CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

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........

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