In the labor reform project pushed by Javier Milei, the “hour basket” — also called a “time bank” — allows companies to accumulate extra hours worked to compensate for them later with rest days or shorter shifts. Instead of paying overtime with a 50% or 100% surcharge, those hours are deposited into an individual worker's account that the employer can “withdraw” when it suits production. The result is evident: the worker's time ceases to belong to them and becomes part of the company's available capital.
The case of Metalsa in Pacheco serves as a precedent where this model was attempted to be imposed. At the autoparts company Metalsa Argentina S.A., located in El Talar de Pacheco, conflicts over the organization of work time are not new. During 2014 and 2015, workers denounced that the company — with the backing of the union — tried to impose a “time bank” scheme that flexibilized schedules and eliminated direct payment for overtime. Ignacio “Nacho” Serrano, a delegate of a sector, led the resistance in an assembly where the UOM union tried to have workers vote on the time bank model. He, along with several colleagues, was fired in an episode that included blockades on the service road and mobilizations in front of the plant. After a long struggle that included a lawsuit, Nacho was reinstated, but the disciplinary message was ingrained in the plant: anyone who questions the employer's management of time will be persecuted.
This precedent is important to consider here. The government's labor reform introduces the so-called “time bank,” a mechanism that allows companies to reorganize workers' schedules and rest periods according to their production needs. The UOM union, together with this Mexican multinational, attempted to impose the “hour basket,” with the labor reform once again stemming from an agreement between the union bureaucracy and the employers.
The “hour basket” promoted by Milei precarizes work. It destroys the boundary between work and life, erodes rest, and reorders the worker's existence to the rhythm of capital, creating a working class monitored by the clock and deprived of the most elementary right — the right to dispose of their own time. This is about the ownership of human time. The “hour basket” implies that rest, family life, leisure, and health are subordinated to the cycle of capital. Where there used to be a right to a limited workday, the logic of a balance appears: hours owed, hours recovered, hours lost. The worker becomes a living clock that marks the pulse of production, without control over their own time.
