This study attempts to show the injuried workers’ hard way to the discovery of citizenship, where the knowledge of rights is a fight for first class citizenship equality, that is, for access to justice and social rights. This fight beguins at the moment of the work accident in the world of labour, where insecure and unhealthy conditions of work prevail. It continues in the health institutions, places of an appaling and almost-animal suffering, where the injuried workers find out the abyssal inequality in the acess of social rights. Once this is discovered, juridically, socially and physically injuried workers find in the unions means to operate their citizenship rights, thus being able to cross the border from the condition of second class to first class citizens. It is in their unions that workers are able to assert their right to work and find the space for regulate, organize and articulate the fight for social rights.
citizenship of the worker; health of the workers; violence in the world of labour; social rights; justice