The Mercosur Socio-Labour Declaration and the importance of judicial activism

Given the fragmentary and uneven development of Mercosur, the adoption of the Mercosur Socio-Labour Declaration has been a bold attempt to protect workers’ fundamental rights within a regional trade bloc. It was first adopted in 1998 and then substantially revisited in 2015. This article explores how Mercosur bodies and, particularly, national judges and their activism have circumvented the current intergovernmental institutional framework to consider the Socio-Labour Declaration as a justiciable instrument. This has allowed workers and citizens to rely upon it to challenge domestic legislations and protect their fundamental rights in the workplace. This piece concludes that an already overdue revision should not only reform the legal nature of the Socio-Labour, which should become a protocol to the Treaty of Asuncion, but should also regulate two crucial areas that are already shaping the Mercosur Member States’ labour markets, namely: platform work, and climate change with a particular focus on green jobs and just transition policies.