The Flexible Work Proposal (PEC) was proposed by Senator Rogério Marinho (PL-RN) to counter the PEC ending the 6x1 shift system, which was approved by the Federal Congress but remains stuck in the Senate, partly due to the articulation of the President of the House himself.Davi Alcolumbre (Union Brazil-AP).
The text provides that workers can opt for either the CLT regime or a regime based on hours worked. According to José Dari Krein, professor of Economics at Unicamp and researcher at the Center for Trade Union Studies and Labor Economy (Cesit), the project is a deepening of the labor reform carried out by Michel Temer in 2017, shortly after the coup against President Dilma Rousseff. The reform, reported by Marinho himself, transfers collective bargaining power to individual agreements that largely favor employers.
According to the economist, flexibility will not only be illusory but will also open up a breach for exhausting work schedules that will impact mental health and the social life of workers, completely going against the fight for reduced working hours and the end of the 6x1 shift system. "It makes workers more subordinate to their employer," he evaluates. "The other measure provides that they will be paid by the hour. This means the possibility of reduction, of receiving less salary at the end of the month, and having less access to Social Security benefits. A situation of total instability is created."
Proponents of the reform, Krein reminds, claimed that work relations would be de-bureaucratized and that millions of jobs would be generated. What has been seen almost ten years later is that none of this happened.
"The recent generation of employment has no connection to the 2017 reform. It can be explained much more by economic dynamics, particularly how the economy is being operationalized, as well as changes in demographic profiles and a shift in values regarding what work means in Brazilian society," he evaluates.
"Moreover, the labor reform did not reduce informality, which was another argument made," he adds.
In general terms, the labor reform weakened workers' negotiating power, trade union action, and even the Labor Court, increasing intermittent and temporary contracts, and precariating workers' routines. The path of the PEC proposed by Marinho will not be much different from what happened with the labor reform.
The economist warns that the proposal is quite synthetic and consists of only three articles, but it has the potential to cause deep impacts in the world of work. And one of them is precisely the fallacy that workers will have conditions of choice in the type of contract. "The PEC starts from a premise that does not exist in the real world: that worker and employer are equal," he summarizes.
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