By Brazil Stock Guide — Banco Votorantim, commonly known as BV, has dismissed around 200 employees since mid-January in what the bank describes as an “organizational restructuring.” The move has sparked protests and a formal response from the Sindicato dos Bancários de São Paulo, Osasco e Região, the main union representing bank workers in Brazil’s largest metropolitan area. The union is urging dismissed employees not to sign individual settlement agreements and has convened a virtual assembly for Thursday (Jan. 22).
According to the union, the layoffs began on Jan. 12 and were largely executed before any meaningful dialogue with employee representatives. The bank informed the union by email that dismissals were being considered, but did not disclose the total number of affected workers, the operational scope of the cuts or the specific terms of the proposed agreements, the entity said.
Tensions escalated on Wednesday (Jan. 21), when workers staged a protest outside BV’s headquarters in São Paulo. The demonstration focused not only on the scale of the job cuts but also on what the union describes as an abusive labor practice: conditioning the payment of PLR — Brazil’s legally and collectively negotiated profit-sharing mechanism — on the signing of a full waiver of labor rights. Under Brazil’s banking collective agreements, PLR payments are negotiated with unions and are not discretionary, according to the entity.
Flávio Moraes, a union director, said the settlement proposals presented by BV include PLR amounts already guaranteed under the sector’s collective labor convention and under the bank’s own results-based program. Those payments, he said, would be made in February regardless of whether employees accept any extrajudicial settlement. “Workers are being pressured to give up future claims in exchange for values they would receive anyway,” Moraes said, adding that this practice undermines collective bargaining.
The union also criticized the process itself, saying that by the time a formal meeting with BV took place on Jan. 19, all 200 dismissals had already been finalized and individual negotiations were underway. BV told union representatives that some employees were relocated within the broader BV Group and that there is currently no schedule for additional layoffs.
The labor dispute comes despite what the union describes as broadly stable financial performance. BV, which is jointly controlled by Banco do Brasil and the Ermírio de Moraes family — one of Brazil’s most traditional industrial groups — posted net income of R$ 461 million in the third quarter. That figure represented a 0.3% increase from the previous quarter but a 7.2% decline from a year earlier.
For the Sindicato dos Bancários, the figures weaken the justification for mass layoffs at a bank with nearly 10 million customers nationwide. The entity argues that dismissals on this scale should, by law and established practice, be preceded by collective negotiations, and it continues to advise workers not to sign any agreement without first seeking guidance from the union’s legal department. BV could not be reached for comment by the time of publication.