An important change that the pandemic period brought was in relation to food stamps during teleworking, since their nature is indemnity and is not intended to add a benefit to the employee.

In this dynamic is the payment of benefits, among them, so to speak, the meal voucher, so usual and so routine that its nature is no longer questioned.

It is worth remembering that teleworking had already been positive in the CLT since November 2017 by the Labor Reform (law 13.467 / 17), but it was certainly the quarantine that brought such a regime to the practical and massive awareness of employers and employees and did it abruptly, to don’t say stabbed.

Well, the meal voucher, or, generically, the meal allowance, has no other nature than the indemnity. It is a portion paid by the employer for the employee to work, for the employee to have a subsidy at a cost resulting from providing services away from home, a cost that manifests itself in the worker leaving his home and in the need of the worker to have to eat outside your home.

Therefore, if there is no damage, if there is nothing to be repaired, there is nothing to compensate. If the worker does not fall into the extraordinary cost of eating outside his home, if the worker no longer has a cost to go to work, there is no longer a duty to pay the meal voucher.

For all these reasons and the express mention of § 2 of art. 457 of the CLT that food aid is not incorporated into the employment contract is that it is argued that for teleworking contracts, migrated during the calamity state or not, payment of meal vouchers is not necessary, unless there is an obligation expressed and specific in the employment contract or to this type of work in the normative instrument.

Finally, we understand that for Food Stamps, that spent in supermarkets to purchase fresh food, treatment should be more cautious and its payment ensured to the teleworker, even if only generally provided for in a Collective Agreement, even if without specific provision to the teleworking regime, because its essence is to add a benefit and make the employment contract attractive, not to repair a damage caused by the execution of services in the company’s establishment.