Key Takeaways
- Brazil's Superior Labor Court (TST) suspended Monday's ruling on the Correios strike after the postal company filed last-minute paperwork seeking to have the walkout declared illegal; a new hearing is set for Thursday, September 24, at 3:30 p.m. Brasília time.
- Pay is largely settled — both sides accept a 4.35% raise — but a plan to restructure CorreiosSaúde, the health plan covering more than 170,000 workers, retirees and dependents, is the real sticking point keeping the walkout alive.
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Deliveries have faced delays and tracking gaps since the strike began on September 10; here's what Thursday's ruling could change and how to track a shipment in the meantime.
Brazil's postal strike is closing in on two weeks with more uncertainty than resolution. The ruling that was supposed to settle the dispute never came this week, and postal workers, small sellers, and the Brazilian communities in the United States who rely on Correios to ship and receive goods are now waiting on a rescheduled court date — while the walkout continues in the meantime.
A Ruling That Didn't Come — and Why
The TST's Special Section for Collective Disputes opened its session on the strike Monday afternoon, only to suspend it before reaching a decision. According to reporting from Correio Braziliense, Correios had submitted new filings late Friday night and into Saturday asking the court to declare the strike abusive, or illegal, a request that could trigger a roughly R$200,000 penalty against the unions. TST President Vieira de Mello Filho gave the labor federations 48 hours to respond to that material before any ruling, arguing it would violate due process to decide the case on documents the other side hadn't had a chance to examine. The result, as CNN Brasil confirmed, is that the judgment now moves to Thursday. Unions, meanwhile, held a demonstration outside Correios' headquarters in Brasília this morning to keep pressure on the company.
How a Rejected Pay Offer Turned Into a Nationwide Walkout
The stoppage began the night of September 10, after postal workers rejected the company's opening wage offer for this year's bargaining round. The walkout spread to every region within days, and federations describe it as open-ended, with no set end date. Two days in, the TST had already intervened with an emergency order requiring at least 80% of staff to remain on duty at each unit — a decision CartaCapital reported was grounded partly in the postal service's role distributing electoral materials ahead of Brazil's 2026 elections.
Court-mediated negotiations ran for roughly a week without a breakthrough. On September 18, Correios formally ended its participation and asked the TST to rule directly, arguing its ongoing financial restructuring left little room for further concessions. Union federations kept the walkout going rather than accept the company's terms, and labor organizers told Brasil de Fato the fight is as much about the broader restructuring plan — branch closures and buyout programs among them — as it is about any single benefit.
The Piece Both Sides Already Agree On
One major element of the dispute is effectively resolved: Correios and the unions have signed off on a 4.35% wage increase tied to Brazil's INPC consumer price index, retroactive to August 1 — a figure confirmed in multiple outlets as the one clear point of consensus. That leaves benefits, not base pay, as the last real obstacle to a deal.
The Real Fight: Who Underwrites the Health Plan
At the center of the standoff is CorreiosSaúde, the company's health plan. Correios wants to shift its legal status from full underwriter of the plan to a co-sponsor that shares costs with participants, a change the company frames as removing roughly R$600 million in actuarial risk it currently carries alone. Unions counter that the switch could sharply raise monthly costs for the more than 170,000 active workers, retirees and dependents the plan covers, some of whom rely on it for ongoing treatment of serious illness, a stake the workers' federation FINDECT has repeatedly stressed is not a perk but a decades-old right. The dispute touches smaller line items too: Correios has proposed cutting the vacation bonus from 70% of salary to the legal minimum of one-third, shifting holiday and rest-day pay from a flat 200% to standard labor-code rules, and eliminating the traditional year-end "vale-peru" bonus, according to details reported by Portal de Prefeitura — on top of the company's initial 0.87% benefits offer, which unions rejected as far below inflation.
A Company Already Deep in the Red
Correios enters this fight from a weak financial position. The state-owned carrier closed 2025 with a record annual loss of R$8.5 billion, and its own second-quarter 2026 results show a further R$2.4 billion loss, bringing the first-half total to roughly R$5.55 billion. Management says salaries and benefits now consume 89% of revenue, a ratio it calls unsustainable, and the company reported negative net equity of roughly R$10.4 billion earlier this year, according to Poder360. Correios already took on a R$12 billion bank loan in December 2025 and formally asked the Treasury on September 3 to guarantee another R$7 billion in credit from four private banks, a request still pending review that the company hopes a favorable strike outcome will help unlock.
A different but related case is running on its own clock. After a previous strike was resolved by the TST at the end of 2025, Correios appealed parts of that settlement to Brazil's Supreme Court, the STF, which suspended four clauses — including the health-plan terms — in late January 2026. The STF opened its review of those suspended clauses in its virtual plenary on September 18, with a decision expected by September 25. That timeline applies to the Supreme Court case, not Thursday's TST hearing, though the two proceedings are shaping the same underlying fight over benefits.
What It Means for Families Shipping Between the U.S. and Brazil
For the Brazilian diaspora, the practical impact has been slower deliveries, gaps in tracking updates, and frustration over shipping-cost refunds. Consumer accounts gathered by O Tempo describe packages with no tracking movement for a week or more and refund requests that have gone unanswered by the company. Correios' own guidance for now is to monitor shipments through its website or app and, for unresolved cases, use its customer service line or online chat. Thursday's ruling won't immediately clear the backlog, but it will determine whether the disruptions continue into a third week or begin winding down.
Until Thursday's session, the court-ordered 80% staffing minimum stays in place and the strike continues. If the court accepts the case for judgment this time, its decision would set binding terms and close the negotiation entirely; any further disagreement would have to be fought through appeals rather than picket lines. If procedural questions delay the case again, expect the walkout — and the shipping disruptions that come with it — to run longer still.
