From Individual Wage to Household’s Labor Income: Consequences of Women’s Labor Force Incorporation in Argentina, 1974–2018

Abstract

The Argentinean real wage has suffered a profound deterioration since the mid-1970s. Simultaneously, there was a structural increase in women’s labor market participation. Consequently, looking at individual wages as indicators of the household’s reproduction conditions might be misleading. Here we put those two phenomena together under a new reading of Marx’s value of labor power concept within an understanding of the specificity of capital accumulation in Argentina. Transformations in the global organization of production led to a change in the concrete expression of the value of labor power, which is now divided into the wages of more than one household member. This expresses itself in the increased participation of women’s income in household income and the latter’s more favorable evolution compared to the individual one. JEL Classification: N36, B51, B54, J31