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Chile’s New Constitution Will Empower Chilean Workers [1]

['Karina Nohales', 'Daniel Finn', 'Grace Blakeley', 'Thomas Piketty', 'Clara Martínez-Toledano', 'Amory Gethin', 'Anton Jäger', 'Oren Schweitzer', 'Gabriel Boric', 'René Rojas']

Date: 2023-05

Karina Nohales

First of all, there is an immediate feminist dimension to the new labor rights. Feminism arrived at the convention on a wave of mobilizations and amid important programmatic discussions so that it was poised to shape constitutional debates about the recognition of domestic and care work. Specifically, socialist feminism was influential in establishing that domestic and care work be considered socially necessary labor, indispensable for the complete sustainability of society and, therefore, requiring the backing of a comprehensive care system at the state level.

This new approach deprivatizes care work, shifting the coordinates of what had been a more liberal feminist approach that never goes beyond policies of coresponsibility between the sexes — which are certainly necessary, but remain at the level of the home and the private space. Today we have advanced toward actually socializing this type of labour.

Then there are the norms that fall within the realm of individual wage-earning labor law. In this area, the constitution enshrines principles and parameters stipulated by international law, especially those of the ILO (International Labor Organization). By Chilean standards, they amount to an advance over what existed up to now: ever since Augusto Pinochet’s constitution, labor has been completely untethered from the sphere of rights, to the point that the only guaranteed right in the world of labor is so-called “freedom of labor,” that is, the supposed freedom of the worker to choose where to work and the freedom of companies to freely choose whom to hire.

Finally, one of the most significant advances is that of collective labor rights. The new constitution recognizes the right to freedom of association at three levels: unionization, collective bargaining, and strikes. By recognizing those rights, the new constitution dismantles key strategic legal bulwarks imposed by the dictatorship and the democratic transition.

First, it guarantees the right of public and private sector workers to form unions and the right of these organizations to set their own demands. Second, it establishes exclusive union rights in collective bargaining, for bargaining at any level decided by public and private sector workers, and sets as the only limit to bargaining the renunciation of labour rights. Third, it guarantees public and private sector workers the right to strike whether or not they have a union. It is also established that by law strikes may not be prohibited.

These three elements represent a Copernican revolution with respect to the 1980 Constitution, which mentions the word “strike” only once — to prohibit it for public sector workers. It is also a sea change with respect to the current legislation, which allows collective bargaining only at the company level, so that it cannot be exercised jointly by workers of two or more different companies and which recognizes the exercise of strike action only within the framework of the “legal” collective bargaining process.

In a country where more than 40 percent of the formally salaried labor force works in small- and medium-sized enterprises, and in a country where a brutal process of productive decentralization has taken place, this legal framework has reduced collective negotiation and the strike to near complete obsolescence. Even where it exists, the reality is more like “pluripersonal” than collective negotiations. The latter is reinforced by the existence of so-called “negotiating groups” that can be set up temporarily within companies for the sole purpose of negotiating common working conditions — a very harmful anti-union practice that is legal in Chile.

With union control over collective bargaining, the new constitution will put an end to a practice that allows companies to keep groups of workers, all in the same workplace, subject to differentiated working conditions. Another great piece of news is that public employees will not only no longer be prohibited from striking but will have full collective rights.

The surprising thing is that these advances were advanced by a body that has no direct self-representation from the world of organized labor. I think it’s worth asking how that was possible.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2022/07/chile-constitutional-convention-neoliberalism-pinochet-labor

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