The R7 portal ensures that Brazilian parliamentarians are also evaluating the possibility of lowering hours without a salary reduction, through an agreement between employees and employers.

Both proposals must be on the parliamentary discussion agenda in the 2024 legislative year, which begins on February 1.

In the world, the country with the highest average weekly workload is Bhutan, with 54.4 hours per week, more than nine hours a day, six days a week.

The lowest average is in Vanuatu, in Oceania, which has an average working week of 24.7 hours, just over four hours, if a six-day work week is considered.

Authored by Senator Weverton Rocha, the Bill (PEC) once again gained prominence after national companies joined an international experiment that tests the model of four days of work per week.

In this case, the challenge is to reduce the burden on employees and maintain productivity. The companies that joined the tests received training, conferences, organizational diagnosis of the teams and individualized monitoring.

Approved by the Senate Social Affairs Commission, the text seeks to set the interval available for negotiation between employer, employee and union at 14 hours per week, through collective agreements.

Such negotiation is conditional on the preservation of current salaries. In this way, the total hours worked could be adjusted to up to 30 hours per week.

As there was a resource for the examination in plenary, now the content will be voted on by all senators. If approved, it goes to the Chamber of Deputies.

The PEC that reduces the maximum workload to 36 hours per week was presented 25 years ago by the then deputy Paulo Paim, currently a senator.

Another proposal is pending in the lower house, presented by legislator Reginaldo Lopes in 2019.

The two texts provide that the Constitution would be modified to reduce the working day without reduction of salary.

Unlike the project that is in the Senate, the Deputies’ version imposes a period of 10 years for the novelty to be put into practice.

The proposals are supported by a study by the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies, which states that reducing the working day to 40 hours a week would generate more than three million new jobs.

Secondly, with the reduction to 36 hours per week, approximately six million jobs would be created, according to the research.

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