Argentina’s Labor Reform: The Most Recent Symptom of Latin America's Right Turn
In the early hours of Friday, February 21st, Argentina's Chamber of Deputies approved a sweeping labor reform pushed by President Javier Milei, 135 votes to 115. Outside Congress, the scene was different. The Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), Argentina's most powerful union federation, had called a general strike that brought much of the country to a standstill, including transport workers, hospital staff, port workers, and teachers. Twelve vessels carrying nearly 380,000 tons of grain sat inactive in Argentine ports. And Milei, the self-described anarcho-capitalist who has made dismantling Argentina's economic institutions his political project, was not even in the country. He was in Washington, attending the first meeting of Donald Trump's Board of Peace.
The reform has been months in the making and covers significant ground. It restructures severance pay by excluding bonuses and vacation time from the calculation, extends the maximum workday from eight to twelve hours under a new flexible scheduling system, and creates a bank of overtime hours that can be compensated with time off rather than pay. It also limits union power by expanding the list of sectors considered "essential services," which limits their ability to strike and requires union meetings to be authorized by employers, with attendees going unpaid for those hours.
The most revealing provision, however, was the one the government ultimately pulled due to its controversy. Under the original text, medical leave pay would have been tied to the cause of the illness. Workers suffering from what the bill called a “blameless illness” (one the worker could not have prevented) would have received 75% of their salary. Workers whose condition was linked to “voluntary action” (meaning lifestyle choices the employer could deem self-inflicted) would have received just 50%. The language alone tells you something about the logic behind the reform: it distributes moral responsibility onto the worker and financial relief onto the company. The provision was pulled days before the vote to avoid a legislative defeat, but the reform still passed.
This is all happening against a backdrop which elevates the stakes of this labor reform. Argentina's official unemployment rate sits at around 7%, but that number comes along with a more uncomfortable reality: over 40% of Argentine workers are in the informal economy, meaning they have no social security, no severance rights, and no union protections to begin with. The reform's stated goal of incentivizing formal hiring is not groundless in that context. But for the workers who are already formal, organized, and watching their salaries lose ground to inflation, the message reads very differently.
However, none of this is particularly surprising to anyone watching the region closely. When the hard right takes power, labor reform tends to follow a recognizable script: reduce costs for employers, weaken organized workers, and signal to foreign investors that the country is open for business. Argentina has been here before; the structural adjustment programs of the 1990s carried a similar logic, trading worker protections for economic "modernization," and the results were documented: growing income inequality, expanding informal employment, and a surge in unemployment that hollowed out the middle class the reforms claimed to serve. (For a deeper look at this, see Novick et al., International Labour Review.)
The Regional Picture
But Argentina is not alone. The reform is the most visible expression of the right turn that has been taking shape across Latin America in just the past few years. In Bolivia, the socialist party which had governed for nearly two decades was voted out. In Ecuador, center-right Daniel Noboa was re-elected. And in December of 2025, José Antonio Kast won Chile's presidency, becoming the country's most right-wing leader since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship. It would be too simple, though, to treat this as a single unified movement with a single agenda. Kast's campaign, like that of Costa Rica's newly elected Laura Fernández, was centered almost entirely on security and crime following the mold of El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, who built his political brand around dismantling gang violence and, along the way, many of his country's independent institutions. The priorities differ across these governments, but the appetite for executive power, and the erosion of the institutions meant to check it, does not.
What makes the pattern worth watching is what comes next. The political vacuum heading into elections this year opens the door to candidates whose platforms align with what is happening in Buenos Aires. Last week in Peru, President José Jerí was ousted from power after failing to disclose secret meetings with Chinese businessmen who were under government scrutiny, and now the country is expected to hold elections on April 12. In Colombia’s upcoming May presidential elections, a figure being called "El Tigre”, an outsider candidate drawing explicit comparisons to Bukele, has been polling strongly against the candidate backed by current leftist president Gustavo Petro. In 2025 alone, every Latin American country that held a presidential election elected a right-wing or conservative candidate. The direction, at this point, is hard to argue with.
And then there is the hemispheric picture. While Argentine workers went on strike and Congress debated the most contested labor reform in decades, Milei was in Washington, sitting alongside Donald Trump at the first meeting of the so-called Board of Peace. The image is telling not because one caused the other, but because it does not need to. What is happening in Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Colombia is part of the same political moment that brought Trump back to the White House: a moment in which the appetite for disruption, deregulation, and the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader has found an audience well beyond any one country's borders. Argentina's labor reform is one piece of that picture, and it is unlikely to be the last.