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 PUBLIC LABOR PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE

   

The Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil, promulgated in 1988, has defined the Office of the Prosecutors for the Public Interest as “a permanent institution, essential to the jurisdictional functioning of the State, and it has the duty to defend the juridical order, the democratic regime and the inalienable social and individual interests”.

The Brazilian Office of the Prosecutors for the Public Interest (Ministério Público or MP) is a highly developed juridical institution because it is not bound to any of the classical powers in the State structure: Executive, Legislative and Judiciary Powers. Its prosecutors and attorneys act within functional independency and autonomy, and are initiated to their careers through public examination of exams and titles.

The Public Prosecution of the Union (Ministério Público da União or MPU) acts on federal level, divided into four branches: Public Federal Prosecutor’s Office (Ministério Público Federal or MPF), Public Military Prosecutor’s Office (Ministério Público Militar or MPM), Public Federal District and Territories Prosecutor’s Office (Ministério Público do Distrito Federal e Territórios or MPDFT) and  Public Labor Prosecutor’s Office (Ministério Público do Trabalho or MPT). On state level, there are the Public State Prosecutor’s Offices.

The Public Labor Prosecutor’s Office is responsible for defending the juridical labor order and the inalienable rights and interest of the working class. Its regulation sources, indispensable for its performance, are the Federal Constitution, infra-constitutional laws and the vast international legislation in relation to Human Rights and Labor Law, in particular the regulations developed with the International Labor Organization.

Integrating the MPT, there are a General Attorney’s Office,  with head office in Brasília, 24 Regional Attorney’s Offices covering the states of the federation and 100 Offices  distributed among demographically, economically and socially substantial cities,  broadening the attorneys’ performance in their defense of society’s collective and diffuse rights.

As of 2003, the MPT has elected five primary performance areas and has instituted National Thematic Coordination Offices to study, discuss and to strategically plan its investigations, all of them in compliance with ILO’s conventions and fundamental recommendations. These areas are: eradication of child labor and regulation of adolescents’ labor; combat against forced labor and regulation of indigenous people’s labor; combat of any kind of discrimination at work; safeguarding of workers’ health & safety and regulation of labor contracts.

 

ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT

 

The Public Labor Prosecutor’s Office is primarily engaged on three fronts of defense of the Social Rights:

 

AS INTERVENOR, it issues legal opinions in lawsuits and takes part in judgment sessions of the Labor Courts, a specific branch of the Brazilian Judicial Power qualified to examine and judge matters alluding to non-compliance of the juridical labor order.

 

AS AGENT, it is an arbiter and mediator in the solution of labor conflicts of the collective kind, involving workers and companies, or union entities which represent them. It supervises the execution of right to strike involving essential activities.

It receives denunciation on labor irregularities from several sources, including secret or anonymous ones. These denunciations are then converted into investigation procedures or civil proceedings, provided with affidavits, documents, and verification reports in loco and other measures necessary to clarify the denounced matters. Once investigations are concluded, prosecutors and attorneys have the following instruments available for acting:

 

a) TAC - Conduct Adjustment Agreement: an administrative and extrajudicial instrument with the purpose of setting forth the agreement of those persons investigated regarding what to do and/or what not to do, to settle the found irregularities, under penalty of being fined in case of non-compliance. A TAC may be executed by the Labor Court, should the obligations covenanted be defaulted.

 

b) Public Civil Proceedings: The MPT’s major instrument of legal action. It used to postulate, before the Labor Judiciary Power, a sentence for legal duties to perform/not to perform, in  cases of compensatory damages and/or collective moral damages.

 

c) Annulment Lawsuit: legal action directed at annulling clauses of such collective labor instruments executed by unions of workers and of employers or unions and companies as may contain illegal terms or which may be in opposition to the workers’ fundamental rights and principles.

 

AS PROMOTER OF PUBLIC POLICIES: It provides guidance to society by means of public hearings, conferences, workshops, sectorial meetings. It develops activities in partnership with Governmental authorities and entities representing employers and workers, domestic and international non-governmental organizations and the organized civil society, both through protocols and covenants and by means of participation in Councils and Forums.