Marília Silva de Melo
Lawyer at Marcos Martins Advogados
Considered an unprecedented decision, the judge of the 23rd Labor Court of Porto Alegre/RS suspended the payment of an agreement signed between the plaintiff and the defendants, until the end of the state of public calamity that is plaguing the country.
It was an agreement signed in 2019, in which payment of the installments began in May 2019 and would end in December of this year. However, the defendants, event organizing companies that form an economic group, informed the court that they would not be able to honor the future installments of the agreement, due to the strong crisis caused by Covid-19.
In his decision dated March 31, 2020, the magistrate ruled that both the creditor/claimant and the debtor/defendant are equally affected by the crisis: “The debtor is also not responsible for the pandemic, although it is equally affected by the event.”
In the magistrate’s view, labor justice must remain faithful to labor and employment relations, but must act based on the principles of reasonableness, and must have “redoubled responsibility at this exceptional time.”
In the same vein, the judge of the Botucatu Labor Court also ruled that, when the company informed them that they would not be able to honor the payment of the installments of the agreement, they asked for a suspension of the process and the payment of the agreement.
For this case in the interior of the state of São Paulo, the magistrate did not decide to suspend the settlement in its entirety, on the grounds that “any decision by this court at this time runs the risk of being unfair and even inhumane for both sides”, ordering the plaintiff to make a statement within 5 days and, if possible, to contact the opposing party so that they could settle within that period.
However, in his decision, the magistrate asked the debtor party to deposit with the claimant, regardless of any decision, whatever was possible at the time, in the time and as agreed, so that the renegotiation would only be of the part of the agreement that could not be paid.
It is worth noting that these decisions are completely innovative and even controversial, since there is no legal provision in the legal system for suspending agreements.
The fact is that in view of the current pandemic situation facing the whole world, more reasonable and didactic decisions such as these tend to be more widely used, since the judge has complete freedom to judge according to his understanding and analysis of the case, although this is not a rule, since not every judge will be able to grant these types of requests.
