Labor law contrarreforms and (surplus)valuation of collective bargaining in the context of sanitary crisis

Abstract

The article deals with the changes brought in the brazilian labor legislation granting collective bargaining permissiveness to make legal labor rights more flexible. Taking the historical and dialectical materialism as method, and discussing dogmatic, historical and social aspects of legality, the study seeks to demonstrate that this legislative change, despite having ideological traits that signal in a different sense, is a reflection of the bourgeois offensive against labor rights, evidencing that (i) the “valorization” of the collective composition does not bring prestige to social concertation as an effective mean for adjusting labor relations; (ii) that its main functionality is the induction to deepen the workforce exploitation, hence it can be read as an surplus-valuation of collective bargaining; (iii) serving as a relevant fissure to provide openings to the radicalization of the individual autonomy of the will, such as the judgment by the Brazilian Supreme Court of the ADI 6.363, in April 2020, in the context of the sanitary crisis resulting from the pandemic of COVID-19.

Keywords

• negociação coletiva. precarização. mais-valorização. autonomia individual da vontade. covid-19.