Democratic Legitimation and the New Labour Code That Never Was

Abstract

Social citizenship is a state that is composed of a number of factors. Yet constitutional rights carry a special political weight. Therefore, the case of legal reform epitomized, more than any other area of labour reform, the symbolism and the popular expectation raised by political democracy’s inception in Chile. Above all, it called to mind the classical Marshallian sequence, when political democracy was a seminal breakthrough with substantial legal significance in several spheres. The expansion of republican freedoms was (at least, according to the authoritative analyses) a vehicle for the development of the liberal economy; and, hence, the expansion of social freedoms became an inexorable part of the process.¹ We have insisted that the modern sequence is different. In the Chilean case, legal political rights, and the economic component in civil rights, became substantially strengthened. However social rights were not. The openness of the modern market economy entails that fewer social rights are possible to modify by states without strong private sector support. Chile therefore did not follow the classical sequence. Entrepreneurs in Chile were concerned, primarily, to cement the privileges, as they were perceived, of the past, and the shape of workers’ rights was the issue that was foremost on their agenda.