Abstract
During the 1990s, Argentine labour underwent dramatic changes at the national level, under the uninterrupted government of a man and a political party that seemed to be its main supporters, apparently managing to articulate a viable type of capitalism combined with a democratic regime. As Novaro (1999: 14) argues, "there has been little recognition of the novelty produced by the politics of these years...whether good or bad," and there is a need to construct a historical vision of the 1990s. It is important to focus on labor, as it has not received as much attention as other areas of study (such as government, business, or civil society). In this chapter, I propose to explore two complementary hypotheses regarding the prospects for institutionalizing a new regulatory framework for work in the early twenty-first century. The two hypotheses are:
1) "Institutionalized labor (i.e., unions and labor organizations) during the 1990s was constrained in both its actions and discourse by three main contradictions."
2) "The second hypothesis, based on Weller's statement, is that: 'The institutionalization of labor played an important role in the post-war development model...in Latin America.... With the crisis of this model, many of its patterns of regulation of production and distribution have lost their strength, among them those of the labor market... The current debate on the reforms of Latin American labor institutions must be undertaken in the context of the current transformation of the development model... It can be said that the countries of the region, like other countries in the world, are in a process of research in which many and varied actors are participating. This process is taking place at different levels, from the enterprise to national legislation and even at the international level, and has not yet found answers to some key questions regarding a new regulation of the labor market (Weller, 1998..."