Documents Pucheta, Mauro 4 results

"The Socio-Labour Declaration is the legal instrument that protects fundamental labour rights within Mercosur and its Member States legal orders. Its 2015 revision enhanced quantitively and qualitatively the rights enshrined therein. Relying upon recent literature on Latin American regional integration, this article considers the complex institutional and legal framework in which the Declaration has been adopted and implemented. It examines how the intergovernmental character of Mercosur has shaped the legal content of the Socio-Labour Declaration. The institutional context of the Declaration requires the active cooperation and intervention of both regional and national actors. This article explores how Mercosur bodies have taken advantage of the flexible institutional framework to implement the Declaration through regional plans and policies. It also analyses the contrasting enforcement roles of the national executive and legislative powers, characterized by their timidity, and the judicial activism that is essential to consider the Declaration as a justiciable instrument. The article concludes that the Socio-Labour Declaration is a crucial instrument in protecting workers' rights in this trade bloc, and that the 2015 revision introduced substantial improvements that may provide the legal basis for future judgments, and regional and national labour laws reforms."

"Policy recommendations
- Latin America will be amongst the regions most affected by climate change. Nevertheless, countries in this region strongly rely on resource extraction and carbon-intensive activities for economic development. Robust green and just-transition policies are crucial to achieving regional and global climate targets, for which funding remains a significant challenge.
- Governments should ensure that workers, particularly informal workers, are duly represented in the design and implementation of just-transition policies. Robust social protection programmes should also be developed that specifically target workers who are at risk of losing their jobs as a result of climate policies.
- A strategic alliance between Latin American countries and the European Union (EU) may contribute to just transition through, amongst other things, free trade agreements and the development of more stringent environmental and labour standards in the region."

"The surprising recent success of populist politics has been framed as a sharp break from the neoliberal world order that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. This article explores how right-wing populist leaders from Argentina, Brazil, and the United States in the 1990s and 2010s have implemented policies that aimed to liberalize labour market regulations and weaken workers' protections, despite their ‘common people' rhetoric. Relying upon the theoretical frameworks of Kurt Weyland as well as Thomás Zicman de Barros and Miguel Lago, this article examines the ‘neoliberalization' of populism in the 1990s in Argentina and Brazil, which had been traditionally associated with inward-looking and nationalist economic policies. Similarly, it explores the reactionary right-wing populism of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, which resulted in neoliberal labour policies that followed a conservative tradition.

To shed light on how these policies have reshaped labour laws, this article first explores the experiences in Argentina and Brazil during the 1990s, in which neo-populist governments, heavily influenced by the Washington Consensus, reformed labour regulations to deconstruct traditional individual labour laws and to undermine the role of social partners. Second, this article studies the development of reactionary right-wing populism in the Americas in the late 2010s, particularly in Brazil and the United States, with a focus on the adoption of neoliberal policies that aim to deconstruct protective labour regulations.

Despite the recent electoral defeats of both Trump and Bolsonaro, the incidence of rightwing populism has not disappeared in the Americas, which became an established major actor in the political arena. The risk seems to be even more concrete in Argentina where the centre-right party, pushed by far-right libertarian candidates, is adamant about implementing a major reform to liberalize labour laws if elected in the next general election in October 2023. The article concludes that even though right-wing populists portrayed themselves as champions of the working class during both earlier periods, they implemented traditional neoliberal labour law policies, which pursued the liberalization of labour market regulations, shunted aside social partners, resulting in the dramatic undermining of workers' rights."