The Superior Labor Court (TST) decided this Monday (25) that the labor reform approved in 2017 must be applied 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).
The understanding was signed by a majority of votes by the TST plenary during the judgment on the temporal application of the reform, which came into force on November 11, 2017, through the Law 13,467/2017.
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.
“Law 13,467 of 2017 has immediate application to ongoing employment contracts, starting to regulate the rights arising from law, whose triggering events have come into effect as of its validity”, defined the court.
The thesis should be applied to all similar processes that are being processed in the Labor Court in the country.
The specific case that motivated the trial deals with the case of a worker who sued a meat processing plant in Rondônia to receive payment for the hours spent traveling on the bus provided by the company between 2013 and 2018.
With the TST’s decision, the hours must be paid by the employer by November 10, 2017, one day before the law comes into force.
