Brazil: more than 3 million labor claims in 2016

President Temer telegraphed his labor reform intentions via the goal of tackling the ‘claims industry’; a reference to the weight of legislation surrounding labor relationships that he holds to be overly complex and which he believes gives judges too much scope for legal interpretation and influence. Data from the Superior Labor Tribunal at the end of 2016 note a record 3,4 million cases registered in 2016, marking a 15.4% increase from the year before. Brazil is far and away the country with the highest number of labor litigation cases.
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Labor litigation related compensation payments fell 3.3% as compared with the figures from 2014 and were down 30% from a quite extraordinarily high year in 2013.

The underlying reason for the rocketing claims clearly lies in Brazil’s economic crisis. Unemployment had reached record highs of 11.9% by the end of 2016 and the mushrooming number of redundancies in positively correlated with the a multiplication in the number of appeals cases. Certain observers note that the labor disputes market is

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