On April 5, 2024, the Judicial Weekly of the Federation published a relevant thesis issued by the Third Collegiate Court in Labor Matters of the Second Circuit, which offers a crucial interpretation of the scope of evidence presented by workers in the framework of the new ordinary labor process. This process takes place before state and federal labor courts, and the thesis in question focuses on the handling of evidence during the rebuttal stage.
In a specific case, the employer denied the existence of an employment relationship in its answer to the claim. In response, the employee presented several pieces of evidence in his reply brief to support the existence of such labor relationship. This evidence was admitted by the labor court for consideration in the proceeding. However, the employer challenged this admission through an amparo lawsuit, arguing that the evidence should not have been admitted because it was not supervening.
The Collegiate Court, in resolving this matter, interpreted the Federal Labor Law in effect as of May 2, 2019. According to this interpretation, the law allows the admission of evidence related to the reply, as long as it refers to facts of which the worker had no knowledge when filing the initial claim. In other words, if the employer denies the labor relationship when answering the claim, the employee has the right to present evidence in the reply to prove such relationship, since it is a fact of which he/she was not aware until that moment.
This precedent established by the Collegiate Court, although not mandatory because it is an isolated thesis, has a significant impact. It marks a path for the interpretations that the courts in charge of resolving labor disputes may adopt in similar cases. This is an important step in labor jurisprudence that could influence future judicial decisions and the way in which evidence is handled in labor proceedings.
