Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article discusses my ethnographic findings on conciliation processes in individual labor cases in México City. The constitutional reform (2017) and its implementation (2019) places in the center of labor justice the conciliation process. This text focuses on analyzing empirical data of how this figure operates and questions what are the possible consequences of strengthening it. The principal research methodology used was participant observation done in the labor jurisdictional authority (Junta de Conciliación y Arbitraje), a legal office and the public defender in labor law for Mexico City. The theoretical proposition of this article is that conciliation is a procedure that gives flexibility to labor cases in their judicial process. It is through its practice that everything that happens in the case before the labor jurisdictional authority (Junta de Conciliación y Arbitraje) and what happens outside of this process, far away from the eyes of the law, merges. This article concludes that the conciliation favors a flexibilization of the labor judicial process, but it also works against effective justice for the working class, as it contributes to the precariousness of the work relationships in México.

Social stability is largely determined by the labor market which is currently undergoing significant technological and social changes all over the world. Of particular scientific interest is the analysis of these changes on the materials of the labor market of the Eurasian Economic Union (hereinafter-the EAEU, or the Union). It was created in 2015 by Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. Inter-regional labor migration, which leads to all other areas of regional integration, is of key importance in this project. The authors analyze the Treaty on the formation of the EAEU, the Agreement on Pension Provision for Workers of the EAEU member States, bilateral interstate agreements between the participating countries, and the national migration legislation. The authors’ attention is also drawn to new social challenges in the regional labor market (digital technologies, demographic problems, labor mobility of new groups of young people, precarization of employment, etcetera.). It is concluded that the possible accession of other post-Soviet countries to the EAEU bloc will be largely determined in the future not only by the freedom of labor migration, but also by the guarantees of social rights of workers in the regional labor market.

The purpose of this document is to present the results of the research process on the way in which the solidarity economy sector of Medellin, Colombia, with its companies as a system, guarantees the offer of dignified and decent work in the light of the proposal of the International Labor Organization (ILO). In the following lines, some relevant aspects of the Colombian labor situation are presented in a general way, to then move on to a conceptual approach to work, a relevant concept to later understand what dignified and decent work is. Subsequently, it continues with the appreciation of different authors on what is the solidarity economy. The methodology used is of mixed type. As a result, an analysis and discussion are made of the most relevant aspects of the application of the instrument used to finally reach conclusions that give an account of the value of dignified and decent work in solidarity economy companies in Colombia.

The ILO Convention 169 is together with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted in 2007 the hard core and fundamental legal body of International Law on Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples Rights. Despite being soft law and not legally binding, the Convention 169 has been well received in America, where many countries are multilingual, multicultural, and multinational. This article’s aim is to analyse emblematic cases regarding the justiciability of indigenous peoples rights in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, with regard to the Convention 169 and its strategical use by the different actors involved in indigenous peoples rights disputes.

The authors analyze those constitutions contain diverse principles and rights. However, they are rarely defined with precision. This, in turn, creates the risk of rights being violated. The authors argue that such vagueness should be mended by legislature. Nonetheless, in case that doesn’t happen, autonomous courts are obliged to do so. The authors recognize social security rights as fundamental rights, and, as such, subject to vagueness. Thus, the authors study a Mexican case regarding social security rights vagueness and the solution they propose to solve it.

Since the first decade of the 21st century, there have been regulatory and conceptually scattered attempts to regulate “labor subcontracting” in Mexico in view of the abusive or fraudulent practices undermining the rights of workers. However, the regulatory framework of the comprehensive reform of April 23, 2021, which is based on the Federal Labor Law, is so general that it is not devoid of ambiguities and legal uncertainty in the various provisions. In the sphere of social security laws, however well-intentioned the aims of the reform may be presented, the fiscal nature of the amendments to said laws is evident since they revolve around institutes’ direct and effective control by relieving employers from exhausting certain means in the event of employer non-compliance, thereby avoiding the jurisdictional route and thus reinforcing the collection and auditing role of the corresponding authorities.

This work starts from the centrality of the claim of dignity in the Chilean social movement that in 2019 opens a new constituent process. It recognizes that the demands are associated with the deep discontent of the socioeconomic structure of the neoliberal socioeconomic model imposed under a conception of diminished citizenship, typical of Latin American dependentist societies. Starting from the hypothesis that in these models work and labor relations sustain and perpetuate socioeconomic heterogeneities, it highlights the need to know the concept of decent work implicit in the citizen’s claim, proposing it as a starting point for a broader discussion.

This paper pretends to asset the juridical problems set up by the work on digital platforms regarding the Chilean case, about the definition of the labor relation-identifying criterion and the protection required. There is no glimpse of a juridical category gifted of better attributes than subordination to delimit the scope of labor law. What should be redefined is their techniques and specific characteristics, aiming to be adapted to the new work realities, as the one provided through a digital platform. Indeed, it is possible to find different common patterns that point out to labor, through a reinterpretation of the functional notion of subordination: incentives to keep high percentages of approval for the services, control via GPS, algorithms, and other digital tools for performance control, among others. Additionally, it is necessary to formulate new juridical categories that allow, on the one hand, projecting specific juridical protections viable in our normative system, particularly fragile regarding labor and social protection, and on the other, to provide juridical certainty to these new forms of work, making the applicable distinctions. It is about an explicative type of investigation, which assumed the methodological pluralism as a formula to submit the validation to the presented hypothesis that has been concretized mainly through bibliographical discussion, normative exegesis, and jurisprudence analysis.

This research article identifies and compares the jurisprudential narrative elaborated by the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of Chile in relation with the justiciability of the right to health through direct adjudication by Courts. Based on an exploratory methodology, that correlates some decisions and find common analysis points, although dissimilar constitutional design in both countries, it is possible to state some critical hypothesis. These hypotheses are related with the risks that such decisional model may generate for guarantying the concept of rights. These risks also arise in relation to the enactment of comprehensive social policies. Thus, during three main sections, the research describes a conceptual framework on the relationship between the rights to life and health; an analysis of the constitutional regulation of these rights in each system and the modifications that Court´s narrative is producing over the right and social policies concepts. Finally, corresponding final reflections states our critics on the matter.

The aim of this paper is to address the way in which the neoliberal labor regime has been reinstated in Ecuador since 2017, even within a constitutional framework characterized by a pro-labor orientation. The hypothesis supported by the text states that the accelerated renewal of the labor regulation model was made possible by the state’s permeability to the agenda of the International Monetary Fund and the economic elites committed to the organization, in addition to the weakness of the popular organizational field to resist this agenda. The article presents the results of a research project that approached the problem in an interdisciplinary way, in an articulation between labor law, the sociology of law and political sociology. The research findings show that the process of neoliberal return in the field of labor relations and labor rights went through three stages. The first was characterized by early state capture by economic elites. The second stage opened with the arrival of the IMF in the country and the concomitant implementation of a set of neoliberal measures, and the last stage was inaugurated with the emergence of the pandemic that acted as a catalyst for the final implementation of structural adjustment.