The Minister of Labor and Employment, Luiz Marinho, suggested the creation of a new transport application in case companies like Uber leave the country for disagreeing with a future labor regulation in the sector to be proposed by the Lula government.
In an interview with Valor Econômico newspaper published this Monday (6), Marinho said that if the company leaves the country, as, according to him, Uber threatened to do during regulatory discussions in Spain, the alternative would be to create a new application, and the Post Office would be responsible for that.
“I can call Correios, which is a logistics company, and tell them to create an application and replace it. There are loads of applications on the market. We don’t want to regulate there even the slightest detail”
Marinho classified Uber’s attitude in the regulatory process in Spain as “rebellion”. According to him, it lasted 72 hours. “It was blackmail. They told me: ‘What if Uber leaves?’. Uber’s problem. I’m not worried.”
The statements reverberated and reignited the debate about the precariousness of work through apps and how regulation can be done. In the minister’s own opinion, the subject should be discussed in depth, as there are cases that fall under the CLT (Consolidation of Labor Laws) and there are others that do not. But it is necessary to have some kind of protection for these workers.
There is a working group being formed to discuss the matter, which was among the main commitments of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (PT) campaign. In a note, the Ministry of Labor and Employment says that “the working group is in the formation phase and the completion of the workers should take place within 90 days”.
In a note sent to Sheet, Uber claims that it has not threatened to leave Spain and that it maintains activities in the country. “Regarding the statement by the Minister of Labor, Luiz Marinho, Uber clarifies that it did not threaten to leave Spain. The company that left the country after the regulation was Deliveroo, which made about 4,000 Spanish couriers lose access to income generation “, says the text.
According to the company, during the discussions in the European country, Uber released estimates on the impact of the measures and pointed out “the couriers themselves are upset with the regulation, which led to the forced migration of many professionals to the model of logistics operators (without direct registration in the applications) and reduced the number of people working on the activity”.
Uber also claims that, since 2021, it has advocated the inclusion of workers by application in Social Security, “with platforms paying part of the contributions in order to reduce the amount to be disbursed by partners”.
Workers want compliance with legislation
For workers’ representatives, companies that operate through applications for transporting people, food or products need to comply with what Brazilian legislation says. According to them, it is not necessary to create new laws, but to determine the framework of professionals in existing laws.
Unionists argue that part of the sector’s professionals should, yes, be hired as CLT and another part can continue with autonomous or intermittent work.
“Companies have been swimming at arm’s length for over six years, making precarious, evading labor rights and federal, municipal, state taxes. They have to go to the government and behave like serious companies, like the grouping of many serious companies that exist in Brazil” , says Gilberto Almeida, Gil, president of Sindimoto-SP (São Paulo Motoboys Union).
According to him, the agenda of the category is different from the agenda of the government and companies. Gil defends a wide debate, with all the professionals involved in this sector. According to him, what the category wants today is an immediate readjustment of the wage gap, in addition to the debate on the long journeys and the end of the blockade classified by him as “unfair”, without the right of defense.
About the minister’s comment, he says that it is necessary that companies have respect for governments, whether state, federal or municipal. “The day they start to respect the worker as a worker and respect governments in the way they have to be respected, this type of comment that the minister made would be very much avoided.”
Raimundo Nonato, known as Nonato Alves, president of Fenamoto (National Federation of Professional and Self-Employed Motorcycle Workers), says he supports what the minister said. “They [empresas do setor] they are creating a social crisis, they keep threatening the government that it will generate 50 thousand unemployment and they don’t want to do what the labor legislation determines in Brazil.”
Nonato is against discussing specific legislation for app workers. “Fenamoto’s agenda today is not to regulate an app, it is to formalize professionals.”
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