Employment

Barbieri Advogados acts in employment law in a practice that combines advisory and contentious work, structured around the prevention and management of labour-related liabilities and the strategic structuring of employment relationships. The practice operates at a moment of consolidation of the 2017 Labour Reform (Lei nº 13.467/2017), which redefined well-established premises of Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (the Brazilian Labour Code, the CLT) — the legal framework for the prevalence of negotiated terms over statutory provisions, the regime of intermittent work, partial working hours, and procedural rules in Justiça do Trabalho (the Brazilian Labour Court system). The firm guides corporate clients through this transition, with a rigorous technical reading of the changes and strategies calibrated to each client’s specific exposure to labour-related liabilities.

The practice is structured around four main pillars. In labour-relations advisory work, the firm acts on the structuring of internal regulations, occupational health and safety policies, employee benefits and incentive plans, the structuring of CIPA (Internal Commission for Accident Prevention) and statutory committees, and on the drafting and review of employment contracts in their various modalities — fixed-term, intermittent, part-time, teleworking — and of internship and apprenticeship agreements. In compliance and prevention, the firm acts on labour due diligence in mergers and acquisitions, on the legal review of working hours, payroll and benefits practices, on the preparation of internal procedures and on the management of inspections and notices of infraction issued by Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego (the Ministry of Labour and Employment). In employment litigation, the firm acts in the defence of companies in reclamações trabalhistas (employment claims), individual and collective actions, ações civis públicas (civil public actions) brought by Ministério Público do Trabalho (the Labour Public Prosecutor’s Office), challenges to administrative penalties, and in actions before Tribunais Regionais do Trabalho and the Tribunal Superior do Trabalho (the Regional Labour Courts and the Superior Labour Court). In collective bargaining and trade union relations, the firm advises on the negotiation of collective bargaining agreements and collective accords with trade unions, on the management of industrial disputes and on the strategic monitoring of trade-union relations.

The practice works in close coordination with Corporate on labour matters in mergers, acquisitions and corporate reorganisations, with Tax on the tax-related labour interface — payroll taxes, social-security contributions and related matters — and with Data Protection on the processing of employee data and workplace monitoring.