The new labor law in Brazil and the respect to the principles as a priori presumptions for law: the intermittent contract and the out of the line employees

Isabele Bandeira de Moraes D’Angelo / Lília Carvalho Finelli

Keywords

Brazilian Labor Law; Labor principles; Intermittent Contract; Labor Reform; MP 808/17; Critical Theory.

Abstract

Under the pretext of an economic crisis in 2017, Brazil promoted a drastic reform in its labor legislation, from Law 13467/17, as amended by Provisional Measure No. 808/17. One of the changes introduced was the intermittent work contract, from which the employer can request the presence of the employee at any time, according to his convenience and the employee can accept the offer or not. The intermittent worker was called by the authors of off-line employees, because they were workers outside the sphere of legal protection and, even after the reform, they worked in precarious conditions. In principle, such a contractual modality would bring new jobs, using the services provided only if necessary. However, the change, which is contrary to the general rule of the Brazilian working day, brings several questions and losses to the worker, which the article proposes to respond. The methodological option adopted was to evaluate the phenomenon beyond the view of traditional legal-labor dogmatic, so that the institute was compared with the labor principles, especially those of the Protection and Human Dignity of the Worker, in the light of the critical theory of Labor Law Work developed by Everaldo Gaspar Andrade.