Judge Removed from Case Against Labor Reform in Argentina

The government was precisely seeking to move the discussion away from labor law, where the reform had found its first obstacle, and transfer it to a more suitable arena to treat the issue as an institutional lawsuit against the state. Buenos Aires, April 12, 2026 - Total News Agency - TNA. The judicial offensive that had managed to halt a central part of the government's labor reform suffered a strong and politically significant turn: the labor judge, Raúl Horacio Ojeda, with a past closely linked to kirchnerism and former advisor to former Labor Minister Carlos Tomada, was removed from the case and will no longer lead the lawsuit filed by the CGT (General Confederation of Labor) against Law 27.802 on Labor Modernization. The discussion will continue, but no longer under the orbit of the judge the CGT had found to block the reform, but in a different jurisdiction with less favorable rules for the labor movement. Among the points affected were the Labor Assistance Fund, limits on the right to strike by activity, changes in indemnifications, a bank of hours, fragmentation of vacations, payment of indemnifications in installments, the transfer of national labor justice to the Buenos Aires orbit, and the repeal of the Telework Law. But the most politically sharp detail is not only the removal of Ojeda, but his profile. The decision was made by Federal Judge Macarena Marra Giménez, who resolved the jurisdictional conflict in favor of the Federal Administrative Court and took the case away from the National Labor Court. The judicial move represents a clear setback for the labor central and, at the same time, a relief for the Casa Rosada (the presidential palace), which had been harshly questioning Ojeda's intervention. In Balcarce 50 (the government house), they interpret the news as an important signal to try to reshape a law that had been wounded by Ojeda's injunction and that the official bloc considers central for reducing costs, redesigning labor relations, and limiting the obstructive power of the unions. Thus, the judge who had dealt the first strong blow against the libertarian labor reform ended up losing control of the file. And the fact is not minor: the magistrate who had suspended the norm was a judge with a direct past in Tomada's structure, one of the most emblematic names of the kirchnerist labor framework. The criterion he set was that the CGT's lawsuit should not be processed in the Buenos Aires labor court because it does not involve individual worker claims, but a general challenge to a state norm of national scope and to acts of the National State. The displacement of Ojeda does not yet resolve the core of the conflict, but it does significantly alter the judicial board. The magistrate had issued an innovative precautionary measure on March 30 at the request of the CGT and had suspended 82 articles of the reform, that is, a large part of the core of the flexibility, modernization, and labor deregulation scheme promoted by the government of Javier Milei. For this reason, he understood that the case must go to the Federal Administrative Court, which is the one that must review the constitutionality of this type of public policy. For the government and for much of the non-Peronist world, the episode reinforced the idea that a key piece of labor modernization had initially been in the hands of a magistrate identified with the kirchnerist legal architecture. Marra Giménez's ruling put a limit to that advance. Concretely, the file must be forwarded, and if this procedure is not completed, the issue will be left to the study of the National Appeals Court in Administrative Matters. The ruling also leaves another deep reading: the CGT keeps its legal battle open, but no longer on the ground that had initially been favorable to it. That precedent came back to the forefront when it came to ruling against one of the most important reforms of the current official bloc. The judge was an advisor to Carlos Tomada between 2004 and 2012 on legislative affairs of the Ministry of Labor during the kirchnerist governments, and was later appointed head of the National Labor Court No. 72 in December 2012.