Arbitration In Employment Relations

The Brazilian Arbitration Act (BAA) allows the parties to refer a dispute to arbitration if the underlying claim can be assigned, waived or settled amicably. However, it does not expressly allow parties to refer individual employment disputes to arbitration, and labor courts – which are in general employee-protective – have historically resisted the use of arbitration in those disputes in view of the workers' perceived weakness vis-à-vis employers.

The fact that the Federal Constitution allows the use of arbitration in the context of collective labor disputes was also commonly mentioned to support the idea that, by contrast, arbitration in individual employment disputes would have been forbidden.