By CARLOS VAINER*

The 6×1 scale exposes the right-wing democratic state (or should we say right-wing?), tolerant of illegalities against workers, intolerant of any attempt to subject capitalists to rules and norms.

“The competition of the workers among themselves is the worst aspect of the present state of affairs in its effect on the worker, the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Hence the striving of the workers to nullify this competition by associations, hence the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards these associations, and its triumph over every defeat that befalls it.” (Friedrich Engels)

“The Trade Union Movement, on behalf of Brazilian workers, proposes to the National Constituent Assembly the following amendment to the Constitution: Article 1 — It is hereby established that the working day in Brazil shall be 40 (forty) hours per week, regardless of the professional category or sector of activity” (Popular Amendment No. 3 to the Draft Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil)

“Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may do the trick for a long time. For three hours a day is time enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!” (John Maynard Keynes)

The public debate sparked by Congresswoman Erika Hilton's (PSOL) proposed constitutional amendment to end the 6x1 work shift, in the wake of the VAT (Life Beyond Work) movement led by the recently elected Rio de Janeiro city councilman Rick Azevedo (PSOL), has led the major corporate media, both printed and televised, to offer a bright stage for journalists, economists and experts of all kinds to offer the spectacle of their consensus: it won't work, it won't function, it's unacceptable, it's unfeasible.

Many people have already drawn attention to the fact that this scenario is not new and that conservatives, the spokespeople for employers, have always cultivated the habit of warning society and workers themselves of the risks of changes that seek to promote, in some way, improvements in their working and living conditions.

Justice demands that we consider Nassau Senior (1790-1864), a renowned professor of Political Economy at the University of Oxford, as the patron of this form of manifestation of reactionary thought. Among his most celebrated “contributions” to economic science is the “abstinence theory,” according to which wealth originates from the deprivation of consumption: the rich possess wealth because they have virtuously agreed to give up consumption in order to accumulate, while the poor live in want because, due to an uncontrollable and immoral consumerist voluptuousness, they spend all their income on consumption.

The Oxford professor, a staunch Malthusian, also stood out in his defense of the so-called “iron law of wages,” according to which there would be a fixed fund for the payment of wages and workers would receive as remuneration the amount resulting from dividing the amount of this fund by the total population. Thus, if the population increased, as it did, a natural law would inexorably impose a progressive reduction in wages, making any claims for salary improvements futile and unfeasible.

His dedication to the interests of his employers was not enough for his name to become part of the history of economic thought, had it not been immortalized by his most caustic and famous critic. Thus, although without explicitly citing him, in the chapter “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation” (The capital, Book I, Chapter XXIV), in which he discusses how the conditions for accumulation were created prior to the establishment of capitalist social relations, Marx writes: “This primitive accumulation plays in political economy a role analogous to original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and with that sin befell mankind. Its [capital’s] origin is explained by telling it as an anecdote that occurred in the past. In very remote times, there was, on the one hand, a hard-working, intelligent and, above all, thrifty elite, and, on the other, vagabonds squandering everything they had and more. The legend of theological original sin tells us, however, how man was condemned to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow; the story of economic original sin, however, reveals to us why there are people who have no need of this. It makes no difference. This explains why the former accumulated wealth and the latter, finally, had nothing to sell but their own skin. And from this original sin comes the poverty of the great mass, who until now, despite all their work, have nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few, which grows continually, although they have long since stopped working.”

And Marx, throughout the chapter, with rich historical documentation, shows how, instead of resulting from an idyllic and virtuous exercise of abstinence, wealth was accumulated in the hands of a few thanks to the expropriation of peasants, to the bloodthirsty legislation that forced the expropriated to submit themselves to work for a boss, to the capture and trafficking of slaves.[I]

Marx and “Senior’s Last Hour”

Marx's direct and explicit mention of Nassau Senior, however, appears in the 3^a Section – “The Production of Absolute Surplus Value”, in the chapter on The Rate of Surplus Value, in a sub-chapter entitled “The Last Hour of Nassau Senior”. Before presenting Nassau Senior’s thesis, Marx gives a quick introduction to the character:

One beautiful morning in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior, famous for his economic science and beautiful style (…), was called from Oxford to Manchester[ii] to learn political economy there instead of teaching it at Oxford. The manufacturers elected him as a service fencer against the Factory Act [1933]], recently published, and the still bolder agitation about ten o'clock. (…) The professor, in turn, stylized the lesson received from the manufacturers in Manchester in the pamphlet Letters on the Factory Act, as it Affects the Cotton Manufacture, London, 1837. In it one may read, among others, the following edifying passage.”

And Marx continues with a quote from Nassau Senior: “According to the present law, no factory employing persons under 18 years of age may work more than 11 1/2 hours a day, that is, 12 hours during the first 5 days and 9 hours on Saturdays. The following analysis (!) shows that in such a factory the entire net profit derives from the last hour.” (Marx, 1996, vol. 2, p. 339).

Nassau Senior presents an example with which he intended to demonstrate that, in an 11 and a half hour workday, the value produced by the worker in the first 10 hours would only replace the value of the capital invested (machinery, raw materials, wages, etc.); the next half hour would make up for the deterioration (amortization) of the factory and the machines. Thus, what was intended to be proven is proven: “if working hours were reduced by one hour per day […] net profit would be destroyed”. And the consequences would be tragic: the disappearance of profit would interrupt capitalist accumulation, this interruption would prevent the continuation of capital investment in production, factories would close, and workers would be thrown into unemployment and poverty.

Marx dismantles Nassau Senior's “demonstration” in a few lines, showing that if the working day were reduced, the capitalist would spend less on raw materials, work instruments, amortization, etc. The consequence of reducing the working day by one hour would be a small reduction in “profit” (surplus value) and not its disappearance.

The history of capitalism proved Marx right and buried Nassau Senior's theses... but the logic that presided over the latter's arguments seems to remain more alive than ever.

The Epigones of Nassau Senior

Presented as a sociologist specializing in labor relations, professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of São Paulo and PhD Honoris Causa da University of wisconsin (USA), José Pastore is categorical: “reducing the working day as proposed in the bill being debated in the National Congress is not viable”. After estimating that this reduction would cause an 18% increase in “labor costs”, he explains that this “would present companies with a huge challenge. Some would try to pass this on to their prices, but not all of them can. Those that cannot may have to opt for informality, which is already huge in the country, at almost 40%.” (Pastore, 2024)

In other words: those who would foot the bill would not be the bosses, but consumers, due to the increase in prices, and/or workers, who would see the supply of formal jobs reduced. Echoing Nassau Senior, José Pastore prophesies the apocalypse: “a good part [of the companies] would simply go bankrupt. And this would destroy a large number of employment monumental."

In the same vein, newspaper editorial The Globe intends to throw cold water on the enthusiasm of the PEC’s supporters who imagine “that, to keep up with the work, companies would hire more employees, reducing unemployment”. No way. It would be great, but that’s not what would happen, “because business owners would have no alternative but to fire people and informal employment would grow” (The Globe, 2024a). In other words, what we are told in this passage is not that unemployment would increase, but that formal employment would shrink and informal employment would grow; in other words, violations of labor legislation by employers would increase... the same ones who continue to benefit greatly from tax breaks and other exemptions worth billions of reais, without any compensation.

It is notable that neither the USP sociologist nor the editorialist of The Globe Let's assume that employers could have a small reduction in their profit rate, employ more people, pay more wages, generate more income, increase demand for their products and eventually recover the small initial loss. Their lack of shame is such that they suddenly set themselves up as defenders of informal workers, remembered not as models of the much-vaunted entrepreneurship, but as those who "have the least labor rights" and would see the inequalities that separate them from formal workers increase. What ardent fighters against inequality, aren't they?!

Let’s leave aside editorialists and experts and see what the employers are telling us out loud. The National Confederation of Industry threatens: “reducing working hours could lead to a wave of layoffs.” The president of the Minas Gerais Commerce Federation predicts “a collapse of small and medium-sized companies throughout the country.” The vice president of the Rio de Janeiro Federation of Industries goes further and warns against the “risk to the country’s growth.” (Franco, 2024)

On the evolution of labor productivity

It is worth taking a closer look at the way our contemporary Senior Nassaus manipulate the discussion about the relationship between reduced working hours and labor productivity. Although there is abundant evidence that reduced working hours have favored an increase in labor productivity in several countries, due to less physical and mental exhaustion and greater worker satisfaction, Brazilian employers and experts question this evidence, providing dubious examples to the contrary.

In short, what they say is that the increase in productivity, if any, would be far from being able to compensate for the increase in costs that employers would incur – a “stratospheric” 18% according to the professor at the University of USP and University of wisconsin "(The Globe, 2024a), more than 20%, according to Ulyssea (2024).

But by focusing attention on the issue of the future evolution of productivity that would or would not result from the reduction of the working day, they are overlooking a fundamental fact: the evolution of labor productivity since 1988, when the constituents rejected the proposal for a 40-hour working day, contained in Popular Amendment No.^o. 3, signed by the trade union movement, and included in the Constitution the still current 44-hour week.

In discussions about the recent evolution of labor productivity in Brazil, there are many disagreements and few consensuses. Among the consensuses, it is worth mentioning the one that leads authors of the most varied theoretical and political options to agree that the growth of labor productivity in Brazil has been small and slow compared to that of other countries. Among the disagreements, the main one is that which opposes the orthodox, who explain the low GDP growth by the low labor productivity, and those, heterodox, who, on the contrary, attribute the low GDP growth to the slow evolution of labor productivity (Cavalcante & Negri, 2015, vol. 2).

Whatever the explanations for its slow progression, it is an undeniable fact that labor productivity has grown. This growth would have been in the order of 30% between 1995 and 2021, when considering the value added per hour of work (Veloso et al, 2024). For the longer period from 1981 to 2019, growth would have been 40%, with the declines resulting from the pandemic beginning to be recovered from 2023 onwards (Veloso et al, 2024).

Thus, even if one were to accept the pessimistic forecasts that costs would rise stratospherically and productivity would remain the same or only slightly higher, the fact is that in the last 40 years, since the 1988 Constitution, labor productivity has increased by 30 to 40%, without workers having benefited from reductions in working hours.

O Caldas Aulete dictionary states that an argument is “reasoning that is intended to be based on facts and logical relationships (…) used to reach a conclusion or to justify it, to convince someone of something” (Aulete Digital). In the case discussed here, the claim to be based on facts and logical relationships certainly does not apply.

The rhetoric of intransigence

What would be the basis for rejecting the proposal to reduce working hours? Without evidence or logic to support it, what would lead our experts, professors as renowned as Nassau Senior was in his time, to reject changes? What would lead them to predict that the effect would be the opposite of what was intended? (Ulyssea, 2024).

The answer to this question is contained in a precious little book written by Albert Hirschman (1915-2012)[iii] entitled The rhetoric of intransigence. In a rigorous and consistent manner, the author exposes the argumentative model that structures reactionary thought, synthesizing it into three main theses: the perversity thesis, the futility thesis and the threat thesis.

“According to the perversity thesis, any purposeful action to improve an aspect of the economic, social, or political order only serves to exacerbate the situation it seeks to remedy. The futility thesis holds that attempts at social change will be fruitless, that they simply will not “make a dent.” Finally, the threat thesis argues that the cost of the proposed reform or change is too high, since it jeopardizes another precious previous achievement.” (Hisrschman, 1992, p. 15).

Let us focus on the perversity thesis, since it is the one that has been most frequently used. First, Albert Hirschman points out that, as a rule, reactionaries rarely confess their aversion to the proposed change; on the contrary, they are usually quick to declare their sympathy and agreement with the objectives sought. We can imagine the condescending and friendly tone with which they announce their agreement with the principle. “Yes,” they say, “the proposal is interesting and the objectives noble. We all want to move forward, don’t we? Who could disagree that current working hours are often exhausting and that it would be important to reduce them?”

Immediately, however, the counterpoint comes: “The problem, and we must recognize that problems exist in the real world, is that it is not always easy to carry out the best intentions and insistence can end up causing setbacks, instead of progress.” This is exactly what José Pastore tells us: “The motivation is to help the worker, but in the end it ends up harming them” (The Globe, 2024a).

Some, more sincere, open up, like Roberto Campos Neto, president of the Central Bank, who, at the 12th Freedom and Democracy Forum, proclaimed: “Brazil needs to have a pro-business policy”, because, after all, “we cannot improve workers’ rights by increasing employers’ obligations” (The Globe, 2024b).

Albert Hirschman will illustrate with several examples the historical contexts in which the most qualified spokespeople of conservative thought have contested change. Thus, for example, the universalization of the right to vote, instead of favoring a more representative and legitimate government, would pave the way for the submission of reason and order to the ignorance and barbarism of the masses.

And as if he were participating in our current debate, the author writes that it is in economics that the thesis of perversity is most present: “In economics, more than in any other social science, the doctrine of the perverse effect is closely linked to a central dogma of the discipline: the idea of ​​a self-regulating market. To the extent that this idea is dominant, any public policy that aims to change market results, such as prices or wages, automatically becomes a harmful interference in beneficial equilibrium processes. Even economists who are in favor of some measures of income and wealth redistribution tend to consider measures of a “populist” nature (…) as counterproductive” (Hirschamn, 1992, p. 30).

Precious and revealing is the quote from Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976 and father of the Chicago School, in whose primer the well-known Paulo Guedes and renowned experts already mentioned learned the basics and secrets of the market: “minimum wage laws are perhaps the clearest case that can be found of a measure whose effects are precisely the opposite of those intended by men of good will” (Capitalism and freedom, p.31).

Legality in the right-wing democratic state

Milton Friedman and neoliberals’ disagreement with the existence of legislation setting a minimum wage and, more broadly, of laws regulating labor relations between employers and employees expresses the conviction that labor power is a commodity like any other and that, like all other commodities, it should be freely bought and sold, without “spurious” interventions that restrict individuals’ freedom to contract. This is what they call “free negotiation” and it is based on the theoretical conviction of economists and the pragmatic interest of employers that they unsheath their bayonets to overcome what they see as the “rigidity” of legislation in favor of “flexibility.”

When criticizing “rigidity”, Gustavo Franco[iv] triggers the aforementioned perversity thesis: “The rigidity of labor rules leads to informality and perverse segmentations in the world of work, often benefiting a union elite and discriminating against minorities and immigrants <…> It would make much more sense to propose something in the direction of more flexibility, not less” (Franco, 2024). The proposal to reduce working hours, according to Gustavo Franco, would go against the necessary “flexibilization” of labor legislation, imposed by Michel Temer’s labor law reform and celebrated by him and his colleagues.

The reform (Law No. 13.467 of 2017), which took place shortly after President Dilma Roussef was impeached, revoked a series of achievements enshrined in the Consolidation of Labor Law and “relaxed” the conditions of hiring and employment. However, it did not fulfill its promise of reducing informality in the labor market. Quite the opposite.

In other words: seven years after the saving labor reform, the percentage of employees without a formal contract increased by 3,9% in the private sector and by 8,3% in domestic work, proving that “flexibility” is nothing more than smoke to cover up the dramatic precariousness of work.[v]

But if we leave aside the nonsense that it would be excessive regulation that would promote the growth of informality, what is striking about this type of argument is that it assumes that a law related to labor relations will result in a “rational” and conscious decision by employers to act illegally, hiring workers outside the law – after all, this is what we are talking about when we talk about an informal contract, of a worker employed without a formal contract.

If someone asks the Francos, Pastores, Campos Netos and other leaders of reactionary thought if they believe that citizens should comply with and demand compliance with the law, regardless of class, gender, color or religion, they will certainly answer yes, because they are true democrats. But in this case, they not only claim that employers will break the law, but they also accept this open violation, making it clear that, in truth, they only defend compliance with those laws that do not challenge the laws of the free market, which are sovereign, imposing, unquestionable, and above the laws of human beings.

And so the implementation of the right-wing democratic state (or should we say right-wing?), tolerant of illegalities against workers, intolerant of any attempt to subject capitalists to rules and norms, advances among us.

*Carlos Vainer He is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

References

Digital Aulete. Available in https://www.aulete.com.br/argumento.

Cavalcante, Luiz Ricardo & Negri, Fernanda de. Consensus and Dissensus on the Evolution of Productivity in the Brazilian Economy. Brasilia, ABDI/IPEA, 2015, vol. 2.

Engels, Friedrich – 1844. The Situation of the Working Class in England. Porto, Afrontamento Editions, 1975 (1844).

Franco, Bernardo de Mello – 2024. “The Chorus Heard in the 6 x 1 Debate”. In: The Globe.

Franco, Gustavo – 2024. “About the PEC of 6 to 1”. In: The Globe, 24/11/2024.

Hirschman, Albert O. The Rhetoric of Intransigence: Perversity, Futility, Threat. New York: Routledge.

IBGE. IBGE Indicators Continuous National Household Sample Survey Second Quarter of 2024. IBGE, APR.-JUN. 2024. Available at https://ftp.ibge.gov.br/Trabalho_e_Rendimento/Pesquisa_Nacional_por_Amostra_de_Domicilios_continua/Trimestral/Fasciculos_Indicadores_IBGE/2024/pnadc_202402_trimestre_caderno.pdf

Keynes, John Maynard – 1930. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”. In: Essays on Persuasion, New York: WWNorton & Co., 1963, pp. 358-373. Available at https://www.geocities.ws/luso_america/KeynesPO.pdf, 30 / 11 / 2024

Marx, Karl. Capital: Critique of Political Economy. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1867].

The Globe – 2024a. “PEC that Imposes 4 x 3 Work Schedule Would Be a Mistake”. Editorial, The Globe, 16/11/2024.

The Globe – 2024b. “Journey 6×1: Government Praises the PEC and Campos Neto Criticizes”. The Globe, 15/11/2024.

Pastore, José – 2024. “Reducing working hours has an economic impact. Interview with José Pastore by Glauce Cavalcanti”. In: The Globe, 16/11/2024.

Ulyssea, Gabriel – 2024. “PEC of the Work Scale Can Generate Inverse Effect”. In, The Globe, 17/11/2024.

Veloso, Fernando et al – 2024. Labor productivity in Brazil: an analysis of sectoral results since the mid-1990s. In: IBRE Blog, 22/04/2024. Available at https://blogdoibre.fgv.br/posts/produtividade-do-trabalho-no-brasil-uma-analise-dos-resultados-setoriais-desde-meados-da, 30/11/2024.

Veloso, Fernando et al. “After sharp declines in 2021 and 2022, labor productivity returns to growth in 2023”. Available at https://portalibre.fgv.br/noticias/apos-fortes-quedas-em-2021-e-2022-produtividade-do-trabalho-volta-crescer-em-2023.

Wikipedia. Gustavo Franco. Available at https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Gustavo_Franco.

Notes

[I] Liverpool's ships transported around 1.500.000 enslaved Africans throughout the XNUMXth century. Liverpool's mayors and elites were slave traders or were linked to the slave trade. The city was the main port through which cotton entered the city of Manchester's industry and through which manufactured goods were exported.

[ii] One of the main centers of the industrial revolution of the 18th century, Manchester was nicknamed Cottontown in the 19th century, due to the concentration of the textile industry.

[iii] A graduate in Economics and Political Science from Humboldt University, Hirschman fled Germany to escape Nazism. He studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris, and earned a doctorate in Economics from the University of Trieste. He worked at the Federal Reserve (US Central Bank), was an advisor to the World Bank and worked at Harvard and Columbia Universities.

[iv] Professor of the Economics Department at PUC-RJ and considered one of the “fathers” of the Plano Real, Gustavo Franco was president of the Central Bank during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and is a founding partner of Rio Bravo Investimentos. After 28 years, he left the PSDB to join the Partido Novo in 2017 (Wikipedia).

[v] Not to mention the legal pre-digitization called “pejotização” (pejotization): when threatened with unemployment, the salaried employee agrees to become a MEI, that is, a company. And in this format of “formalized informality” he sees his rights being stolen. After all, unlike male and female workers, companies, even micro and individual ones, do not get sick, do not get pregnant, do not get tired… and, as a result, do not need sick leave, maternity leave, vacations and other abuses drastically established by the rigidity of labor legislation.

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