In 2017, Brazilian labour law underwent its first general reform in decades through the approval of the federal law No. 13.467/2017, that makes significant changes to the main aspects of individual and collective law. The reform changes more than one hundred articles from the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (Labour Code), creating new types of labour contracts – as for example the zero-hour contract – , restricting the role of the labour courts, and changing the relationship between legal norms and collective contracts. Labour law reforms can signal progressive change but as we argue below the new law is one of the most regressive steps in Brazil’s contemporary history of labour regulation. There has been great anxiety surrounding the labour reform, mostly because of the speed with which it was brought into effect. Historically, most pieces of comprehensive legislation spent several years in each house of Congress being discussed and debated; but in this case, in less than a year the entire package of significant changes was approved. It signals a tectonic shift from the longstanding principles of Brazilian labour law. Our objective is to examine the challenges the Brazilian union movement will face in response to the new regulations. Our analysis suggests that the labour movement would need to effectively reinvent itself to neutralise the changes made in the law. From mandatory to voluntary: changes in rules governing trade union dues Brazil’s peculiar corporatist structure prevents effective freedom of association in the terms of the ILO Convention 87. One main aspect of the Brazilian corporatist system was the mandatory trade union dues (contribuição sindical), required under law to be collected from employers and workers represented by trade unions1. Union dues are the main sources of trade union funding in the country. There are basically four types of trade union dues in the current system: the dues paid by individual workers who choose to associate with the trade union (CLT, Article 548, b); the trade union assistance contribution (based on a general provision in CLT Article 513); the confederation contribution (Article 8, IV, Federal Constitution); and the trade union dues imposed by law on all members of a category (CLT Articles 578 to 610). Among the four, only the last one, the CLT trade union dues, was mandatory on entire categories of workers or employers. The mandatory trade union dues was one of the oldest rules of Brazilian Labour Law as part of the corporatist system. The first rule to establish the dues was the Decree No. 19,770, 1931, that authorised trade unions to apply to the Ministry of Labour for ‘protective measures, aid, subsidies for their institutes of assistance and education ...’. The mandatory trade union dues was a major part of the constituency of trade unions’ resources, especially for unions with a small membership, which depend almost entirely on it. Collected once a year, the dues were compulsory for employed workers, unionised or not, self-employed professionals and for employers in the case of employers’ trade unions. The value of this contribution is equivalent to one day’s pay in the case of workers’ trade unions2. The new rules make the compulsory trade union dues voluntary, that is, workers have to formally and individually agree to pay the dues. According to the new CLT Article 578: ‘The contributions due to the unions by the participants of the economic or professional categories or of the liberal professions represented by those entities shall be paid, under the denomination of trade union contribution, collected and applied in the manner established in this Chapter, provided that prior and expressly authorised’. This change is likely to cause a serious decline in the dues on which trade unions rely for their economic survival. Workers would now have the option not to authorise the collection of these dues unless they believe that the union is working in their interest. In the past, unions have taken these financial resources for granted and did not worry about their performance in representing workers’ interests and rights. Employers’ unions, however, have been spared to a certain extent, since compulsory contributions administered by these unions for social service, training and professional qualification have been maintained and...
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Oct 10, 2019
Gertrude E Elleamoh + 1
Open Access
