On 22 March Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro published a ‘provisional measure’ in the Official Journal (decree with legal force which will run for 60 days and can be renewed once) concerning amendments to the labor law as part of the ‘public health emergency’ situation and state of ‘public calamity’, as decreed two days earlier, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Trade unions however are highly critical of several of the measures implemented on 24 March, with not least among them the fact that companies managing the crisis will be able do so by way of individual written employer-employee agreements on new working conditions (teleworking, different working hours, conditions related to holiday leave entitlements, and so on), and these will take precedence over alternative standards and norms contained in collective agreements, with the exception however of constitutional norms, which thus de facto excludes all efforts at collective negotiation.
From the moment article 13 of the Provisional Measure No. 927 (MP No. 927) was published, it has met with vociferous criticism from both the political classes and the trade unions. MP No. 927 intends that during the ‘calamity period’, employment contracts can be ‘suspended for a maximum period of 4 months’, with a ‘monthly non-salary type compensation allowance’, ‘the value of which is defined between the employer and the employee.’
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