One day in 2023, after finishing his shift, a pharmacy assistant in Rio de Janeiro called Rick Azevedo decided to record a video railing against the six-day work schedule to which much of the Brazilian working class are subject, including a disproportionate number of black workers. In the video, he referred to the 6 x 1, the colloquial name for this work regime, as a “modern form of slavery” and asked when the working class was going to make a revolution to put an end to it.

Azevedo went on to note that if he, as a single man, had no time to do anything, he could only imagine how bad things are for others with kids. He ended the video with a call to revolt, warning that if ordinary workers like him did not organize behind the issue, things would never change. He originally archived the video, but after his manager called him in to work early the next day, he decided to post it on TikTok during his shift.

The video quickly went viral, with thousands of interactions shortly after it was posted. Azevedo, who already had a following on TikTok for posts about pop culture and Beyoncé Knowles, received messages from others who felt the same way. In response, he founded the social movement Vida Além do Trabalho (VAT, “Life Beyond Work”), organizing first through live streams and WhatsApp groups, then through petitions to change the law.

Azevedo, who had spent much of his life jumping from job to job but never finding enough time to finish formal university studies, became a movement leader overnight. The movement soon spread to other states and crowdfunded a protest in São Paulo to organize around the issue, gaining the attention of Erika Hilton, a rising star in the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). Because of his newfound popularity, Azevedo decided to run for Rio’s City Council in 2024 with PSOL’s support, further popularizing the movement and solidifying his alliance with Erika Hilton.

After the initial 2024 protests and news of Azevedo’s election in Rio, calls to change the workweek gained momentum and were taken up by some of Brazil’s progressive members of Congress. However, under Brazilian law, a change of this kind could not be made through a simple legislative process; it required an amendment to the Brazilian Constitution.

In Brazil, a constitutional amendment requires one-third of members in both houses to sign on. This seemed very hard to achieve at the time because many of those in Congress belonged to right-wing and center-right parties that initially opposed the change.

In February 2025, Hilton got 234 members of Congress to sign on to the constitutional amendment proposal, well over the third needed, allowing her to bring the amendment up for formal debate in Congress. The initial proposal also proved to be quite ambitious, calling for a thirty-six-hour workweek spread over four days without any cut to pay, which would have transformed Brazil’s labor regulations into some of the most progressive in Latin America.

The thirty-six-hour workweek met opposition from sectors on the center and Right who chose to side with capital and oppose it. Azevedo’s VAT movement and the Brazilian labor movement mobilized around the demand on May 1, and President Lula made the end of the 6 x 1 work schedule a centerpiece in his May Day address in 2025.

Lula stated that this change was necessary to build a balance between workers’ professional lives and their well-being. But despite the pressure, the legislation sat in Congress for the rest of 2025. In April 2026, the president sent his own proposal to Congress to keep the issue in the media cycle and continue putting pressure on the lower chamber.

The combination of pressure from above and below worked, and in May the proposal finally passed the lower chamber and moved to the Senate. By this point, the reform had been modified so that it would establish a forty-hour workweek with two days off instead of the four-day workweek Hilton had initially proposed.

The timing now meant that labor reform would be a key part of the national debate in Brazil’s presidential election. The right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro was a sitting senator at the time, and he felt obliged to support the proposed constitutional change for fear of losing working-class voters. This essentially meant conceding that the Right had been wrong to oppose the labor reform.

After the first round of elections on October 4, it seemed that Bolsonaro’s compromise might have sufficed to shore up support for his candidacy, as he topped the polls and his far-right Liberal Party made significant gains in both houses of Congress. However, Rick Azevedo was elected to Congress on the same night, and Erika Hilton became the female deputy with the highest number of votes in Brazilian history: 1,596,472. This demonstrated how the fight for a shorter workweek connected with diverse sectors of the Brazilian electorate.

On October 14, a week after the first round of the election, the Brazilian Senate voted 75–1 to end the forty-four-hour workweek. This promised a change to the lives of sixteen million Brazilians who previously had only one day off a week. Although the legislation that eventually passed was less ambitious than Hilton’s original proposal, it still lowered the work week to forty hours with two days off. This promises to empower millions of workers by making Brazil into one of the few countries in Latin America, a region where businesses are notorious for exploiting workers, to have a forty-hour week.

The debate around the forty-hour week became a key space for Lula’s campaign to regain momentum after it initially fell behind Bolsonaro in the first round, shifting the focus to what was at stake for the Brazilian working class and the possibility of future reforms. The issue forced the Right to concede that Lula and his coalition had the best interests of workers at heart.

The debate also revealed the hypocrisy of the Right’s homophobic and transphobic rhetoric around the family, with a gay man and a trans woman leading the fight for working-class families to be able to spend more time together, get an education, and watch their children grow. Now, as Lula enters his fourth (and surely final) term, the global left should watch closely to learn how to take back the narrative from the Right and connect working-class interests with the diverse forms of oppression that workers face.