The labor reform has two sides of the same coin: entrepreneurial freedom to subject workers and to end with unionism as the only subject capable of setting a limit to employer voracity. By Luciana Censi, labor lawyer and union advisor.
Background The labor reform project presented by the PEN on 12.9.25 and to be dealt with in extraordinary sessions of the Senate, has its normative antecedents in the Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU) 70/23, from which it imports several of its articles, DNU 340/25 and in the "Bases Law" on which it deepens some concepts further worsening the rights of workers. On the other hand, its factual history is the composition of the labor market where registered salaried workers reach 47.2%, unregistered salaried workers 27.4% and self-employed workers 25.4% of the economically active population (EAP).
Objectives On this basis, the labor reform has the following objectives: 1. – To allow the free availability and cheapening of labor force on entry (extension of probation periods, interposition of labor through contracting companies, limitation of solidarity in outsourcing), on exit (creation of the FAL - Labor Assistance Fund - which allows to divert employer contributions from the social security system to an external trust fund to pay future severance pay, exclusion of salary concepts to determine the amount of severance pay for dismissals, payment of severance pay in installments) and in the worker's production process (to unilaterally or contractually dispose of essential elements, such as working hours, vacations and salary).
In short, this freedom of disposition in the work process that the project consecrates implies a greater exploitation of the worker in two fundamental aspects: working time and salary. In working time, for example, because it authorizes that by agreement of the parties, the worker may work beyond the 9 hours daily established by law in our country since the '30s, being able to compensate them at some point, and in salaries because it allows the employer to pay them according to the individual effort of the worker.
These changes presuppose that those who hire a labor relationship are people who are in "equality of power and decision" to impose their wishes and needs: the employer with his money, his machinery and his facilities and the worker with his body and his intelligence; "freedom of contract" in turn framed on an army of unemployed or immersed in the informal market always waiting to find a better job.
The economic objective is clearly seen: to increase the intensity of work by lowering salaries and increasing the working day, and the political objective consists in the subjugation of workers to carry it out.
- – However, to fulfill the political objective, two substantial aspects are resorted to, one is the labor market itself that disciplines workers who are in formality fearing being displaced to the informal market or to unemployment, and the other is the second part of the labor reform they intend to implement: collective rights.
To achieve the free availability of the labor force, it is not enough with a reform of individual law, since our country has strong union organizations and collective rights that constitute barriers to employer fantasies. For this reason, the reform also provides: defunding unions, fostering collective bargaining by company emptying collective bargaining by branch of activity (so that each company can have a CBA negotiated with its union according to its productive or discretionary parameters, regardless of what workers of equal activity who work, next door, in the same industrial park but for another company achieve), sanctioning and prohibiting part of union activity (through fines, criminal complaints and damages against unions and their representatives), limiting union tutelage and restricting the right to strike by declaring almost all economic activity as essential service or of transcendental importance in order to hinder its exercise.
The two sides of the same coin: entrepreneurial freedom to subject workers on one hand and on the other to end with unionism (and its practice) as the only subject capable of setting a limit to the voracity of employers (or to "their freedom").
- – However, as I said above, the fragmentation of the labor market (workers in an employment relationship but who are hired in a clandestine manner or in fraud of the labor law) is an antecedent and then through the reform it is institutionalized, outside the Labor Contract Law, real labor relations and they are framed in the contracts of the Civil and Commercial Code of the Nation: that is, they legalize what already exists and they tell self-employed workers that they are not workers but "autonomous" and to informal workers that they pay a monotributo and an insurance.
In one case or the other, they will lead us to failure and will hinder the way for a viable or at least consistent resistance.
Luciana Censi is a Labor Lawyer and union advisor.
Source: https://argentina.indymedia.org/2026/01/20/que-busca-la-reforma-laboral-de-javier-milei/
That is: they by law freeze their precariousness.
- – Thus, the claims of some part of the opposition or unionism about the "need" for a labor reform in this structural context are intentionally complicit and if they are not, they ignore how Law works in capitalist society.
