Seventy thousand workers spend roughly half of each year away from home, aboard oil platforms and support vessels off the Brazilian coast. For them, the constitutional amendment that ended the "6x1" schedule, six days of work for each day off, has become an open question: nobody yet knows how the new rule will apply to people who work 14 straight days at sea.
The current routine is 14 days on board followed by 14 days off (21 days off at Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company). While at sea, crews work 12-hour days, one and a half times the standard eight-hour shift, with no weekly rest day. That is the point that may clash with the mandatory weekly rest under the new legislation.
Understanding the rule
The 6x1 schedule, common in Brazilian retail and services, means working six days for each day off. The amendment scrapped that model and phases in a 40-hour workweek by December 2027. The text, however, does not mention the oil industry's special regimes, where production runs 24 hours a day and cannot stop.
For Telmo Ghiorzi, president of Abespetro, the oil goods and services association that calculated the 70,000 figure, the answer is regulation. "A decree or a complementary law must come to establish how it will work," he told Folha de S.Paulo, which first reported the sector's concerns.
Abpip, the association of independent oil producers, goes further in its warning. According to the group, revising embarkation schedules and crew sizes could raise costs and lead to the early closure of producing fields, cutting royalty payments to governments and eliminating industrial jobs.
Petrobras told Folha it already applies a 40-hour week to administrative staff and that schedules at operational units are negotiated in collective bargaining agreements. The company said its technical teams have begun assessing the effects of the new rule on contracts with outsourced crews working across the Petrobras system.
Beyond the 70,000 embarked workers, another 650,000 people work in oil exploration and production in Brazil, many in onshore fields that operate every day, according to Abespetro. Specialists consulted by the industry argue that collective bargaining should adapt the special regimes before the 2027 deadline.