When combined with a 30% gender pay gap, the picture reveals a structural inequality that the acceleration of informal or self-employment tends to deepen. By Luciana Censi, labor lawyer and union advisor. For the government and its allies, it was very important to impose this legal reform. It is our common interests (the right to work, to a salary, to leisure, to a minimum working day, to vacations, to health, to strike, etc.) that unite us against the labor reform, layoffs, austerity, and repression. That is why our struggle is against the capitalist class and its governments: the same ones that discriminate against us in the labor market, steal our free time with exhausting work shifts, and impose miserable wages. That unity they seek to break is what we will defend in the streets and in every workplace. We face those who promote productivity to divide us, while denying a social care system, starving education workers in Santa Fe and across the country, and despising the essential work of public health workers. These measures make it clear that women and gender-diverse people are part of the same identity: the working class. Without strong unions or labor protection, gender inequality can only deepen. In this sense, the violation of the right to a limited working day established by law through the so-called 'time bank' directly impacts the social organization of care, historically feminized. Due to the greater burden of these tasks on women, our capacity to respond to individual productivity incentives will be limited by domestic work. All of this under the threat of dismissal if the worker does not consent to these changes that compromise their well-being and that of their family. With the current fragmentation of the labor market, where salaried workers make up 47.2%, informal salaried workers 27.4%, and the self-employed 25.4% of the economically active population (PEA), adding a 30% pay gap reveals a structural inequality that the acceleration of informal or self-employment only tends to deepen. This law attacks the entire working class. The weakening of unions harms us, as we will not be able to raise various demands, such as family responsibility leave, extensions for maternity/paternity leave, leave for gender-based violence, salary increases, limited working hours, among others. With a growing closure of industries caused by the opening of imports and the decline in the purchasing power of wages, and the defunding of social, public, and free services (education, health, disability). This is something that employers are well aware of.
