Unions: decision proves that labor reform removed rights

Workers’ unions will appeal the decision of the Superior Labor Court (TST), taken on Monday (25), regarding the time frame for labor reform. The TST decided that the reform, approved in 2017, must be applied even to contracts that were in progress before the law that regulated the changes came into force.

The court’s decision confirms that companies are not obliged to maintain labor benefits that were extinguished by the reform, such as payment of hours for workers to travel to the workplace (hours in itinere) even in contracts signed before 2017.

According to the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), the decision, which will be questioned in the TST itself by the entity, shows that the labor reform took away employees’ rights. “The judgment highlights the fallacy widely publicized when the law was published, that the so-called labor reform would not take away workers’ rights”, highlighted CUT lawyer Ricardo Carneiro.

“[O julgamento] not only took away rights, but also offended legal, constitutional norms and international pacts ratified by Brazil, in the sense of the impossibility of social regression”, he added.

According to the winning thesis of the trial, prepared by the rapporteur, minister Aloysio Corrêa da Veiga, the reform has immediate application to labor contracts that were in force. The decision should be applied to all similar processes that are being processed in the Labor Court in the country.

“The decision taken unfortunately only favors employers, taking away from workers the rights they already had guaranteed by agreement or convention prior to the reform. [A decisão] it means money in the boss’s pocket and less in the worker’s pocket, so it’s very bad”, highlighted the executive director of the ABC Metalworkers Union, Luiz Carlos da Silva Dias.

The ministers Vieira de Mello Filho (general inspector of Labor Justice), Ives Gandra Martins Filho, Caputo Bastos, Agra Belmonte, Douglas Alencar Rodrigues, Breno Medeiros, Alexandre Ramos, Dezena da Silva, Evandro voted with the rapporteur of the action in the TST. Valadão, Amaury Rodrigues and Sergio Pinto Martins and ministers Maria Cristina Peduzzi, Dora Maria da Costa and Morgana de Almeida Richa.

Minister Mauricio Godinho Delgado, vice-president of the TST, opened a disagreement, as he understood that employment contracts signed before the reform should remain under the rules in force at the time of the celebration. Ministers Augusto César, José Roberto Pimenta, Hugo Scheuermann, Cláudio Brandão and Alberto Balazeiro and ministers Kátia Arruda, Delaíde Miranda Arantes, Maria Helena Mallmann and Liana Chaib followed this understanding.