INFORMES
May 25, 2021
Application of Article 404 of the Civil Code as a Supplement to Monetary Adjustment and Interest in the Labor Court – Labor Memorandum Article | Ed. 04-2021
Leonardo Vieira
Occasionally, in the Labor Court, questions that seem to be endless or minimal are raised to the failure of the Hegelian dialectic that would have an end, albeit an eschatological one. However, the dialectics of Labor Justice is either far from an eschatological end or, as Nietzsche would say, to an eternal return of the same, from which repetition will always be present, changing only from the clothes one is wearing.
And so, again, here we are in front of the discussion about the monetary correction of labor debts. However, to understand the subject, we must go back to 1991, which brought Law No. 8,177/91, which determined the updating of amounts due in the Labor Court by the Daily Referential Rate (TRD).
See that in that historical context, we lived in Brazil at a time of hyperinflation and the year before the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello. In this period, inflation between 1990 and 1999, had an average annual variation of 492.28%, according to FIPE[1], even for this reason, the name of the index is noted: daily reference rate, as many times, the values in the supermarket gondola they even changed in a matter of hours. Thus, since then, the daily reference rate has been applied for the correction of labor debts, combined with late payment interest of 1% per month, pursuant to article 39 of Law No. 8,177/91.