Is Regulating Rest Time a Waste of Time? An Assessment of the Impacts of the "Rest Law" on Brazilian Truck Drivers

The purpose of this article is to assess the impact of the Federal Law 12,619, so called the “Rest Law”, in the monthly worked hours, in the wages and in non-fatal work accidents (injuries and illnesses) of Brazilian truck drivers. To this end, it uses a panel data by individuals built from information of the Annual Social Information Register (RAIS) from the period 2011 to 2014 and takes advantage of the natural experiment generated by the implementation of this Law in 2012, which provides the rules about the working hours and driving time of road passenger drivers and road cargo drivers (truck drivers) in Brazil, to estimate a model of generalized difference in differences (GDD). In general, the results show that the “Rest Law” did not generate statistically significant effects in any of the dimensions analyzed. Thus, we concluded that this Law does not seem to have achieved the objectives of its proponents and has not altered the decisions of truck drivers regarding the fulfillment of the daily work and rest hours stipulated by this new rule, that is, the benefit of breaking the proposed legislation by assuming the risk of negligence appears to have been greater than its costs.