Brazilian supermarkets have been characterized by intense work and little rest.

By Osmel Almaguer

HAVANA TIMES – Brazil’s Congress has put an end to the “6 x 1” work schedule, guaranteeing by law two days of paid rest per week. The new law will take effect on December 16, two months after its enactment.

However, some companies have already ventured into testing the new arrangement to become familiar with it and adapt. One of them is the supermarket chain where I work.

The first challenge was finding a way to distribute days off without favoring or disadvantaging anyone. The company’s internal rule prohibiting days off on certain strategic days, such as Saturdays, had to be eliminated. Sundays also had to begin being treated like any other day, since previously each employee was entitled to one Sunday off per month.

The number of employees on each shift had to be adjusted, with less priority given to the closing shift, which is the supermarket’s busiest period.

Even so, the challenge remained of deciding when each employee would take their days off, along with uncertainty about whether additional workers would need to be hired or whether we would have to close one day a week.

All these questions were crucial because their answers would determine the company’s future.

Closing one day a week would cause enormous losses, which could eventually lead to layoffs. On the other hand, if the company decided to hire more employees, it would inevitably have to pass the financial burden on to customers through higher product prices, ultimately affecting sales.

The solution, although ingenious, was to place the burden on the workers.

The owner devised a rotating system of days off, creating four teams whose members would take their days off together. Each team would include employees from both the morning and afternoon shifts, with representatives from every department. For example, the meat department would have at least one butcher and one salesperson working each shift every day.

Each team would be identified by a color because fixed weekly days off would disappear. Instead, days off would rotate. For example, the yellow team, which rested on Monday and Thursday this week, would rest on Tuesday and Friday the following week, then Wednesday and Saturday the week after that, and finally Monday and Sunday during the last week of the cycle.

When the schedule connects with the first week of the next cycle, which begins with Monday off, the team gets two consecutive days off. This applies to all four colors. With this ingenious but complicated structure, the company ensured fairness in the distribution of days off, maintained constant staffing, and avoided having to hire additional workers.

Since each of the four teams receives two days off, there was one remaining day on which an additional team could rest. They ultimately assigned it to Monday, the day with the lowest sales. On Mondays, two teams will have the day off.

The hardest part is that, because this is still a trial, we continue working 44 hours a week, meaning an additional hour and 18 minutes has been added to each workday. Starting in December, the workweek will be reduced to 42 hours, so the increase in daily working time compared with the previous schedule will be 40 minutes.

One year after the law takes effect, it requires the weekly workload to be reduced to 40 hours, leaving an increase of just 20 minutes per workday.

The difficulty with this system arises on public holidays because, when the supermarket remains open, the law requires employees who work on those holidays to receive an additional day off as compensation. This comes at a time when staffing is already stretched thin. Some employees will have three days off during those weeks.

The measure seems designed to provide relief, and to some extent it does. But we must not forget the owners’ bottom line, and that is where things get complicated. On the one hand, we will have two days at home to rest, go out, take care of personal matters, or even earn a little extra money. On the other hand, our daily working hours and responsibilities within the company will increase.

There will also be consequences for society as a whole, but we will have to wait a little longer to measure that impact.

Read more from the diary of Osmel Almaguer here on Havana Times