The Supreme Court, a court for employers? Empirical study of the jurisprudence unification recourse

Abstract

This research assesses the pro-employer or pro-worker orientation of the Chilean Supreme Court rulings on labor law cases. For this purpose the decisions made in the 1,051 jurisprudence unification recourses that have been brought to the Court in the quadrennium that began when it was incorporated to the national legal system. This empirical study allows us to conclude, essentially, that the Supreme Court favored the employers' positions in 95.2% of the cases. In this sense, the higher court seems extraordinarily far away from the decisions made by the Courts of Appeal and in the first stage courts that knew the same issues and, which is more serious, regarding the requests for protecting workers' rights.