Employment law and the workplace

The twenty-fourth entry is a retribuição base, and it is the word on a Portuguese payslip that an English reader should least of all translate by the word it resembles. Both go back to Latin retribuere, to pay back, and both are still about paying back — but English narrowed the debt to a bad one. « Retribution » is what is owed for a wrong: punishment, and in its older register divine punishment. A lawyer who writes about « retributive justice » is discussing prison, not wages, and no payslip in the language has ever carried the word. Portuguese kept the neutral sense and then made it the technical term of the labour code, so a retribuição is simply the pay, and a retribuição base is the part of it fixed by the contract before the allowances are counted in. The English for that is « basic pay » on the slip and « remuneration » in the contract, neither of them from the same root. The trap runs both ways: a Portuguese reader who meets « the retribution he deserved » in a novel will look for money and find a beating.