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RIO DE JANEIRO — “Downton Abbey” has nothing on contemporary Brazil: With more household servants than any other country — 6.5 million, according to the International Labor Organization — discussing upstairs-downstairs drama is a national pastime.

Brazil’s long-standing income disparities have provided the upper and middle classes with a steady supply of cooks, nannies, maids and caretakers; they can be seen in Rio and São Paulo loading bags of groceries, pushing strollers, walking dogs or their elderly charges. The certainty that there is always someone else to make breakfast and tidy up after dinner is so entrenched that even one-bedroom apartments have separate postage-stamp-size rooms for the help.

A law implemented in April that is designed to modestly improve the lot of domestic workers is causing a fury.

Domestic workers in Brazil (60 percent black, 90 percent female) not only use separate bathrooms; they eat in the kitchen and ride separate elevators in the back of buildings. They get very few benefits, work unlimited hours and can be fired on a whim.

Which is why a law implemented in April that is designed to modestly improve the lot of domestic workers is causing a fury. It caps their workload at 44 hours a week, and it grants them one-and-a-half-pay for overtime and a month of vacation per year. Yet it is being described as the end of civilization — an economic revolution on a par with the abolition of slavery.

In a post last month, one blogger described a hypothetical evening in which a maid insists that her eight-hour day is over, leaving a hungry toddler wailing for food and her hapless father wringing his hands. An op-ed in O Globo, Rio’s leading newspaper, warned readers who have grown tired of their maids’ cooking to consult a lawyer before firing them because “socialism has now reached the kitchen.”

An April cover of Veja, a conservative newsmagazine, shows a morose businessman in shirt and tie washing dishes under the headline, “You tomorrow.”

The discomfort is about more than money. Having someone else to do your dirty work raises your own status, according to studies of domestic workers in Arab states edited by Simel Esim and Monica Smith, of the I.L.O. Maids have taken up the bottom rung in Brazil’s social, economic, racial and gender hierarchy, giving everyone else a boost up.

Without them there, the others take a step down. In a series of articles published in April in O Globo, Brazilians abroad share their tips for living without help. One couple in France divvies up household chores with their teenage children.

Another in the United States describes their “domestic revolution”: They learned to cook, clean, iron and even wash toilets. “It was a shock — a lifestyle I’d only seen in movies,” the wife confided to the reporter.

Some change was inevitable. Brazil has grown both wealthier and more equitable over the last 15 or so years. Although incomes have risen across the board, the poorest 10 percent of Brazilians arguably have benefited the most: Their earnings have nearly doubled over the last decade, and 25 million of them have been hoisted out of extreme poverty over the last two years.

Brazil has a history of passing progressive laws but failing to enforce them.

Thanks to an unemployment rate at a near-record low — between 5 and 6 percent for much of the previous year — and transfer-of-wealth programs that alleviate extreme poverty with cash infusions, the number of maids shrunk from 7.2 million in 2009 to 6.7 million in 2011. It continued to drop last year, even while their average salary increased twice as fast as inflation. Maids tend to be older now: the proportion of domestic staff over 30 went from 57 percent to 73 percent over the last decade. Much as in Britain at the turn of the last century, the balance of economic and social power is shifting in Brazil today.

The country has a history of passing progressive laws but failing to enforce them. It would be a pity if that happened again regarding the rights of domestic workers, because the recent law has the potential, in time, to bring broader reforms, like full-time schooling and more subsidized nurseries (a pledge of President Dilma Rousseff).

Voltaire once wrote, “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” It’s time for Brazil to concern itself with the comfort of the poor.