By GRACE DRUCK & LUIZ FILGUEIRAS*
The end of the 6×1 scale because it is putting the capital-labor relationship back at the center of the organization and political struggle of workers
Workers have returned to the political scene. And they have not returned in a divided, fragmented form. Workers have returned to the political scene as a social class, which unifies all its segments, regardless of their specific identity. What’s more, they have returned to social media and the streets, mobilized in the fight for a reduction in working hours, which is in the interests of all categories of workers: poor and well-off, black and white, men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, etc.
The person directly responsible for this, and who started this mobilization, is the “Life Beyond Work” Movement (VAT), started by Rio de Janeiro city councilman Rick Azevedo, the PSOL’s most voted candidate in the recent municipal election, and which immediately gained support on social media and in the streets. Based on his own experience of “living to work”, in an exhaustive and precarious manner, he started an online petition initiative that has already gathered three million signatures and, in partnership with PSOL deputy Érika Hilton, a Proposed Constitutional Amendment (PEC) was drafted changing the workday from six days of work (48 hours per week as a maximum limit) with one day of rest, to four days of work (36 hours per week as a maximum limit) with three days of rest – without a reduction in salary.
The benefits for all Brazilian workers are clear: adopting a 4x3 workday will significantly improve the quality of life of workers, who will have more time for rest, family life and leisure, contributing to their physical and mental health by reducing stress and accumulated fatigue. It will also enable them to improve their professional skills and qualifications.
From a business perspective, it will reduce the high turnover of the workforce associated, among other reasons, with employee dissatisfaction with the existence of exhausting working hours. This will reduce the number of layoffs, saving on training and frequent replacements. In addition, it will have a positive impact on the creation of more jobs and increased productivity, as seen in countries such as England, Germany and Spain, which have reduced their working hours.
The fight to reduce the working day has been a historic struggle of the working class since the first Industrial Revolution in the 16th and 1th centuries, when people worked up to 1886 hours a day every day, including using child labor. One of the most significant moments of this struggle occurred on May 8, 1, in the city of Chicago in the United States, when thousands of workers took to the streets, striking their jobs in protest for better working conditions, especially a reduction in the working day to XNUMX hours. The government responded by violently repressing the protesters, giving rise to May XNUMX as Workers' Day.
Gradually, with the mobilization and struggle of workers as a fundamental determinant, this working day was reduced and reached, at the beginning of the 48th century, in the central countries of capitalism, a daily working day of eight hours, with a total of 1919 hours per week. This occurred and was legitimized by the First ILO Convention signed in XNUMX.
However, today, technological transformations and changes in the organization of work in contemporary financialized capitalism, which has the precariousness of work at its dynamic center, have brought back exhausting and inhumane working hours, as is the most evident case of platform workers.
In Brazil, the eight-hour work week was only established in 1932 and included in the 1934 Constitution, with six working days; therefore, 92 years ago. The CLT, created in 1943, and then restricted to urban workers, incorporated the 48-hour work week, together with the establishment of a set of labor rights and others that were established later (minimum wage, thirteenth salary, paid vacations, retirement, unemployment insurance, etc.).
In the 1988 Constitution, despite the union movement having defended a 40-hour workweek, the working day was reduced to 44 hours. However, there are numerous loopholes in the legislation that, in practice, make it possible to circumvent this limit, such as the 6×1 scale – in force mainly in the commerce and services sectors.
In Brazil, as in the central countries of capitalism, the struggle to reduce the working day has always been arduous. The bourgeoisie and its spokespeople have always strongly resisted any initiative in this direction, painting a chaotic picture for the economy, predicting a dramatic increase in unemployment and even foreseeing the emergence of a “class of vagabonds”.
It is never too much to remember that, in Brazil, the large landowners and slave owners, when the abolition of slavery was imminent, behaved in the same way, foreseeing the end of coffee production and a debacle of the national economy. The same occurred more recently, with the extension of labor legislation to domestic workers. Evidently, as history has shown, none of these predictions came true.
In the current situation of financialized capitalism, the arguments of the neoliberal right and the neofascist extreme right against the reduction of the working day remain basically the same: the Brazilian economy will not be able to cope, the small capitalist will “go broke”, unemployment will explode, the prices of goods and services will rise and the proposed PEC, which has already received more than 200 signatures from the deputies, is a piece of crap.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, with the establishment of the liberal-peripheral development pattern in Brazil, the capital-labor relationship has changed profoundly, with the increase in structural unemployment and the weakening of unions, greater precariousness of work and the institution of a process of deregulation of this relationship to the detriment of working conditions (working hours and pay) and the reduction of labor rights, as exemplified by the 2017 labor reform.
In short, the prevalence of a political correlation of forces unfavorable to workers has led to the emergence of new forms of super-exploitation of labor (a structural characteristic of Brazilian dependent capitalism), such as that to which workers on digital platforms are subjected – whose companies reach the paradox of denying the existence of the capital-labor relationship.
On November 15, demonstrations were held in several states in Brazil, called by the Vida Além do Trabalho movement and other organizations, with the central theme being the end of the 6x1 work shift, that is, the reduction of working hours without a reduction in wages. This was the first national initiative to demonstrate in the streets, in the campaign that had already been taking place on social media and locally in the streets of some cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, where the movement was born. This mobilization began to be discussed in the news, in the corporate press, on various social media channels, and in political parties and unions.
The campaign – on social media and in the streets – has gained support from left-wing parties, union leaders and social movements, which seem to have rediscovered the centrality of this struggle for all Brazilian workers. The experience of VAT – Life Beyond Work – as a social movement for better working conditions beyond the union space, present in neighborhoods, workplaces, social media and parliament, has demonstrated a collective will that can help change the correlation of political forces in the country, with the working class as the central subject of this process – thus putting work and workers back on the political scene.
But is this here to stay, putting the capital-labor relationship back at the center of the organization and political struggle of workers, reorienting the course of the left in Brazil? Or will the majority of the left continue to look only at the immediate situation and cling to a “political correlation of forces” limited to Parliament and seen as a snapshot, which prevents actions and initiatives that confront capital and neofascism?
*Graça Druck She is a professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
*Luiz Filgueiras He is a professor at the Faculty of Economics at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
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