Citation

Calavita K. Law Soc. Rev. 1986; 20(2): 189-227.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1986, Law and Society Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.2307/3053540

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper is a case study of the occupational safety and health provisions of the Italian Workers' Rights Law of 1970, which gave Italian workers the broad right to regulate safety and health conditions at the shop level. The paper traces the political history of this controversial legislation and workers' and employers' responses to it. It then provides evidence that the law was neither the mere "symbolic gesture" nor the tool to "open new horizons" that observers variously predicted. The paper argues that to account for the formulation of this law and its ambiguous impact, the economic and political contradictions into which it was inserted must be placed at the center of analysis. It thus challenges the kind of legal determinism implicit in many analyses of the sociology of law that make the state and legal phenomena the central actors.