Los apremios pecuniarios en los procesos laboralesun estudio comparado de los ordenamientos portugués, español y norteamericano

Abstract

The comparative analysis of three legal systems (United States of America, Spain and Portugal) carried out in this PhD work, around the legal concept of Compulsory Penalty in Labor Law, was unprecedented (and, consequently, original), both in the Portuguese and in the Spanish labor doctrine. This originality is amplified by the circumstance that the comparison made opposes a legal order of «Common law», as the North American, to two legal orders of Roman-Germanic matrix or continental «Civil Law», like the Portuguese and the Spanish. The issue addressed in this PhD work constitutes one of the structural pillars of the entire rule of law: how to effectively overcome the resistance of the sentenced party in a labor lawsuit to comply with the condemnatory judicial decision which the sentenced party dared to challenge. There is a radical contrast between the sanctions applied in the United States of America for «contempt of court» (punitive, coercive and compensatory, without maximum limits to which the American courts must be subject, when imposing such restrictions) not only with the so-called «Apremios pecunários» (penalty payment for not complying with a court decision), executives and non-executives in Spain, but also with the «sanção pecuniária compulsória» (penalty payment for not complying with a court decision) in Portugal, in its two most typical variants (judicial and legal or automatic). The comparative legal methodology specifically used in the present PhD work, anchored in the identification of structures that allow the extraction of relevant comparative results (presented in the twenty scientific conclusions, which were reached in this PhD work, written in Portuguese and in Spanish), allowed to extend the comparison made to other legal systems in addition to the three mentioned, and which were taken into account, in the last century, by the Portuguese scientific doctrine responsible for creating in Portugal the «sanção pecuniária compulsória» (more specifically, the French, German and British legal systems).