Disputes around zero-hour contracts in the Chamber of Deputies (2012-2017)

Abstract

The 2017 Labor Reform completes more than five years of validity, still carrying a lot of controversy. Responsible for the most extensive round of flexibility in labor legislation since the CLT, the reform had, among other things, the objective of expanding the possibilities for hiring and using the workforce, incorporating more occupations considered “atypical”, such as zero-hour contracts. The aim of this work is to analyze the legislation process of this model before and during the reform, pointing out the possibilities of regulation that were disputed in the Chamber of Deputies from 2012 to 2017, resorting to a documentary research for this purpose. Our findings indicate that models were disputed and that the political, institutional and economic situation provided the political opportunity for matters hitherto repressed in the Chamber to be discussed and zero-hour contracts to be institutionalized.