Brazil’s lower house approved a constitutional amendment Wednesday establishing a 40-hour, five-day workweek, moving the country toward a shorter schedule that ends the six-day grind for at least 37 million people without reducing pay. The measure now goes to the Senate, where the next round of institutional gatekeeping could still alter it before any approval by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Who Pays for the Old Order
The amendment targets a system that currently forces Brazilians to work five eight-hour days and four hours on a sixth day for 44 hours total. Under the new rules, workers would get two consecutive 24-hour rest days each week, preferably Saturdays and Sundays. The change is being sold as a correction to a punishing schedule that has long extracted more labor from ordinary people than it gives back.
Paulo Pimenta, Brazil’s government whip in the lower house, put the hierarchy in plain language: “People who have this workweek from Monday to Saturday are the ones that have to work the hardest and are paid the least. We need to be brave and do justice.” That is the basic arithmetic of the arrangement the amendment seeks to change: the people at the bottom carry the heaviest load.
The proposal is widely popular in Brazil ahead of presidential elections in October, and Lula sponsored the move and has repeatedly promoted it. The amendment is also part of a push within the region that has been lauded by labor rights groups but highly criticized by the business sector. In other words, the same people who live under the schedule are the ones pushing for relief, while the business class complains about the cost of giving workers a little less extraction.
Pressure From Below, Resistance From Above
Many opposition lawmakers voted for the amendment after months of pressure from their constituents, but some still criticized it. Kim Kataguiri said, “I don’t care this is an election year. I think we need to be responsible. This will be a problem for many companies. We are doing this in a rush and workers should know they might end up worse than they are now if business leaders stop hiring.” His warning reflects the familiar script: protect companies first, then tell workers to fear the consequences of any change that cuts into profit.
The amendment gives businesses 14 months to adapt, which was a key point in negotiations. Many business leaders and lawmakers wanted the changes to be made gradually over 10 years. The final timetable is still a compromise shaped by the demands of employers, not a clean break from the power of the workplace bosses who have long set the terms.
Leo Prates, who drafted the amendment in the lower house, said, “This was built with a lot of responsibility, thinking about workers and families in Brazil. We need to accomplish this for the Brazilian people.” The language of responsibility here sits alongside the reality that the measure still has to pass through the Senate, where no vote date has been set and changes remain possible.
The Regional Pattern and the Limits of Reform
Brazil is not moving alone. In February, Mexican lawmakers approved a proposal by President Claudia Sheinbaum to trim the 48-hour workweek, with working hours to be shortened gradually to a 40-hour workweek by 2030. Chile in 2023 passed the so-called 40-Hour Law, which reduced its workweek to 40 hours as of last year and applies to all workers under Chile’s Labor Code without reducing pay.
The regional picture is not uniform. Argentina has bucked that trend under libertarian President Javier Milei and may extend its 48-hour workweek. A labor overhaul package passed earlier this year extends the maximum workday from eight to 12 hours and scraps overtime pay, among other measures that Argentine labor unions say favor companies over employees. That contrast lays out the stakes clearly: in one direction, workers win a little breathing room; in the other, the apparatus of labor discipline gets harsher.
Lula’s main rival in the election, Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, wants to replace the current workweek system with a more flexible payment-by-the-hour strategy, which so far seems to be popular only among some business leaders. The Senate has not set a date for its vote, and it could make changes before Lula’s approval for the constitution to be amended. For now, the lower house has moved the proposal forward, but the final shape of the workweek still depends on the same institutions that have spent years managing labor on behalf of capital.