ECONOMIC CRISIS AND LABOR REFORM IN THE HISTORICAL LONG TERM

Abstract

As a consequence of the successive labor market reforms, there have been generalized measures of «arrangement and regulation of the labor market»; in a sense of re-commodification of human work with limits, only thinkable in comparison with those liberalizing periods, prematurely considered as surpassed. Less and less, the Labor law is a field of Law with a «relative and generalized de-commodification of work» (which is only able to contribute a de-commodification of low intensity). This visible tendency leads to intensify the «commodification of everything», and particularly, the social rights. Companies organize themselves like «societies or disciplinary organizations», object of governance. Some cooperative labor relations and the active participation of trade unions in the management of companies are in decline. The company tends, again, to define itself like a monist organization of power, by contrast to its conception like a pluralistic organization where powers coexist with divergent interests, looking for a balance between the economic and the social reason in the definition of the objectives of the company.

In the cycle of reforms, measures adopted show unequivocal and manifestly unbalanced concerning labor relations, within the company, in the labour market, and the scope of the socio-labor public policy. Therefore, an increasing dissembled of the «social» or «collective» property takes place, that is to say, a dismantling of the Social State, constructed in the Second World Postwar period. At the moment, one attends a period of selective accumulation, not only based on the production and the financial speculation, but also on the «accumulation by de-possession», through the privatization of public services and the recommodification of social rights (HealthCare, old-age pensions, etc.). They are being dismantled and they are commodifying the legal and institutional regulatory frameworks intended for the protection of people, and particularly, workers, extending the commercial economic space to that space considered before reserved to the «public goods obstructed» to the rules of the commercial exchange.

Likewise, there are imposed some measures, which question the Labor law is committed to the employment, because actually the full employment has stopped being in practice (and beyond the rhetoric to the use) the high-priority objective of the economic and social policy. What it is impelled now is the Labor law as Law for the promotion of the competitiveness of companies and the «national» and «European» economy. These are the priorities and changes of the consequent approach.