A construção histórica do Estado social no Brasil e no Chile: do mutualismo ao seguro

Abstract

The welfare state is a historical phenomenon built on legal conventions and associations that turned it into collective power. This study emphasizes the advent of this sort of State both in Brazil and Chile as a configurative process of nation building. Different forms of manifestation of the welfare state s programs in both countries, although seized synchronously at certain periods in time, show traces of the period where its norms acquired efficacy standards, thus becoming valued as organizational resources with its own identity. In these countries, collective welfare insurance schemes organized by the State between 1920 and 1940; played important roles in articulating the solidarity of the working world. A new public commitment emerges during this period surrounding the expansion of welfare state programs. From the resources of welfare policy, the working class of these countries acquired political expression. However, substantive differences of how this commitment took form in those countries were deeply considered. In Brazil, this commitment is consolidated through a corporate arrangement structured by new social forces that came to power with the 1930´s Revolution. Although still related to employers´ interests, this arrangement also forwarded the Brazilian social issues; articulated to the basis of representation of professional unions, to the normative power of labor justice, and to social security funds. In Chile, the corporate representation of workers in the political system was restrained of institutionalization. Even after the advent of the regime that overthrew the oligarchic liberalism in 1924, pioneering the process of welfare legislation, the unions remained circumscribed within enterprises, and the power of labor courts had its prerogatives undermined. As a result of union organization at the level of industries, social insurance schemes have developed quite fragmented, preventing the consolidation of collective social security institutions. The possibilities to advance on constructing the welfare State were obstructed; therefore, such task was performed by the social medicine, practiced in the institutions of social insurance for workers. Finally, the historical construction process of the welfare state in Chile and Brazil suggests how the institutionalization of social rights in these countries had to deal with deep hostilities. The programmatic accomplishment of these rights was limited by a certain private tendency of blocking the regulatory functions of the welfare state. It is, in short, to emphasize the civilizing character contained in this construction process, given the deep inequalities that still characterize the Chilean and Brazilian societies.