Re-thinking Argentina’s Labor and Social Security Reform in the 1990s: Agreement on Competitive Corporatism

Abstract

During the 1980s, the so-called “lost decade,” Argentina experienced an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. This contrasted with the nature of her transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy in 1983. Carlos Menem, from the Peronist Party, was elected president in 1989 at a time when the country’s inflation rate had reached almost 5,000 percent. To restore the economy, he adopted neoliberal economic policies and carried out social reforms, including the deregulation of the labor market. These policies were adopted to cope with an increase in market competition brought about by the processes of globalization and to combat high levels of unemployment through increasing the flexibility of the labor market. Social security reforms were required to deal with the transformation in industrial relations, the high rate of unemployment, and a huge financial deficit.KeywordsIndustrial RelationLabor UnionPension SystemUnemployment InsurancePension ReformThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.