Trabalho escravo contemporâneo e danos extrapatrimoniais: uma análise da jurisprudência do Tribunal Regional do Trabalho da 8ª Região (2018-2019)

Abstract

Labor analogous to slavery is still one of the forms of exploitation of workers used in the production of capital, a practice that weakens the democratic-social system established by the Constitution of the Brazilian Federative Republic. And this crime needs to be combated both in the criminal sphere and in the labor sphere. Aiming to eradicate this conduct, the present research proposed to present greater visibility to the fight of this crime through the repair of immaterial damages, the origin of which comes from civil liability, one of the legal institutes that most evolved in the law and that needs to be revealed, through studies that demonstrate this behavior in regional labor jurisprudence. Off-balance-sheet damages, now in comment, for the first time were standardized with the labor reform, implemented by Law No. 13,467 / 2017, characterizing one of the changes in the text of the Consolidation of Labor Laws that most brought divergence and discontent to the working class and that, even the present date, still has its constitutionality questioned. Aiming to highlight the indemnity for moral and existential damages caused as a result of the criminal conduct of contemporary slave labor, bibliographic research, mainly of books, legal publications, periodicals and newsletters, was used as methodology to give theoretical support to the study, as well as for the analysis the jurisprudence produced by the Regional Labor Court of the 8th Region. It also used field research, with the purpose of surveying the number of judgments judged by the referred Court in the years 2018 and 2019, and systematizing them in a database, in order to analyze the theses produced by the respective Classes , counting until the end of 2019, 192 (one hundred and ninety-two) judgments. Several tables and graphs were also built, which made it possible to prospect the result of the investigative process. This process used knowledge of the concept and characterization of the entire framework of knowledge about labor analogous to slavery, as well as non-patrimonial damage, in order to build, through the deductive method, knowledge about judicial decisions. Although the Regional Labor Court of the 8th region recognizes the reimbursement of moral damages and the newest positive existential damage, that is, damages to the life project and to the life of relationships in the practice of slave-like work, it was still evident that in the illegal conduct arising from the proof of the respective damage, degrading work conditions and strenuous work hours were detected. It has also been proven that these characteristics of work analogous to slavery are being denied by the majority of the Regional Labor Court's Groups, thus, it is not being enough to condemn off-balance sheet damages, which has shown resistance on the part of the jurisprudence of this regional. This fact is the result of the precariousness that work has been suffering from the current political, economic and social reality that, although it seeks decent work, permeates the loss of rights resulting from class struggles, such as the minimum day, as well as loss of guarantees protection for workers in general.