By Deborah Martinez
Javier Milei’s recently approved labor reform promises to liberate the Argentine people from the obstacles that constrain their individual prosperity. Yet beneath its façade of freedom, the reform redefines the legal protections that have long safeguarded workers, their well-being, and their environments, as the Agenda 2030’s “Decent Work” Goal demands.
On February 27, Argentina’s Congress approved a bill sent by President Javier Milei that modifies more than fifteen labor and tax laws as part of a broader project of economic liberalization. The government presents the reform as a necessary correction to expand opportunities, formalize a labor market in which nearly half of workers remain informal, and tackle persistent poverty—even among the formally employed. Critics, however, interpret it differently, viewing the reform as a structural dismantling of labor protections and an “attack on workers” and trade union rights, and therefore on democracy.”
At the center of Milei’s administration lies a particular articulation of libertarianism, which defines freedom through private property, free markets, competition, division of labor, and social cooperation. Informed by Austrian libertarianism, Milei considers any constraint on individuals a violation. Regulations or rights, in his view, do not safeguard dignity and prosperity but instead distort and obstruct them. Such a worldview feeds a rhetoric in which freedom is cast as a struggle against an oppressive system. This makes his motto, “Long live freedom, damn it!,” more than a rallying cry; it becomes the condensation of a political imaginary in which institutions and “unnecessary” rights are redefined as obstacles to be removed.
Milei’s understanding, however, rests on a premise that is not universally shared. International labor frameworks, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 8 on “Decent Work,” recognize that the playing field is uneven and that economic and social relations are shaped by structural asymmetries. For this reason, workers require guarantees and protections to secure safety, dignity, and environmental integrity.
Milei’s Discourse as a Libertarian Construction of the Populist Logic
From a discursive approach, populism can be understood as an articulatory logic through which “the people” and their “collective will” are constructed in opposition to a vertical “antagonistic other,” typically “the elite” or “the establishment.” This antagonism does not emerge from pre-existing social groups but is politically produced through language, equivalence, and exclusion.
In Milei’s discourse, this adversarial logic of populism is not abandoned in favor of libertarianism but rather reconfigured through it.
In his logic, “the people” are not all Argentines but those who align with his specific moral and economic vision, particularly the individuals who produce, compete, and seek prosperity through liberated relations and markets. Milei refers to them as “lions of freedom,” those willing to break with what he considers state dependency. Within this framework, “workers” and “employers” are no longer positioned as opposing social groups but rearticulated as entrepreneurial actors engaged in voluntary exchange. Workers offer their time and effort; employers provide opportunities and wages. Work thus becomes a matter of individual initiative, and employment a space of competition and cooperation.
What falls outside Milei’s construction of “the people” are those who cannot, or do not, conform to his populist logic. They are assembled into an “antagonistic other” that appears homogeneous despite encompassing heterogeneous actors, including the “political caste,” trade unions, and, more broadly, institutional structures that mediate economic relations. As Milei declared before the Congress, once the bill was approved, the “other” includes all “the champions of workers’ rights [who] left half of workers without any rights.” In his view, protectors and institutionalized guarantees are not only questioned but also blamed for Argentina’s current labor conditions. In doing so, he collapses labor laws and rights into illegitimate constraints and reframes institutions as obstacles, rendering their dismantling both rational and necessary.
Based on this antagonism, Milei configures the “will of the people” as a demand for liberation, a call for freedom from regulation, taxation, and what he repeatedly frames as an “extractive system” imposed by the “political caste.” In his logic, the collective demand becomes the installation of a free‑market and meritocratic order that can restore what is “rightfully” one’s own, grounded in property, flexibility, individual effort, and the reallocation of resources to achieve prosperity. As Milei argues, with market liberalization, “technical progress displaces less efficient activities… and work moves to new sectors with higher pay.” Thus, the “will” he claims to embody is one that promises higher wages, lower prices, and greater consumption through the reordering of the very conditions under which work exists.
Yet while his discourse celebrates individual autonomy and market freedom, it simultaneously obscures the tensions that structure labor relations. The worker is interpellated as free, yet continues to operate within unequal conditions shaped by employer power, market volatility, and structural constraints.
Although freedom is promised, dependency persists; while choice is invoked, alternatives remain constrained; and though responsibility is individualized, the risks of the market are displaced onto those least able to absorb them.
Milei’s discourse of liberation thus displaces the question of protection, recoding vulnerability as choice and insecurity as flexibility. This stands in direct contrast to SDG 8, which seeks to integrate and equalize labor conditions to promote the prosperity of current and future workers and the planet. Milei’s discourse, by contrast, fragments this vision by recasting protections as impediments and dissolving the worker as a distinct political subject within “the people.”
Law 27,802: The Unmaking of Decent Work
If Milei’s discourse redefines freedom as the identity of the people and their will, Law 27,802 materializes that vision in concrete terms. The reform becomes the instrument through which Decent Work is dismantled, reshaping labor relations, collective bargaining, and unions’ role through multiple modifications to laws concerning labor, taxes, and even the environment.
The core mechanism of the reform is disintermediation, which aligns with Milei’s libertarian logic, in which anything perceived as standing between the individual and his definition of freedom is treated as an obstacle to be removed. For instance, the law replaces mandatory overtime with a “bank of hours” and authorizes 12-hour shifts at the employer’s discretion, removing temporal limits that previously constrained employers’ authority. This enables employers to restructure tasks, modalities, and schedules, allowing them to alter working conditions with limited avenues for workers to contest unilateral decisions. Such changes erode the certainties and stability that Decent Work standards seek to guarantee, producing precarious conditions under which workers must navigate fluctuating demands and diminished protections.
Within Milei’s libertarian frame, however, these vulnerabilities are reframed as necessary features of “social cooperation,” where flexibility becomes a virtue, insecurity a stimulus for innovation, and the weakening of guarantees a prerequisite for productivity, as it is only through this reconfiguration that prosperity will finally arrive.
This disintermediation is further reinforced by the expansion of non‑remunerative and merit‑based pay, which converts earnings into variable rewards decoupled from pensions and social protection. From a libertarian logic, wages are not conceived as a right but as the outcome of voluntary exchange, contingent on the employee’s effort and adaptability. Such logic obscures the structural inequalities that shape access to inclusive and equal opportunities and instead personalizes success and failure. At the same time, it renders the labor market increasingly attractive to employers, as costs become more flexible, obligations more limited, and remuneration more responsive to business needs rather than legal guarantees.
This “liberation” extends beyond income to affect the overall well‑being of employees as the reform hollows out the social safety net that Decent Work frameworks require. Under the new rules, vacations are transformed into a productivity‑managed “inventory,” converting time for recovery and leisure, which is essential for workers’ health, safety, and dignity, into another variable to be optimized in the name of autonomy and productivity. The reform justifies this shift by framing rest not as a right but as a negotiable resource that should adapt to market rhythms. Nonetheless, this justification reveals a fundamental contradiction: The celebrated “flexibility” and “freedom” do not expand workers’ capacity to decide when or how to rest. On the contrary, what is presented as empowerment for the worker operates as empowerment for the employer, who gains new authority to schedule, fragment, or postpone rest according to business needs.
These changes reconfigure the worker’s position within the labor relation, shifting the balance of power toward the employer and further eroding the guarantees aimed at equating the labour market for workers. This dynamic deepens as company-level agreements override sectoral contracts, while the right to strike is hollowed out through a 75% minimum-service requirement, rendering most collective action ineffective. Even union activity itself is displaced, as assemblies now require employer authorization. Within Milei’s logic, however, these changes are justified as a defense of “the people” against the alleged extortion of unions, presented as a way to ensure that strikes do not “harm users,” “halt productivity,” or “obstruct national growth.” In their name, the mechanisms of representation, participation, and contestation are neutralized, persisting as institutions without real force.
The reform also reshapes the conditions under which work is performed, particularly in sectors where environmental risk and labor vulnerability converge. Through previously introduced mechanisms, such as the Incentive Regime for Large Investments (RIGI), the state has accelerated activity in mining, agribusiness, and energy sectors, reducing oversight while prioritizing investment security over that of workers. This reconfiguration has been justified as necessary to attract capital, increase competitiveness, and unlock growth. Yet the new introduction of the “independent collaborator,” further separates workers from formal employment relations and, with them, from the protections those relations once guaranteed, thereby reducing employees’ capacity to report hazards, demand safeguards, or refuse unsafe conditions.
Freedom for Whom?
Meanwhile, Argentina’s economic elite celebrates the approved law as a step toward clarity, predictability, and reduced litigation. Unions and workers, by contrast, protest the reduction of their rights and their capacity to organize. On one side, what appears as freedom can be interpreted as subordination. Autonomy for vulnerability. Flexibility for insecurity. Prosperity for precarity. The reform does not correct the asymmetries of the labor market; it deepens them by redefining decent work obligations as dispensable and treating safety, stability, and environmental stewardship as liabilities rather than conditions for collective flourishing.
Taken together, these measures do not simply modernize labor relations and conditions. They transform the worker from a rights‑bearing subject into a market participant. In doing so, they run counter to the foundations of SDG 8, where labor guarantees, protections, and environmental safeguards are treated as conditions for dignity and sustainability. Within Milei’s logic, however, their dismantling remains entirely coherent.
But Milei’s notion of “freedom” is not universal. It is a construction that privileges those who command capital, flexibility, and bargaining power, while exposing the “people” he claims to represent to fragility. It replaces collective guarantees with individual risk and reframes that shift not as a political choice but as a moral necessity.
The question, then, is not whether Argentina will become freer under the new Law, but who will be free.
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Deborah Martínez is a PhD candidate at Radboud University studying how populist discourses frame sustainability. She was an OSUN Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute and serves on BYU’s OPUS Steering Committee. Before academia, she worked as an international journalist for Nikkei, Russia Today, and TV Azteca.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
