bolsonaro, who had expressed reservations and whose Liberal Party backed an alternative proposal, voted in favour remotely from Porto Alegre, where he was attending a campaign event. His party, the largest in Congress, has not ruled out making changes in the next legislature. The only vote against came from senator and retired general Hamilton Mourão, vice president under Jair Bolsonaro.

The initiative, championed in the lower house by deputy Erika Hilton of the Socialism and Liberty Party, began in 2023 with a TikTok video by Rick Azevedo, then a pharmacy worker, complaining about the exhaustion of working six days a week. Azevedo founded the Life Beyond Work movement and was elected a federal deputy on October 4.

Lula’s campaign hopes the reform will help him overturn the nearly two-point deficit with which he ended the first round. The latest Quaest poll gives Bolsonaro 47% and Lula 45%. The two candidates will face each other on Sunday in the campaign’s first debate, hosted by the Band network, the same day Bolsonaro has called his supporters to São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista. Lula, for his part, has promised 5,000 reais to every micro-entrepreneur.