the young labour statute is a new policy of casualisation of employment. But what does that mean in real terms? Status is a standard which aims to regulate and relax in a special way the work of young people who are fulfilling a plan of study in an institution of higher education recognized by the State between 18 and 28 years old.
This is a particular youth. It is not the overall youth of the country, but that they are mainly young people who come from families and contexts with insufficient socio-economic conditions in order to study without the generation of extra income to the scholarship of maintenance and indirect transfer of the State. They are mostly families composed of poor workers, i.e. that income and wage cannot afford the reproduction of life.
This is not minor, since it designates as the Statute is directed to a specific sector of the population. A sector that is vulnerable and the defenceless, and which sees in education a chance of social mobility, in addition to its dependence on resources provided by the State through the transfer of grants and bonds.
Bill develops a mechanism of extortion and blackmail to this specific population: subjected to these young people to this new statute, since it would allow them to access the conditional transfer of money, and to formalize their work. It is true that many of the jobs and jobs developed by these young occur in informal invisibility, but this is due to the logic of “hiding income to be subject of benefit”. What will be wrong in this practice?
The criteria of conditionality for delivery of resources in education was one of the icons of the student protests in 2011-2012. Mobilization was aimed at guaranteeing the right to education in Chile by dismantling the commodification and the neo-liberal education. This involved conquer unrestricted access to higher education for the entire population that wanted to study in the country. However, sheets of households and other socio-economic monitoring tools have continued functioning as ejectors and discriminatory in all institutions of higher education, in sync with the ministerial and Government demand for the system set politician.
This fact, legalized discrimination, makes that most of those who work and study to see a benefit in the Statute: is not necessary to return to hide income, can get through this Statute. The cost of taking this logic is the loss of the rights attributed to work (maternal immunity, compensation, day, overtime, etc.). Does it matter to lose rights if I have more money? This is the question that the State wants to reply at the social level, installing a regime of work where workers do not understand as such, but as machines produce money and compete for living your life, segmenting and stripped to the workers employed in your unit as subjects of law and class.
The labor insurance statute is and represents a weapon of self-precarization, in the sense that it involves, directly or indirectly, a serious erosion of work forms stable, secure, and protected from the whole of society. But also, it is not necessary to forget, that this policy is a subject to exercise its legitimacy, and this subject must today decide whether to become an instrument of exclusive protection of the State, or pursue to become a subject of rights and social guarantees.
This dichotomy is not new and own statutes, since we have seen it in its emergence and expansion in our research as studies of labour (GETSUR) group entitled cartographies of the precariousness of work in the Macrozone South of Chile) Regular FONDECYT No.1161347). The insecurity becomes a weapon of segmentation, hierarchy and social discrimination. In this investigation, with more 100 interviews with workers in three regions of the country (Maule, bio bio and Araucania), we have seen failure and difficulties for the generation of a culture based on social rights and social security.
Precarization is accompanied by the exercise of institutional (labour, health, social security, etc.) and practices of domination (humanocentric, classist, racist and adulto-centricas) biography and career of workers which forced and workers (employed and self-employed). This is reflected in not having a policy of care of themselves / yourselves to forms of underemployment, informality, intensification of their journeys, etc., or to weaken the ties of partnership and collective Agency against the exercise of insecurity and helplessness that they face at work, having serious impacts on their well-being and quality of life.
In this respect, the current character of the Statute is strategic and symptomatic for echoing this weakening of the social rights and corrosion of the life culture. The Statute has a strategic character, since it is part of a series of anti-Trade Union policies of flexibilization of labour and violation of rights, which points to an offensive claim instituent and character induced by part of the Government and block more neoliberal society with order to dismantle the work and life. And at the same time, the Statute is symptomatic of a neo-liberal society that has individualized on the basis of consumption and acquisition of goods at the expense of the generation of instruments and policies based on solidarity and collective social security.
It’s time to understand that precarization can become subjects and subject fragile against threats that are unable to view at present, but which are part of the problems that will involve live in impoverished, individualist and consumerist society in the future. Several societies and peoples have faced such problems and have responded from their historical and cultural peculiarities. It is necessary that Chilean society and its peoples, trade union organizations, movements and civil society respond with energy and skill, and with their own capacities, diversity, knowledge and experience to these attacks in order to defend the society: a social movement against the precariousness of life in the country is necessary.
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