Lula’s Battle for a 40-Hour Work Week

One day after submitting the bill for a 40 hour work week to Congress, Lula met with union leaders in Brasilia.

On April 14, President Lula submitted a bill to Congress that, if passed, will reduce Brazil’s work week to 40 hours. It was submitted under the legal condition “constitutional urgency” meaning that Congress is required to bring it to a floor vote within 45 days. During a press conference the following day, Lula’s Chief of Staff, Guilherme Boulos (PSOL) said that he believes the measure will be passed within 3 months. The Lula administration has spent the last 3 years negotiating behind the scenes with the powerful parties from the center right, and waiting until they were confident of securing a “yes” vote to submit the bill. After all, it’s an election year and no one wants to have to explain to their voters why they don’t support reducing their work week.

During the late 1970s, Brazil’s US-backed military dictatorship initiated a process of democratic opening. Unions were begrudgingly allowed to strike, although leaders continued to be arrested, as Lula himself was in 1980. Amnesty was granted to thousands of political exiles who were allowed to return to Brazil, and new political parties were allowed to form, with the Workers Party founded in 198o, by a broad tent coalition of labor unions, social movements, intellectuals like Paulo Freire and Sergio Buarque, and argumentative trotskyist groups.

At the time, Brazil’s work week was 48 hours. One of the first things the new Workers Party did was engage in a campaign with the unions for a 40 hour work week. After 6 years of marches, protests and pressure on lawmakers, a compromise was struck, reducing the work week to 44 hours in the 1988 constitution. For most Brazilian workers, this meant 8 hours a day from Monday to Friday and a half day on Saturdays.

I was shocked when I immigrated to Brazil and got my first job to discover that I was expected to work on Saturday mornings and wondered why my coworkers didn’t complain about it, not knowing, with my poor portuguese at the time, that the half day off on Saturdays was a new thing. As I reached my 30s and my career moved forwards, working on Saturdays became a thing of the past. Many of the better paying jobs for the middle class phased out the half day on Saturday as a perk. But for the vast majority of Brazil’s formally employed workers who make under two times the minimum wage in the service sector, construction, etc, the 44 hour work week lives on to this day.

After the coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016, through an impeachment for a commonly practiced budgetary infraction called “fiscal peddling” that she was later proven innocent of, which was legalized two days after she left office and subsequently practiced by President’s Temer and Bolsonaro, illegitimate President Michel Temer pushed through “reforms” that massacred Brazil’s labor rights. It’s outsourcing provisions caused millions of workers to be able to be legally removed from the books and hired back as freelancers. The week after the reforms went through, Estacio, one of Brazil’s largest private university franchises fired 10,000 professors and hired most of them back as freelancers, eliminating their rights to severance pay, paid sick leave and vacations. This pattern was repeated across the country. Temer also pushed through a constitutional amendment, nicknamed the “amendment of death”, that froze all spending on Brazil’s public health and education system for 20 years, in a country with a growing population. This was just the beginning of a tsunami of setbacks for the working class that would be exacerbated under the Bolsonaro administration when raised the retirement age by 3.5 years.

This was the conjecture that President Lula inherited when he took office in 2023, and although he has managed to undo some of the damage, he has not been able to completely revert it.

As some unfortunate voices in the Anglo left spread defeatism about Lula’s predicted inability to govern with Brazil’s most conservative congress in modern history, he shocked many by quickly pushing through an amendmentcalled the “fiscal framework”, partially undoing the freeze on education and health funding. This measure allows above-inflation increases in public health and education spending, within tight guidelines connected to the previous year’s GDP growth. Although the fiscal spending guidelines embedded into the law have been weaponized against probable Lula successor Fernando Haddad by some figures connected to smaller left parties eyeing the post-Lula future, most people understand it as the best deal they could secure at the time, and it has enabled the federal government to increase spending on the SUS, Brazil’s universal free public health system by 30% since Lula took office in January, 2023. After 6 years of no real gains in minimum wage, the Lula administration has implemented 4 consecutive above inflation minimum wage hikes, causing a total increase of 32.76% since taking office.

Another victory for labor has been raising the cap for income tax exemption from R$3500 to R$5000 a month, making up for the income loss through a tax increase on the super wealthy. As 15 million workers became exempt from paying income tax in 2026, 86% of Brazil’s formal workforce is now fully exempt from paying federal income tax.

The last major campaign promise to the workers that Lula has yet to push through is the reduction of the work week. With 16 parties holding seats in Congress, the PT has never had a majority in Congress. Currently holding 67 seats the total percentage of left and center left seats in Congress is 95, representing 18% of the lower house. In order to make a majority Lula has to rely on his fickle outer coalition of the center-right parties, who tend to vote along with the government on 60-70% of its initiatives but have historically blocked most of its most progressive moves, such as a constitutional amendment to disband Brazil’s notorious military police, which was blocked 3 times by the PT’s own center-right coalition partners between 2003 and 2015.

During an election year in which Flavio Bolsonaro is rising in the polls, thanks to massive international support from CPAC partners in the international far right, including top officials within the Trump administration and the neo-fascists of the AfD and Vox, there has been a lot of jockeying between the left and the far right for support from the traditional center right, with dozens of lawmakers switching parties at the last minute before this years April 3 deadline.

Last week at a meeting with Union leaders, Lula said, “We wanted to lower the work week to five days in the 1980s. It’s been 45 years, and we have to look at the technological advances since then. For example when I was the metalworkers union president in Sao Bernardo, Volkswagen had 44,000 workers in its plant and it made 120,000 cars per year. Now it only has 12.000 workers and produces double the number of cars. So why can’t it reduce its work week?”

If the measure passes it will represent the biggest advance for workers rights since the Rousseff administration. Nevertheless, millions of workers in Brazil still have almost no labor rights whatsoever, thanks to the reforms implemented after the 2017 coup. I think of my own next door neighbor in Recife. After 20 years working as a journalist for a large Brazilian newspaper, he and his wife were laid off when the paper folded. They used their then mandatory severance packages to open a clothing store in a shopping mall. Last year, their store went out of business, unable to compete with online shopping. Now he’s driving an Uber at 62., working 16 hours a day. The reduction of the work week won’t affect him at all. With driverless cars on the horizon, and advances in AI and robotics decimating labor forces around the World, Brazil is on the precipice of a massive labor crisis. The difference between a Workers Party government and a potential Javier Milei-style anarcho-libertarian leader like Flavio Bolsonaro is that, while once side is trying to fight it, the far right and its international Silicon Valley technofascist backers will undoubtedly work to accelerate it.

This first appeared on De-Linking Brazil.

The post Lula’s Battle for a 40-Hour Work Week appeared first on CounterPunch.org.