The First Constitutional Guarantees of Workers' Rights: Mechanisms for the Implementation of the 1918 Constitution

The paper is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the first constitutional guarantees of workers’ rights, as legislatively enshrined in the 1918 Constitution of the RSFSR. The study focuses on the mechanisms of their practical implementation in the context of the profound revolutionary transformations that encompassed Russian society. It examines in detail the content of Articles 15–22 of the Constitution, which, in essence, laid the foundation of Soviet labor law by proclaiming the rights, fundamentally new for their time, including: the eight-hour workday, the right to rest, annual leave, and social security. The paper considers the central role of the 1918 Labor Code as the principal legal instrument giving concrete form to the constitutional provisions. It analyzes the activities of the People’s Commissariat of Labor, trade unions, and factory committees, which served as the primary institutions responsible for overseeing compliance with labor legislation. Particular attention is devoted to identifying and analyzing the contradictions that arose between the rights declared and the actual practice of their implementation, a disparity caused by the acute economic crisis, the Civil War, and the specific features of labor mobilization policy during the period of War Communism. The paper demonstrates that the transition to the New Economic Policy (NEP) required a substantial adjustment of the mechanisms for implementing constitutional guarantees and, as a consequence, the adoption of a new Labor Code in 1922. The author concludes that the experience of 1918, notwithstanding all the difficulties and contradictions of its practical realization, exerted a significant influence on the formation of international labor standards and the development of the concept of the social state, thereby underscoring the enduring relevance of this historical experience for contemporary legal scholarship.

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