A Philosophy of the Person in Labor Laws

Abstract

Current analysis relates the essential aspects of the human condition within the structure of the production and consumption society, proper to homo faber, in which technology frames its rational creators and makes them disposable. The labor world as a condition for the promotion of the common good, with its distribution of rights and duties to social roles, neutralizes the human capacity of personal consolidation. In fact, it may be re-thought as a phenomenological attribute of the species. If humanization means life expansion and the natural norm triggers human beings towards transcendence, current labor model constructs the homo economicus and forgets the ontological attributes that maintain them within nihilism. As far as they are the person’s juridical contents, the paradigms of liberty and equality within the labor sphere wither in the wake of volition with regard to labor or to consumption. They rather involve techniques in social engagement and distribution of risks and calculations. The firm’s social function is the prescription of the State through juridical positivation within the abidance of the law, where the workers’ dignity consists of the right to minimum existentiality. Both concepts are ideologically neutralized in the wake of the expansive dimension of life. The paradigm of personal and specific construction of the social actors is required as a philosophical engagement in the labor world and a suggestion of action, or rather, a permanent task within labor relationships. Labor laws contribute towards the restitution of the human condition and give meaning to life.