The joint effort carried out by the Judicial Center for Consensual Dispute Resolution Methods of the Rio Branco Labor Court (Cejusc), last Friday (28).
However, it approved more than R$1.8 million in agreements involving a single defendant, the Cooperative of Self-Employed Workers in General Services (Coopserge).
The joint effort was coordinated by Substitute Labor Judge Augusto Nascimento Carigé, and held 46 hearings, of which 33 resulted in an agreement and three others were dropped.
Employment Relationship
The cases were being processed in the instruction agenda at the 1st and 2nd Labor Courts of Rio Branco with similar requests where the workers' collective asked for recognition of the employment relationship. Because of the payment of labor benefits and the subsidiary liability of the public entity.
Coopserge provided outsourced cleaning and maintenance services to several public bodies and entities in the state of Acre. However, in 2013, the Public Ministry of Labor of the 14th Region (MPT) filed a public civil action (0010912-45.2013.5.14.0403).
Therefore, the cooperative was ordered in 2015 to refrain from providing cooperative labor for the provision of services linked to the end or means activities of bodies and entities public and private, to register the employment contracts of all affiliated workers. As well as to pay compensation for collective moral damages in the amount of R$100,000. After a series of appeals by Coopserge, the sentence became final.
Labor Complaints
Carigé explained that after this, the entity lost several contracts with public bodies and entities in 2019, failing to honor the payment of cooperative members' salaries, which generated a mass of hundreds of labor complaints.
“In these complaints, the cooperative insisted on contesting the existence of an employment relationship, which required lengthy and repetitive investigations in various courts. Because of this, and considering the final judgment of the public civil action, we proposed to the director of the cooperative that he recognize the relationships, as well as the amounts owed in compliance with the court decision, which was accepted,” he revealed.
As a result, the judge ordered the joint effort to seek conciliation in the cases that were already on the court’s agenda for investigation. This was without prejudice to the cooperative’s other cases that were already on the Cejusc’s agenda and that were also the subject of agreements. “The joint effort was made possible thanks to the efforts of the employees and interns assigned to the Cejusc in Acre,” the judge emphasized.
(TRT14)