I diritti sociali nell'ordinamento della crisi

This essay argues that an extreme declination of financial stability and competitive growth have marked a change in the “genetic code” of social rights. On the one hand, the constitutionalisation of the balanced budget principle has radicalized the well-known paradigm of financially conditioned rights. On the other hand, in the new European governance, social rights are also functionally conditioned to competitive growth. The exercise of most rights and collective freedoms of workers is, in fact, designed around the overriding need to maintain maximum competitiveness of the European economic system. Therefore, it is not only the redistributive dimension of social rights to be weakened, but also their essential emancipatory dimension. Finally, the question arises if the courts possess the appropriate means, in order to preserve the hard core of the Welfare State against the increasingly “tyrannical” reasons of financial stability