Colombia’s Senate on Tuesday approved a labor reform bill that included many of the elements of a controversial referendum called by President Gustavo Petro.
Coalition lawmakers celebrated the vote that restored much of the bill as it had been approved by the House of Representatives.
“Today we took a historic step in the struggle for dignified labor in Colombia,” said House Representative Maria Fernanda Carrascal, one of the main forces behind the reform.
Tuesday’s vote came after weeks of tensions that began escalating in April when the Senate’s social policy commission refused to put the labor reform that has been approved in the lower chamber up for debate.
Petro subsequently called a referendum that would allow voters to force Congress to adopt the reform.
The Senate, where the government lacks a majority, rejected this referendum in a vote that was called “fraudulent” by the government and its supporters in Congress.
In the same session, the Senate appealed the commission’s decision to sink the bill and sent it to a different commission so it could be reintroduced for a vote by the plenary.
The president of this commission, Senator Angelica Lozano of the liberal Green Alliance party, was able to get opposition support for the bill by killing key elements of the original reform and introducing new elements that, according to the coalition, made labor conditions even more precarious.
While coalition lawmakers tried to convince their colleagues to restore the labor reform, the government and labor unions increased pressure on the senate with protests and threats of a referendum.
This joint strategy apparently worked as the Senate sank the allegedly regressive articles and revived articles that had been taken down in Lozano’s commission.
Labor Minister Antonio Sanguino said after the vote that the government would revoke the referendum if the reform is maintained in a joint session that seeks to reconcile the House and the Senate version of the reform.
This would end an increasingly problematic institutional crisis that followed the Senate’s attempt to sink the labor reform.
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