Women, already confined to the lowest-paying sectors, will be the first to see their hours—and their incomes—cut at the whim of an algorithm or a supervisor. The answer is twofold and reflects a structural inequality: – As a feminized labor sector: Health is a sector where women are the majority, especially in the most precarious and essential positions: nursing and hospital cleaning. This disproportionately affects women, who bear the brunt of the invisible care work. The question is not whether it affects us, but how we are going to stop it together. Source: https://argentina.indymedia.org/2026/02/09/punto-por-punto-como-la-reforma-laboral-ataca-especialmente-a-las-mujeres-trabajadoras/ Let's see how. By Jimena Frankel and Noelia Bartfay, for Indymedia. Working Day The labor reform's 'hour bank' and 'zero-hour contracts', sold as flexibility and modernization, are nothing more than the commodification of the life time of all workers, and they destroy the organization of daily life. By transferring to the company the power to unilaterally decide the days, duration, and work schedules according to its demand peaks, the result will be a total loss of predictability. The uncertainty affects not only domestic and care responsibilities. The deterioration of collective health thus becomes an extra mental and logistical burden that falls on their shoulders. Thus, the reform creates a vicious cycle: it precarious the health workers (mostly women) while overloading the women who manage care in their families, all while making them pay more for a deteriorating service. Thus, precariousness in one sector generates unemployment in another, in a vicious circle that destroys net female employment. Health The labor reform includes another cut: a 1% reduction in employer contributions to social works. The question is concrete and urgent: how do you coordinate shifts at the pediatrician, school pick-up, or care for a dependent relative if you don't know when you will be free? This reform only reinforces existing gender inequalities in terms of income, permanence, and advancement in the labor market, as well as their already limited possibilities for political and union participation, and the recovery of energy and mental wear and tear. Wages The lack of predictability about the number of hours worked directly translates into loss of salary and economic uncertainty. A model is being designed that weakens both union and private health, and overloads a historically underfunded public system with serious infrastructure and working condition problems. Photo: Indymedia Argentina But why does this hit women harder? This will pressure schools to deepen a role they have already played for decades: mere childcare depositories, extending their hours and responsibilities, while educational communities deal with social problems aggravated by the same crisis: extreme precariousness and lack of basic goods in families. In parallel, as in health, the invisible burden of managing school life will fall more heavily on women. The burden of reorganizing family logistics in the face of this fragmentation of rest will fall, once again, predominantly on women. Moreover, and to emphasize that this is the hallmark of the entire law, if this minimum fragmentation is enabled, what is being enabled is the power of the employer to force employees into said fragmentation if it is convenient for the company. Added to this, the elimination of union guardianship for substitutes and delegates has a differential impact on women. It is through these positions that the first steps in union activity are usually taken, a space to which women already have greater difficulty accessing due to the double workday—paid and unpaid. Outsourcing The central problem here is that the reform would enable an infinite succession of phantom outsourcing company chains, blurring the responsibilities of main companies and legalizing precariousness. The reform does not 'save costs', it transfers the company's risk to the bodies and accounts of the workers. Income and Pensions The application of the Labor Assistance Fund (FAL) will have a direct and regressive impact on the economy of working families. By precarious working conditions and facilitating layoffs, the reform creates a domino effect: more people will lose their social security and be forced to collapse the already deteriorated public health system. There is no equality between individuals in a labor relationship between workers and employers. Licenses The reform puts at risk a series of recent labor improvements, such as licenses for care and against labor violence. By disrupting work time, breaks, salary, and social security, the labor reform is a direct attack on the reproduction of the life of those of us who live from our work. It will disproportionately affect those who sustain care tasks, which fall mostly on women. Thus, the reform produces a perverse effect: while it destabilizes formal female work, it overloads the unpaid care work that makes schooling possible. In this way, the education system will be both a victim and a thermometer of the reform: it will reflect in its classrooms the social deterioration that it accelerates, while its workers (mostly women) and the mothers of their students bear the weight of sustaining a right that the project's commercial logic seeks to empty of content. This review of different axes aims to show that the labor reform does not 'modernize': It enshrines a model where the life of women—their time, their salary, their rest, their organization—is the shock absorber of the capitalist crisis. By prioritizing company-level collective bargaining and enabling downward negotiations, employers will be able to eliminate shared licenses, return to the minimum legal for childbirth, eliminate licenses for family care, and remove licenses for labor or gender violence, among other setbacks. It expands to another deeply feminized social pillar: education. This sector, with a majority of female workers—teachers, assistants, administrators—will suffer a double and contradictory impact. This is the first step to organize the response. The underfunding implied by the 3% cut in employer contributions to pensions, retirement, moratoriums, and the AUH will affect the entire class, but will fall with much more weight on women. They are the ones who receive the lowest pensions or depend on moratoriums to be able to retire, and they are also the ones who benefit mainly from family allowances and the AUH, as a direct consequence of the structural inequality in the time dedicated to the reproduction of life. The reform robs them twice: in the present, with lower and uncertain salaries, and in the future, mortgaging the pension system that should sustain them. Photo: Indymedia Argentina Vacations The reform allows for the fragmentation of vacations into minimum periods of 7 days, which can be granted at any time of the year. This means that the deepening of precariousness and legal protectionlessness will have a clearly feminized face. Work in private homes The general deterioration has a cascading effect. This measure directly goes against family organization and restorative rest. Furthermore, this scheme allows for evading the payment of overtime. The impact of the loss will be even stronger on women workers, who are usually already employed in lower-paying activities or in lower-ranking positions than their male counterparts, widening the gender pay gap. On the one hand, the same precarious 'flexibility' will expel many women from formal jobs in the private sector or force them to accept work schedules incompatible with family life. By being able to adjust schedules to sales or production needs, companies can reduce the monthly salary as another cost variable. One of the most impoverishing and affected sectors is cleaning and maintenance, an area occupied mostly by women. All this puts at risk decades of conquests of feminist unionism. Photo: Indymedia Workers/Officials The end of the ultra-activity of mandatory clauses also threatens specific rights, such as gender commissions or delegates and protocols against labor violence included in some agreements. Work in private homes, another feminized sector, depends on the purchasing power of other working families (not just workers). If these see their income reduced by uncertain salaries, the first thing they cut is the paid domestic service service. A cut to health is, directly, a cut to their working and living conditions. – As main managers of family care: The invisible task of managing the health of the home—coordinating shifts, accompanying children, people with disabilities, and the elderly—falls overwhelmingly on women. When the system deteriorates, it is they who have to juggle: spend more time on paperwork, accompanying relatives to collapsed hospitals, and absorbing the stress of increasingly deficient care. It is an attack that reaches them both in their role as workers and in their role as family support. Education The relentless logic of the reform does not stop at health. They are the first to suffer the wear and tear of a collapsed system, with devalued salaries and exhausting hours. In this way, it is foreseeable that the pay gap will widen and economic dependence will deepen. This economic uncertainty is a low blow to the pocket and to autonomy. In short, a cost is lowered for employers so that we pay it out of our own pocket, further privatizing the right to health. This measure does not operate in a vacuum. The daily logistics—transportation, help with homework, meetings, ensuring clothing and materials—will become an even more complex puzzle in the face of uncertainty in one's own or one's partner's work. It attacks the time available for us to train, go to a union or political meeting, have social encounters, or simply replenish our energy. Because if the attack is systematic, resistance cannot be less: it must be woven in every union, in every neighborhood, in every assembly, uniting the precarious employee, the teacher, the worker of the popular economy. This cut is not just a number in a balance sheet; it is a direct attack on collective health that will deepen the crisis of the system and have a disproportionate impact on women workers. The mechanism is clear: the cost that the company stops paying does not disappear, it is transferred. But it is not neutral: it widens the gender pay gap that the feminist movement has been denouncing. Those who will have to cover that shortfall will be the workers, either through higher copays in social works or more expensive fees in prepaid plans. The problem is not working more, but that work time ceases to be a known piece of information to become a foreign variable that dismantles the material bases of existence and struggle. The impact, however, is not neutral. It will be practically impossible to match vacation periods between family members, a difficulty that worsens when there are school-aged children. Understanding it point by point is not an academic exercise.
