Yesterday, Monday 11^th, in Sao Paulo, the United Workers’ Federation (CUT), together with the other Brazilian trade union federations, held the first public act to promote the Joint Campaign to Reduce the Workday without Reducing Wages and launched the drive to collect signatures. Sirel spoke with Siderlei de Olivera, president of Brazil’s National Confederation of Food Workers (CONTAC) and CUT’s National Institute of Health, Labor and Environmental Matters (INST).

-What can you tell us about yesterday’s activity in Sao Paulo, held to launch the Campaign to Reduce the Workday?

-Brazil’s eight labor federations were there, and that’s a very good thing. The goal of this Campaign is to obtain a million signatures to support a bill reducing the workday, and to submit it to Congress through the mechanism of “popular initiative.” CONTAC has been working for a long time on this and has gone to Congress to distribute a specific bill for our industry, which even includes six hour shifts for the poultry sector, a greater reduction than what CUT proposes, because these workers perform unhealthy tasks.

But we agree with the demand for all industries in general, which is the proposal to lower the workweek to 40 hours, and which will no doubt generate new jobs. In the case of the food industry, we have full employment because there have been no recent layoffs. On the contrary, many companies are increasing their workforces, in particular meatpacking plants.

For us, a reduction in the workday is also important because it would reduce occupational diseases and work-related accidents. It’s obvious that if we reduce the number of hours in which workers are exposed to unhealthy working conditions, to the cold, to intense paces of production, their health will suffer less. Improving and protecting the quality of life of workers is as important as generating new jobs.

-Which activities have a greater incidence of occupational diseases?

-Metal works, food production, banking services and construction works are the four sectors that lead the statistics in this sense. One of the main reasons for this is the workload and the intensity of the workdays. That is why reducing working hours to 40 per week, controlling overtime and eliminating the so called “hour banks” will contribute to improve working conditions in terms of health.

-Besides the simple arithmetic result of distributing the number of work hours among more people, in what other ways will a shorter workday create new jobs?

-That’s very important, because often when people talk about unemployment they only refer to those workers who had a job and lost it, but statistics rarely include the millions of young people who enter the work market and can’t find their first job. Brazil currently has a stable economy, maybe even one of the most stable economies in the world, so much so that there are no signs of it being affected by the huge crisis underway in the United States. But what we want is for those benefits, for that economic consolidation, to reach workers as well, generating more quality jobs for these young people. Only then will we be able to say that we live in a “Brazil for everyone.”

-How are employers and the political establishment reacting to this proposal?

-Naturally, management will initially reject our demand; they are going to be against it. But as this is a “popular initiative,” that is, a bill that is presented directly to Congress by organized citizens, backed by a stipulated number of signatures, it will be difficult for legislators to vote against a demand that comes from their own constituencies, the same people they will have to appeal to in the next elections if they want to be reelected. By law, only a million signatures are required, but we’re aiming for 20 million, in order to give the project the greatest support possible so that it will not be rejected by Congress.

-How long do you think it will take to collect that many signatures?

-We think two or three months. If all the categories participate and everyone does what they have to do, it’s a perfectly reasonable timeframe. In the food sector we expect to collect some 800,000 signatures. We are going to fight to achieve it. We mustn’t forget that all the labor federations are participating in this movement, so I predict that if we all do what we have to do, we’ll not only reach that number, we’ll beat it.