Brazil’s congress has approved a constitutional amendment to shorten the working week to a maximum of 40 hours, a move that could affect 30 million workers and that will hand a political victory to the leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of the presidential runoff in under two weeks. In an attempt to overturn the first-round lead secured by his opponent, far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula has strongly championed the amendment, which will give some workers an extra day off each week. Bolsonaro, by contrast, spent months opposing the change but reversed course on Tuesday, saying “the majority of Brazilian workers” supported it.
On Wednesday, he joined 75 senators who approved the reform, which passed the lower house in May. Only one senator voted against it: Hamilton Mourão, former vice-president to Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father. The constitutional amendment bans six-day workweeks, currently worked by 16 million people, while cutting the maximum workweek from 44 to 40 hours for more than 30 million workers.
The change is expected to affect mainly workers in retail, restaurants and hotels, most of them low-paid – one of the groups which Lula lost the most support from since the 2022 election, when he defeated Jair Bolsonaro. Lula celebrated the amendment’s passing, writing on social media “ending the 6x1 schedule is about more than changing working hours. It means more time to live, rest, be with family, watch your children grow up, look after yourself and enjoy life.” Victor Escobar, a researcher at the Laboratory of Parties, Elections and Comparative Politics, said the change “could indeed benefit Lula’s re-election campaign”.
The proposal began as a TikTok movement called Life Beyond Work, founded by a pharmacy assistant who entered politics after its success and later was embraced by Lula. His party spent months pushing the senate to put the proposal to a vote and many believed that after the far right’s sweeping victory last week secured a broad congressional majority in 2027, the Senate would no longer vote on it. But Senate president Davi Alcolumbre, whose relationship with Lula has at times been rocky, put it to a vote.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s party had considered blocking it, but polls showed the change had more than 70% of the general population behind it, and more than half of the senator’s voters. In May, Bolsonaro said the proposal could cause “mass unemployment”, an argument employers’ associations opposed to the change have repeatedly made. The senator voted remotely while campaigning in the country’s south.
Even after changing his position, Bolsonaro said on Tuesday that he “supports something even better,” referring to an alternative proposal he had long advocated in which pay would be based on the hours actually worked. The Folha newspaper reported that he told business leaders that, if elected, he would review parts of the new amendment, a point several allied senators also made during Wednesday’s vote. Despite its approval, none of the changes will take effect before the runoff on 25 October.
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