🛠️ A crowd-pleaser, unpaused

Brazil's Senate has rediscovered a constitutional amendment it spent three months pretending not to see. PEC 221/2019, which would end the country's six-day workweek (common in sectors such as retail) by cutting the maximum workweek from 44 to 40 hours with no pay reduction, cleared the House in late May and then sat untouched, hostage to a feud between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senate President Davi Alcolumbre.

The two had been estranged since last year, but the relationship reached a full rupture in April, when senators rejected Lula's nomination of Solicitor General Jorge Messias to the Supreme Court, and Alcolumbre began shelving the government's legislative priorities.

A reconciliation brokered by mutual allies in early August changed the government's legislative standing overnight. Alcolumbre sent…

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