New Regulatory Requirements

Companies with employees in Brazil have until May 26, 2025, to revise their Brazil Risk Management Program (PGR) to include psychosocial risks.

The PGR is the formalization, through physical or electronic documents, of an employer’s Occupational Risk Management (GRO) process. The goal of the GRO is to continuously prevent or minimize, through multidisciplinary and systematized actions, workers' exposure to health and safety risks in the work environment. The GRO must include a PGR, which became mandatory on January 3, 2022, when the new Regulatory Standard No. 01 (“NR1” - General Provisions and Occupational Risk Management) came into force.

Ordinance # 1,419 of August 27, 2024, amended NR1 to include psychosocial risk factors related to the work environment in the PGR.

Currently, the PGR must include risks arising from physical, chemical, and biological agents, accident risks, and risks related to ergonomic factors, to the extent applicable; as of May 26, 2025, it will also have to include psychosocial risks.

Employer Responsibilities

An employer in Brazil is responsible for identifying hazards and possible injuries or harm to health, assessing occupational risks, indicating the level of risk, classifying occupational risks to determine the need to adopt preventive measures, implementing preventive measures in accordance with the risk classification, and monitoring the control of occupational risks.

The PGR must include at least a risk inventory, which includes the stages of hazard identification and risk assessment, in order to establish the need for prevention measures, and an action plan, which establishes the prevention measures to be introduced, improved or maintained, in order to eliminate, reduce, or control occupational risks. The risk inventory must be kept up to date and all of its official versions retained for at least 20 years.

Psychosocial Risks

Many companies are still not sure how to identify, assess and classify psychosocial risks.  The Brazilian health and safety (H & S) authorities, through some webinars, have provided a non-exhaustive list of common psychosocial risks, as described by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), to guide employers. Such identified risks are:

• Work content/task design: e.g., lack of variety or short work cycles, fragmented or meaningless work, under-use of skills, high uncertainty, continuous exposure to people through work;

• Workload and work pace: e.g., work overload or under-load, machine pacing, high levels of time pressure, continual subjection to deadlines;

• Work schedule: e.g., shift-working, night shifts, inflexible work schedules, unpredictable hours, long or unsociable hours;

• Control: e.g., low participation in decision-making, lack of control over workload, pacing, etc.;

• Environment and equipment: e.g., inadequate equipment availability, suitability or maintenance; poor environmental conditions such as lack of space, poor lighting, excessive noise;

• Organizational culture and function: e.g., poor communication, low levels of support for problem-solving and personal development, lack of definition of, or agreement on, organizational objectives, organizational change; high competition for scarce resources, over-complex bureaucracies;

• Interpersonal relationships at work: e.g., social or physical isolation, poor relationships with superiors, interpersonal conflict, harmful work behaviors, lack of (perceived, actual) social support; bullying, harassment, mobbing; microaggressions;

• Role in organization: e.g., role ambiguity, role conflict, and responsibility for other people;

• Career development: e.g., career stagnation and uncertainty, under-promotion or over-promotion, poor pay, job insecurity, low social value of work;

• Home-work interface: e.g., conflicting demands of work and home, including for persons with caregiving responsibilities, low support at home, dual career problems; living at the same site where the work is done, living away from family during work assignments.¹

Challenges for Employers

Although there are a number of H & S service providers in Brazil assisting companies in preparing and updating their PGR, employers should be careful about developing such programs based on psychosocial risks and involve legal counsel through the process.

Unlike other occupational hazards that are obviously a health risk, e.g., handling chemical products, psychosocial factors are not so evident. For example, performance targets, deadlines, and some level of stress are not necessarily (or automatically) an existing occupational risk.

Non-Brazilian companies with small- to mid-size operations in Brazil are often not aware of their H & S obligations, including, for example, currently having a PGR focusing on ergonomic factors, and they cannot benefit from or raise as a defense the exemptions provided to small Brazilian businesses, as they do not qualify as a Micro Company (ME) or Small Size Company (EPP) entities for tax and other purposes. Therefore, their need to get into compliance may require even more work before they can even address their potential psychosocial risks.

Legal and Cultural Considerations

Another important point to consider as part of this exercise is the cultural aspects of managing a workforce in Brazil from abroad. Targets and deadlines that require employees to work unlimited hours, every day and on rest days, may be acceptable in some cultures, but this not the case in Brazil, and such stress points may need to be reviewed and reevaluated. Managing mandatory vacation is another point of considerable stress for both parties, as well as having most employees classified as exempt.

Not having a proper PGR may subject the company not only to fines but also to orders to correct the irregularities. Their lack of proper documentation and action plan can further aggravate the outcome of potential individual claims for damages (moral and actual damages) in case of occupational illnesses, such as burnout, and make the company more susceptible to higher collective moral damages sought by the Labor Prosecutor’s Office for generalized harassment.  

Burnout has been recently added to the list of potential health conditions relating to work, along with other mental health conditions, through the Ministry of Health Ordinance GM/MS # 1.999/23. Under the Ordinance, burnout as an occupational disease can be the consequence of psychosocial factors related to: organizational management and/or context of work organization; characteristics of social relationships at work; content of work tasks; conditions of the work environment; person-task interaction; working hours; violence and moral/sexual harassment at work; discrimination at work; and/or risk of death and trauma at work. However, for a medical condition to be defined as an occupational disease, Brazilian social security must establish the technical link between the work factors and the medical condition. For now, there is no change in social security legislation following the Ordinance and therefore no automatic association between the disease and the granting of social security leave exists. This situation may change after the new RN1 requirements become mandatory in May 2025.

Worker’s Comp – New York vs. Brazil

Brazil is not alone in addressing the growing number of mental health issues relating to the workplace. In December 2024, for example, the New York governor signed new legislation, which went into effect on January 1, 2025, allowing employees to file for workers’ compensation for specific types of mental health injuries based on extraordinary work-related stress. Similar to Brazil’s, the New York law does not define what constitutes an “extraordinary work-related stress,” which likely will lead to much litigation about where to draw the line. Unlike New York, where absent allegations of injury arising from an intentional tort an employee is barred from suing an employer for damages, Brazil’s workers’ compensation system does not prevent employees from suing employers for damages under any circumstances, after and in addition to receiving the benefits of the workers’ compensation system (managed by the Brazilian social security). Also, employees who file and are approved for Brazil’s workers’ compensation benefits cannot be terminated while they are on leave, regardless of the duration of the leave, during which time the employer must continue to provide health insurance, and once (and if) they become fit to return to work, the employer is required to reinstate the employee to the same position, with an updated salary, and continue to employ that person for at least 12 months.  

Conclusion

Employers must give additional attention this Q1 to their operations in Brazil, analyze potential work stressors and plan to remove or minimize them. Cross-cultural training for management will continue to be a relevant and important tool to bring awareness to cultural differences, in addition to the traditional anti-harassment trainings. Employers are encouraged to consult with multinational employment counsel regarding strategies to get into compliance in Brazil, by creating and updating their PGR, as part of their global health and safety program.