Congress should discuss reducing work hours while maintaining salaries – News

Reducing working hours, without reducing wages, should be among the proposals on the congressional agenda in 2024. In December last year, before the end of parliamentary activities, the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives approved a bill amending the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT). . To allow for a reduction in working hours. The proposal must still be analyzed by the House of Representatives and approved by the President to become law.

The project, written by Senator Waverton (PDT-MA), has gained prominence again after Brazilian companies joined an international trial testing the four-day workweek model. In this case, the challenge is to reduce the workload on employees and maintain productivity. Companies that joined the tests received training, lectures, organizational diagnosis of teams and individual monitoring.

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The text approved by the committee aims to limit the time period available for negotiation between the employer, employee and union to 14 hours per week, through collective agreements. This negotiation is conditional on maintaining current salaries. In this way, the total working hours can be adjusted to up to 30 hours per week.

In addition to this proposal, at least two other projects are still underway that seek to reduce the current 44-hour work week. One such article was introduced 25 years ago by Rep. Paulo Beim (PT-RS), now a senator. According to the proposal, the maximum weekly working hours will be a maximum of 36 hours, with a guarantee that the salary will not be reduced.

The other proposal is being processed in the House of Representatives and was presented by Rep. Reginaldo Lopez (PT-MG) in 2019. According to the text, the constitution will also be changed to reduce the working day to 36 hours per week. However, unlike the project currently proposed in the Senate, the text imposes a period of ten years to put the idea into practice.

These proposals are supported by a study conducted by the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Social and Economic Studies (Dieese), which states that reducing working hours to 40 hours per week would generate more than 3 million new jobs. In a second step, with the reduction to 36 hours per week, approximately 6 million jobs will be created, according to the research.