La realidad del contrato de trabajo y su situación en Suramérica

The ILO, in the book labor reform in Latin America: 15 years later, proposed the following concept regarding the employment contract in the region. UEI employment contract in the laws of Latin America is an act constituting obligations (it is the same agreement of wills, regardless of its form, that gives rise to the obligations) a bilateral legal transaction, of continuous execution over time (not is limited to a single moment, such as the purchase-sale contract, for example), which arises from the own will of the parties to 'oblige themselves to provide work', on the one hand, and to remunerate the work, on the other. In short, the employment contract guarantees the freedom of work recognized in the Constitutions and provides the individual employment relationship with a set of minimum conditions."

Thirteen years have passed since this book appeared until today, during which an international economic crisis was experienced that has generated a diversity of approaches to economic policies and the development paradigm; At least twenty million jobs have been lost in the world; The asymmetries between the economic and the social have increased and, thanks to technology, multiple virtual work options have emerged that have revolutionized the way of working and demand a reconfiguration of labor standards.

For this reason, it is more than pertinent to question the role of the employment contract today, particularly in the countries of our region, for which a research project was formulated in which a collective work of academics from seven countries was achieved. and in which the challenges that national legislation must face to preserve the scope of protection provided by the employment contract are evident, the basic contents of labor legislation regarding this are explained and a comparative synthesis is made between what is in each country, in order to call for reflection and the search for alternatives so that labor law is not left behind in the face of what has been called the fourth industrial revolution.