Lula’s statements extolling Spain’s new labor reform guided the political debate last week. Little or nothing has been done, however, to understand the historical experience he is referring to.
The governance model of democratic Spain, based on competition between regions, with strong financial autonomy, and the central state, which manages European funds destined for the country, collapsed after the 2008 financial collapse.
Elected in 2011, at the height of Europe’s debt crisis, Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government used dramatic youth unemployment figures, which reached 46% that year, to justify one of the continent’s toughest labor reforms. It was wage earners turned precarious in the Rajoy era who helped strengthen leftist Podemos from 2014 onwards.
After several failed attempts to come to power alone, Podemos agreed, in 2019, to form a coalition with the Socialists. Of the five ministers that the party nominated for the government of Pedro Sánchez, the one who stood out the most was Minister of Labor Yolanda DÃaz.
The daughter of anti-Franco activists, the labor lawyer became a determined reform organizer. It gained national prominence from 2020, when it became responsible for the protection mechanisms of companies and workers during the health crisis.
Among other successes, it negotiated, at the beginning of last year, the Rider law, which abolished digital servitude by establishing the employment relationship between workers and delivery applications. The new labor law, which has the strong point of reducing temporary jobs, will be a milestone in your career.
DÃaz showed that the difference between revoking, revising and counter-reforming is not just semantic. She insisted on the need to create a law from scratch to address the post-pandemic job market challenges. Her ambitious style annoyed the supporters of Podemos, from which she had disaffiliated, and the socialists, more interested in accommodating themselves with a simple revision of the existing law.
Today, business people and unions in Europe recognize that the DÃaz method is far more effective than that of Emmanuel Macron, who unleashed the yellow vests, France’s biggest popular uprising since 1968, in his first attempt to reform the country. Spain’s most popular politician since 2020, DÃaz is articulating a new left-wing coalition and is seen as Sánchez’s successor in government.
There is no lack of parallels between the Brazilian and Spanish experience. Both labor reforms were carried out in periods of low democratic intensity, under the auspices of the IMF in Spain and, in the Brazilian case, on the initiative of a government born of a lurid impeachment.
The dramatic situation of millions of workers per app, exploited by algorithms and abandoned by the state, forces progressive governments to rethink the job market.
But more than the final result of DÃaz’s work, it is the method she put into practice that must serve as an inspiration. His trajectory shows that the modern and united left dominates the art of economic reform like no other ideological field.
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