The Jara formula: how the Chilean communist minister managed to carry out the 40-hour work week law

When Gabriel Boric invited Jeannette Jara (Santiago de Chile, 49 years old) to be part of his Cabinet before taking office on March 11, 2022, the public administrator and lawyer knew that it would not be easy to advance the challenges of his portfolio.

As part of the Communist Party and a former union leader, she was clear that she would have to deal, on the one hand, with the expectations of the workers, and on the other, with the prejudices of her militancy among businessmen and opposition parties.

For this reason, one of his first missions was to put together a diverse team, with militants from the Socialist and Communist Parties, the PPD - Ricardo Lagos's party - and the Broad Front (the group to which President Boric belongs) and thus give a first sign of opening.

With several of them she had history:

Then he designed a strategy to move forward on the challenges of his portfolio: a roadmap that he works with to this day and that consists of proposing weekly goals and dates to achieve his objectives.

According to its schedule, the 40-hour Law -which reduces the working week from 45 to 40 hours- approved by Congress on April 11 and promulgated this Wednesday, had to become law before May 1, the Day of Worker.

His plan worked.

Five days later, the polls echoed her success: the minister was ranked third among the most valued members of Boric's cabinet, with 57% approval in the weekly poll by Plaza Pública, Cadem (figures that alerted the opposition).

The cross-sectional comment is that through the emblematic law, the Secretary of State established a way of building bridges between sectors that are often antagonistic.

“In Chile there is a lack of more dialogue and in everything there is always a wide path to the middle to build public policies.

It is super easy to stay in the position in which one is self-convinced that it is the correct one and follow the nailed flag, but that does not change anything in people's lives ”, the minister explained to EL PAÍS, about her work method and her style to negotiate.

"We have to act with the principle of reality and we have a parliament that was elected by the people of Chile with the diversity it has, so to build majorities you have to dialogue."

pragmatism

Jeannette Jara began her political life at the age of 15 when she joined the JJ.CC (Communist Youth).

Ten years later she became a member of the Communist Party of which she was a member of its central committee.

She is close to the communist wing of former minister and former constituent Marcos Barraza and former Secretary of State and senator, Claudia Pascual, her name was promoted to the Cabinet by the Government spokesperson, Camila Vallejo.

Since her tenure at the Undersecretary of Social Welfare in the second Bachelet government, her frontal but friendly style and her willingness to work with all sectors and get closer to the business world have made her the ideal candidate for the Labor portfolio, which she has since 1973, the year of the military coup in Chile, was not led by a communist militant.

Those who know the minister say that she is a person with firm ideas, persistent, but above all pragmatic.

For this reason, rather than closing himself off to a 40-hour project that was only focused on reducing the working day, Jara opted to include elements such as gradualness and flexibility, an issue that the right-wing in Chile had been asking for years.

Thus, she managed to gather supporters in the reluctant business world and in the opposition, which ended up supporting the law (except for the far-right Republican Party, linked to former president José Antonio Kast).

Jara's links with the Confederation of Production and Commerce (CPC), which brings together the country's main unions, were born when the current minister was undersecretary of Social Welfare.

The relationship was especially close with Fernando Alvear, general manager of the union entity.

With him they forged a bond of mutual trust when they negotiated the labor inclusion law for people with disabilities.

Juan Sutil, former president of the CPC, did not know her, but from the first minute they managed to have a conversation of mutual respect and understanding.

“Just as she has her convictions, I have mine and we both have the ability to respect our positions, always with an attitude of finding a way to achieve certain agreements, which materialized in this bill that was approved by a large majority. ”, the businessman points out to EL PAÍS.

For much of 2022, both met weekly to advance the working hours project, but also to try to reach an agreement on pension matters, which failed to reach port.

union expectations

The Chilean Minister of Labor knows the unions from the inside.

She was a leader in the Internal Revenue Service (SII), where she worked between 1999 and 2016 as an inspector.

For this reason, she was clear that to achieve the

challenge , incorporating the trade union world as a central actor was key.

One of her first initiatives as soon as she took office was to form a tripartite working group between the Government, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) and the CPC, in addition to calling more than 200 dialogue tables aimed at gathering information to improve the law.

After the approval of

, the president of the CUT, David Acuña, said that although "it is not the law we wanted, it is the one that allows us to move forward."

And he stressed that the new legal body would have incorporated union ownership (that the representation of the workers and the adaptation of the hours must be negotiated with the company through the unions).

"This is delivering value to the collective and building democracy, enshrining social rights and strengthening an alternative model of development where the working class is the guarantor of social dialogue that allows for the construction of responsible and sovereign policies," Acuña said after the approval of the law. in Parliament.

Jara's great achievement, highlighted by those who worked with her on the emblematic regulations, is that she managed to bring together in a single legal text the various desires of sectors that were initially antagonistic and to which everyone had to give in.

Chile, with them, is one of the three countries in the region to achieve 40 hours a week of work, after Ecuador and Venezuela.

From the opposition they also applauded the openness shown by Jeannette Jara to add their positions at the negotiating table and the tone in which the conversation took place.

“After much talk and much discussion, we dispatched the project to reduce working hours.

Beyond putting ourselves today in the standards that gradually advance towards 40 hours, it is also important that this project finally does not generate any harm to the workers or the companies”, highlighted Senator Luciano Cruz-Coke, president of the Work Commission of the Chilean Upper House.

But there were also tense minutes in the parliamentary discussion.

Someone close to the procedures, says that the project was on the verge of falling.

It happened last September, when the most emblematic article was voted to reduce the working day from 45 to 40 hours and the opposition included indications that, in the opinion of the Government, went against the spirit of the project.

Time was pressing, there was little room to reach agreements and there was a complex moment, so much so that the Government asked the Senate commission to pause.

“After a long process of one-on-one conversation, the session was resumed and we were able to go

with the project.

The minister put her political capacity to the test to return to the table and continue the dialogue ”, recalls a person who was at those negotiations.

For the pension reform, a debt that Chile has been carrying for more than 10 years, the minister's strategy is to change the focus of the discussion: to leave the debate on the future of the Pension Fund Administrators (AFPs) industry. and focus it on retirement and on creating a system that ensures a real social security system for pensioners.

For Giorgio Boccardo, Undersecretary of Labor, what happened with the 40-hour law showed a route to reach political and social agreements.

"Everyone recognized that in this project there was a method and a way to advance in the next agreements that the country requires," says

Jara's