Between the Worker's Longing and the Political Disposition around the “PEC 6x1”: The Duel of Social Voices Based on the Statement by Congressman Nikolas Ferreira

Abstract

Recently, Constitutional Amendment Proposal 8/2025 or, as it has come to be known, “PEC 6x1” has gained notoriety. The proposal aims to reduce the standard 44-hour workweek to 36 hours. Although it enjoys significant popular support, the PEC faces opposition among members of parliament, such as Congressman Nikolas Ferreira (Liberal Party), who argues that the proposal would lead to inflation and job losses. In light of this, the present article aims to investigate the deputy’s statement opposing PEC 8/2025, posted on his TikTok profile on November 11, 2024, through the lens of Dialogic Discourse Analysis (DDA). The analysis is grounded in the concept of the concrete utterance as the basic unit of discursive communication (Bakhtin, 2016), insofar as we consider the intrinsic relationship between the utterance and other utterances. In addition, the study draws on the notions of social voices referring to the presence of multiple social, ideological, and historically situated consciousnesses within concrete utterances (Bakhtin, 2017b) and of ideological sign, to highlight how utterances, as ideological products, reflect and refract different class relations (Volóchinov, 2019). The results show that the deputy’s statement aligns with discourses that seek to preserve the status quo of the 6x1 work schedule, using arguments that generate a certain degree of panic, which ultimately shuts down the debate by asserting a single truth and rendering the discourse, as a meaning effect, monologic.