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Despite the serious difficulties the country is going through and the growing aggressions and threats from the government of the United States against our people, we cannot lose sight of the path of transformations we have sovereignly set for ourselves to improve our economic and social model.
An example of these important ongoing changes is the Labor Code Law, whose draft was submitted for consultation with more than two million workers during the last months of the past year, who made around 97,000 proposals to modify the substantial document.
As reported last February, in the more than 40,000 meetings held, there were issues that concentrated much of the suggestions, among them several that are currently being tested under the exceptional conditions in which many labor collectives are operating.
Matters such as the employer’s authority to grant unpaid leave, multiple employment and different modalities of remote work, protections and rights of youth and women workers, expert committees and their functioning, were some of the recurring concerns that must continue to be tracked for the improvement of the draft.
The recent measures announced by the country regarding greater openness to foreign investment and the interlinking of different forms of property in joint ventures and other association modalities also give significant relevance to the Labor Code as the highest guarantor of labor justice, which will become the third Labor Code in the history of the Revolution.
We are moving toward increasingly complex labor relations, in which the future Law must ensure that all workers indeed have equal rights, duties, and protections, regardless of the sector of the economy in which they work. This is an issue that must be in the focus of our National Assembly of People’s Power when it is time to discuss and endorse the final draft of this law.
Expert voices have reflected on the little attention given to labor rights in the daily activity of legal counseling in both state and private entities, a weakness that must be corrected in this more dynamic, plural, and perhaps inequitable environment of labor relations that already exist and may even deepen in the immediate future between employees and employers with interests not always aligned.
Trade unions play a fundamental role in this recomposition of labor relations. Much has been highlighted about the greater hierarchy that the upcoming Code would give to workers’ participation in economic management and the greater responsibilities that would fall to their union representatives.
Changing in the new proposed legal framework the formula of “after hearing the opinion” to “by mutual agreement” with the union is undoubtedly a notable step in strengthening collective action, but it may no longer be sufficient in an environment of greater differences in the nature of ownership of the means of production. We are going to need—and we already do need—a much more energetic union movement, prepared for changes and with a stronger fighting spirit at all levels of leadership, as should be addressed in the upcoming 22nd Congress of the Cuban Workers’ Central.
Because what is non-negotiable, whatever formulas and mechanisms our productive base assumes and whatever practical adjustments the times impose on us, is that the new Cuban labor law must maintain as its premise the defense, first and foremost, of the inalienable rights that the Revolution has won for our working class, and the principle that work is the only honorable code to follow in order to overcome internal economic difficulties and achieve our individual and collective fulfillment as human beings.
