Access to justice and the labor law reform: reflections on vulnerability in the labor court

Abstract

The Labor Reform deeply altered the rules of accessibility to Labor Justice. The article problematizes such
changes from the perspective of theories of access to justice,
examining the strategic differentials of action existing between
habitual and eventual litigants, the specificities of the debate
on the legalization of social and class relations, and
the role of the Labor Court, institution integral part of a system
aimed at the de-commodification of human labor.
To do so, it presents the changes introduced in the Consolidation
of Labor Laws by Law No. 13467/2017 and related to the labor
process, especially the institutes originally built to overcome the
obstacles known to exist in access to justice. It argues
that Labor Reform institutionalizes a set of procedural barriers
that retreat in the processes of democratization of access
to justice, expanding situations of vulnerability. The reflection
benefits from the studies of Boaventura de Sousa Santos on the
role of Law and Courts in the face of structural conflicts. In this
sense, when analyzing the Labor Reform under the perspective
of access to justice, reflects on the performance of the Labor
Justice in the face of conflicts and disputes between capital and
labor.