On 27 August 2026 the Supreme Federal Court (STF) again failed to reach RE 1.446.336, the Uber and Rappi case known as Tema 1291, on whether app drivers and couriers are employees. It was the fourth postponement in under a year. No justice has voted on the merits, and no new date is set. Silence from the court is not neutral. It is a decision to let thousands of lower-court judgments keep pulling in different directions.
What is actually pending
The STF recognised general repercussion in the Uber appeal, RE 1.446.336, with Edson Fachin as rapporteur, so the outcome will bind every court in the country (STF news). Oral arguments opened on 1 October 2025 and then stopped without any votes. The Prosecutor-General's office opposes recognising an employment link, and reporting on the first session notes that Uber faces more than 10,000 similar suits (Jovem Pan). Fachin then pulled the case from the agenda on 24 June 2026, after the International Labour Organization approved Convention 193 on platform work.
The strongest case for the labour-law side
The argument for employment status deserves a fair statement. Platforms set prices, assign work, rate workers and deactivate them, often with no explanation. A courier who cannot refuse jobs without penalty and cannot negotiate fares looks less like a free entrepreneur than a worker under algorithmic management. Brazil's labour courts have often found employment on exactly these facts. Letting platforms externalise accident risk, income volatility and unfair deactivation onto the individual is a real harm, and a court that simply declares everyone an independent contractor would be ignoring it.
Why a binary ruling is the wrong tool
The difficulty is that the question as framed has only two answers, and both are bad. Full employment status under the CLT would bring fixed hours, dismissal rules and payroll costs that a model built on flexible, multi-app work cannot absorb. Many drivers and couriers value being able to log in and out and to work for several platforms at once. The likely market response is fewer workers admitted, tighter shift control and higher prices for consumers in a country where delivery and ride-hailing serve as mass-market infrastructure. A flat declaration of contractor status, though, would leave out the protections that are plainly justified.
The ILO's new instrument points to a third path. Convention 193, the Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention, was adopted on 12 June 2026 at the 114th International Labour Conference by 406 votes to 8, with 36 abstentions (ILO). It extends a floor of protections regardless of employment status. These cover occupational safety and health, minimum pay and protection against unjustified deactivation. Classification stays with national law. A law firm's summary of the text adds that Article 9 requires correct classification based on the facts of the work, expressly recognises genuine self-employment, and sets no international presumption of employment (Ius Laboris).
That design suits Brazil. The protections that matter most to platform workers, such as safety, accident coverage, transparent pay and a way to contest deactivation, do not depend on settling the employee-versus-contractor label.
The cost of drift
The convention binds only states that ratify it, and it enters into force for them twelve months afterward, so it supplies no immediate rule. Congress has not filled the gap either, since its platform-work bills, including the delivery-pay floor, are stalled. That leaves the STF as the only institution able to give certainty, and each postponement carries a price. Workers cannot know what protections they hold. Platforms cannot price compliance. Labour judges continue to decide similar facts in opposite ways, which generates more appeals and more litigation.
Postponing has one defensible rationale: the court may have been waiting for the legislature, which is the proper body to design a new category of work. But four postponements across a year and a Congress that has not moved suggest the wait is not producing a statute.
What a proportionate outcome looks like
The court has options short of a binary verdict. It could hold that the existing CLT test is not met by the typical flexible platform relationship, while stating that this does not strip workers of baseline protections. It could invite Congress to legislate within a fixed period, using the ILO floor as a template. Such a thesis would give platforms a stable regime and give workers rights they currently lack. It would also respect the Prosecutor-General's concern that blanket employment status misreads how this work is organised.
What the court should avoid is a fifth deferral by default. A narrow, reasoned ruling that sets the classification rule and points to a protection floor would serve workers, platforms and the lower courts better than another year of uncertainty. For Brazil's tech sector, predictability is worth more than either extreme.