Foundations of Law & Society
Kitty Calavita (1986) “Worker Safety, Law, and Social Change: The Italian Case.” Law & Society Review 20.2: 189-228.
Calavita’s article enquires about the role of law through a case study of the development of Italian worker rights. She has analysed the role of dialectics, structure, and law. Dialectics, in the Italian context, did not play a role as a cause or effect, but rather as an arena for the debating force – the workers and the employers. In this view, society has shaped the law in a bottom-up way, even though eventually the law was created for a dialectic reason, to ease the tensions between the parties. Calavita has highlighted the importance of the dialectic between the two social classes, and that if the ruling class would always win – and there would be no victories for the workers, such as in the Italian case – there would be no dialectic and hence, no history to write about, as there would have been no social change. Calavita supports her argument of the law being formulated by the economic (capitalism with the opportunity to strike) and political (democracy with the chance to lobby for a majority) context through the Italian example.
The economic structure (capitalism, free movement of labour and goods) allowed for the workers’ strikes, while the political structure has allowed the second largest party, the Communist Party to stand up on the side of the workers, besides being excluded for the governing coalition. This exclusion of the significant number of democratically elected Communist representatives has also weakened the coalition’s power.
By 1970, the first law of workers’ rights to health and safety has been set up as 1) a response to the economic threat of strikes, 2) as a non-symbolic law for the working class (which would have usually been the case) and 3) as a product of a weak government with multiple parties, with various conflicts and interests.
In response, businesses ‘externalised’ the dangerous tasks to smaller actors or a region where the laws were not enforced. Then came the economic collapse a few years later, when the government turned things around and started supporting the reduction of labour-costs, which evidently came with the increase of work-accidents, as production pace increased.
Finally, Calavita has shown that the role of law in the case study has been as a product of contradictions within the state (politically), which has taken effect in the economic context (in the work sphere). Hence, we can look at law as a mediator between political (class) interests and the economic structure that is being shaped.
Based on the case study she concludes that seeing law as either a tool or as a symbolic response are both missing the economic and political context by which the parties play. She also highlights the sociology of law’s failure to look beyond the state’s nature when it comes to laws’ development. Hence, she suggests that we should look at the dialectics between the parties in combination with the political- and economic context, which aims to complete the missing pieces of how laws come to their form.
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