Labor arbitration of zombie institutions

When the chief trustees and deputy members are created the Labor Law approved in 1971, lThey alone gave the workers of Panama an important instrument for the advancement of social justice. From that moment, the economically dominant sectors, driven by their proverbial greed, rose up to fight to dismantle and destroy this important andan instrument of social equality.

In his desire to destroy meaning the original Labor Law the dominant economic sectors achieved the whole a series of reforms, all designed to limit social struggle and consolidate their position of dominance over labor. In order to promote these reforms, they always claimed that they would raise productivity and employment.

In relation to the latter, today, even before the pandemic, close to 50.0% of the workforce in the country was in precarious employment conditions. As far as productivity is concerned, what the economically dominant sectors have achieved is that wages systematically grow at a lower rate than output growth.

Thanks to this, the share of wages in gross domestic product fell between 2001 and 2019 from 37.8% to 26.6%, which increased the already high benefits of the capital factor.
It is not just about the harmful impact of successive reforms on Operation code.

It is also about the way the governments of the time dealt with it its application for this purpose damage bargaining power of workers. This is the case of the figure labor arbitration.

To understand this problem, we must begin by noting that The Panamanian economy shows a basically oligopolistic structureboth in the case of companies that operate according to the internal market, and those that operate according to some segment of the external market.

Taking the latter into account, what has been happening lately is that when any of these companies have to face the process of striking their workers, they are forced against their will to submit to arbitration. For this reason, the company is declared a company of public interest, with the explanation that it either produces a basic good or provides an essential service. And that in the event that other companies operating in an oligopolistic market can meet the demand of that market.

The goal of alienation like the one indicated is clear: to subordinate the workers to the will of the company. It is about taking away from the worker what, like Dixit and Nalebuff point out in his book Thinking strategically, his most powerful element of negotiation: the strike.

complacency of Ministry of Labor and Labor Development with the dominant sectors is such that it succeeded in stopping the strike, subjecting the workers to disastrous compulsory arbitration, before it began. That’s a violation Article 452 of the Labor Act, which clearly reads that ” Regional Labor Administration decide to submit the strike to arbitration after it has started”.

It turns out that, for in general. it’s MITRADEL one who, when labor and capital appoint their own arbitrators, in the end appoints a third arbiter. In the complicity between this body and the economically dominant sectors, it turns out that on many occasions the latter arbitrator clashes with the arbitrator of the company, in order to crush the aspirations of the workers. Labor arbitration today is a doomed zombie institution terrorize workers and thwart their legitimate aspirations.