Abstract

The 2021 Spanish labour reform constitutes a change in the policy orientation of the law in the labour field. The prolonged neoliberal imprint that had characterized the reformist action of the last four decades is now redirected towards a more democratic and egalitarian Labour Law. The recovery of the principle of stability in employment, a different use of internal flexibility aimed at satisfying the interests of entrepreneur subjects and workers in a balanced way, the search for equal pay in contexts of productive decentralization or, in short, the modification of the structure and validity of the rules that order collective bargaining, constitute the main regulatory modifications that guide this change in direction of the regulations that order labour relations as of December 2021. The democratic element is the most analysed in the present work, maintaining the consistent hypothesis that the labour reform of 2021 opens the space of the company to a greater and more intense intervention and participation of the representatives of the workers. The work that is presented addresses, therefore, the analysis of labour reform from a perspective of opposition to the neoliberal model of labour reformism, with special emphasis on the transition from authoritarianism to the reinvigoration of the democratic principle in labour relations in the Spanish experience.