ILPC 2026

There is a broad production about the role of labor policies of flexibilization, reduction of wage costs and management of unemployment in shaping the neoliberal strategy. In Argentina, after the 2001 crisis and its sequel to unemployment, precarization and pauperization of the popular sectors, the demand for employment became a political and social axis of magnitude, and this was assumed by the Kirchner governments, with arguments that prioritized active state policies, economic reactivation and social inclusion.

In this framework, it is essential to investigate the relationship between the dynamics of the labor force market, the process of capital accumulation, and the type of state intervention matrix that is configured in this matter, in different historical periods, analyzing ruptures and continuities.

To this end, we will consider the policies promoted by the Secretary of Employment of the Ministry of Labor, Employment, and Social Security (MTEySS). In particular, the policies and social processes articulated around the creation of the Public Employment Services Network and the consolidation of municipal employment offices (OEMs). We will seek to identify the social and political actors that take center stage in the framework of the developed policies, recognizing continuities and / or ruptures in the actors that these policies prioritize, in the specific patterns of state action against groups and actors with different political positions and belongings of class and in the allocation of costs and benefits thereof. We will focus on the specific state management, to analyze to what extent these policies have a differential quality with respect to the neoliberal stage and understand what their limits have been. This Network represents an institutional innovation with respect to the 90s, and it implements many of the programs and active employment policies promoted by the Ministry; Likewise, OEMs are central to the strategy of municipalization-territorialization of MTEySS intervention in the period, above all for the universe of unregistered, informal, unemployed and / or underemployed workers. We will try to reconstruct a periodization of employment policies, articulating the different functions and policies in charge of the Network with the characteristics, profiles and structural biases assumed by the labor market in the period under analysis.

This analysis of policies, although not enough to generalize, aims to illuminate, be part of broader reflections on the transformations that have taken place in the State in the last decade, within the framework of the "crisis of neoliberalism", as well as contributing to the most recent discussions about new regressive turns in labor matters, based on the state regulation of the capital-labor relationship and the changing and dynamic correlations of force between social classes.