Heloisa de Alencar Santos
Lawyer at Marcos Martins Advogados
A multinational company was ordered by the Superior Labor Court to pay compensation for collective moral damage for conducting a credit search (SPC and Serasa) of candidates in a selection process.
The investigation was initiated through a confidential complaint, which resulted in the filing of a Public Civil Action by the Labor Prosecutor’s Office.
At first instance, the company’s attitude in consulting the personal credit of candidates for job vacancies was classified as an abuse of rights, invasion of privacy and violation of intimacy, and it was ordered to pay compensation for collective moral damage in the amount of R$100,000.00, to be reverted to the Workers’ Support Fund (FAT).
In the second instance, the conviction was overturned on the grounds that the company cannot be forced to be surprised by any illicit practices by its candidates and that there would be no justification for the conviction for consulting the registers of official bodies that were created precisely for this purpose.
However, this argument was considered wrong by the Second Panel of the Superior Labor Court. According to the rapporteur of the judgment, Justice José Roberto Pimenta, the purpose of credit protection services is to protect traders and financial and credit institutions, which has nothing to do with the selection process for filling job vacancies. Thus, the Superior Labor Court considered the act to be discriminatory, since only the qualities and skills of each candidate should be taken into account, with the credit situation having no relation to such qualifications, pointing out that the candidate who is looking for a job is often in a fragile economic situation, without the means to subsist and to fulfill some financial obligations previously assumed, maintaining the company’s condemnation to pay collective moral damage in the amount to be awarded by the Court of origin.
