Strike and dispute settlement procedures

Abstract

The strike belongs to the sphere of collective autonomy, without whose recognition a pluralist constitutional democracy is unthinkable. The strike is a social phenomenon that only later becomes a legal institution, without ceasing to be a social institution subject to regulation. And this in a permanent tension between the strike as a fact and the strike in law and as a right. The dynamics of the strike is governed by power relations: workers' powers, employers' powers and public powers; and underlying them are the conflicting interests not only of workers, employers and governments themselves, but also public or general interests, the interests of citizens, users and consumers in relation to public services (in the broad sense of essential community services as expressly used in art. 28.2 of the Spanish Constitution). Thus, the phenomenon of strike action is not restricted to the sphere of inter-private labor relations, but goes beyond "economic struggles". And this in a context dominated by the internationalization of enterprises and the transformation of the forms of organization of enterprises and labor relations ("internationalized"): global value chains, international subcontracting, expansion of forms of teleworking, etc. Processes of change favored by the expansion of new technologies and their current phase of digitalization (algorithms, artificial intelligence). The strike is inserted in the logic of collective action of trade unionism and in its history is a continuous process of adaptation to the transformation of labor relations and industrial relations systems. This explains its flexibility to deal with new forms of conflict development, taking into account the different union and political cultures of law.