In order for a democracy to survive and thrive, the places where people work also must be democratic, according to Yolanda Díaz Pérez, Spain’s second vice president and minister of labour and social economy.
“If you spend half of your life in a place where you don’t have a voice, where you can’t influence the decisions being made that affect your health, your time, your salary, your dignity, and your future, then democracy stops being a shared experience and becomes something distant, almost alien,” she said. “Democracy isn’t just an institutional system. It’s a way of organizing life in common.”
Díaz spoke at the John T. Dunlop Memorial Forum Lecture, presented on Feb. 4 by the Center for Labor and a Just Economy and its Harvard Trade Union Program. She was introduced by the center’s executive director, Harvard Law School Professor of Practice Sharon Block; Harvard Kennedy School Visiting Professor David Weil; and Isabelle Ferreras, a professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, a 2005 alumnus of the trade union program, and a senior research associate at CLJE.
Block noted Díaz’s leadership in passing Spain’s Rider Law, which requires online delivery platforms to classify their workers as employees.
Díaz has been “lauded for not looking for the easy or incremental policy solutions,” Block said. “She is recognized for pushing for transformative, structural change towards a more just and labor-centered economy.”
In her wide-ranging remarks, Díaz spoke in support of...
Spacey's fiery testimony is the centerpiece of an ongoing trial to determine whether the production company behind the Netflix hit is owed $100 million in losses. Kevin Spacey testified about his ...