Labour inspection after the civil war in Spain.Regulatory interventionism and abstentionistlabour inspection performance

Abstract

This paper focuses on something not previously addressed by the litera-ture, labour inspection in Spain in the first decades of the Franco dictator-ship. Despite the Franco dictatorship’s fascist-style approach of regulatory interventionism, this research shows a relapse into an abstentionist con-ception of labour inspection that led to worker vulnerability. The study has not only found, as was already known, normative similarities with the contemporaneous Italian and German dictatorships, but also similar (although more severe) limitations to the functioning of the inspection service. The slight improvement registered from 1947 onwards and the effort to achieve a limited equivalence with Western democracies also failed to notably improve working conditions, occupational safety and worker protection. The Labour Inspectorate suffered from understaffing and a lack of resources up to the very end of the dictatorship, something which the incipient democracy then inherited. These human and material resource shortages continue to be a problem and are currently debated in Spain.