The labor reform of Milei cannot be understood without the international geopolitical context. It is neither a local anomaly nor an isolated ideological obsession, but rather a functional piece in the strategy of the United States to reorganize the global economy in its open dispute with China.
Since the pandemic, Washington has accelerated a policy that has already been developing: reducing industrial dependence on Asia, especially China, and relocating part of its production to territories that are closer and politically aligned. This strategy is called nearshoring or friendshoring.
The objective is clear: to shorten supply chains, reduce geopolitical risks, and maintain U.S. economic hegemony in the face of Chinese advancement.
In this scheme, Latin America once again occupies a familiar role. Not as a pole of autonomous development, but as a subordinate productive platform. Geographic proximity, abundance of natural resources, and — above all — cheaper labor than in central countries.
The United States does not present this in explicit terms. Its official documents speak of “shared prosperity,” “hemispheric integration,” and “economic resilience,” as in the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) or in legislative projects like the Americas Act. However, when analyzing the real conditions of these agreements, the pattern repeats itself: investment incentives tied to labor flexibility, legal stability for capital, and regulatory harmonization favorable to businesses.
Strengthening wages, labor rights, or local industrial development is not demanded. What is sought is predictability for the investor and cost reduction.
Argentina, under Milei’s government, decided to fully align itself with this logic.
The labor reform is moving exactly in the direction demanded by transnational capital:
lowering severance pay, weakening unions, restricting the right to strike, extending working hours, and precarizing employment conditions. It is not about generating quality jobs but rather about making the Argentine worker “competitive” by removing their rights.
This process is complemented by the Regime for Incentives to Large Investments (RIGI), which constitutes one of the most regressive schemes in recent history. The RIGI offers fiscal stability for 30 years, tax exemptions, free availability of foreign currency, and legal protection for large projects, mainly in extractive sectors like mining, energy, and hydrocarbons.
All of this without requiring technological transfer, productive linkages, generation of formal jobs, or national industrial development.
In other words: extraordinary benefits for capital, social costs for the population.
The message is unequivocal. Argentina presents itself to the world — and especially to the United States — as a compliant territory: cheap natural resources, precarious work, and a state that voluntarily renounces regulation.
This model is not new. It is a reissue of the old Latin American dependent scheme, updated to the 21st century. Exporting raw materials, subordinated insertion into global value chains, and disciplining the labor movement as a condition for external profitability.
The difference is that now it is presented as “freedom,” “modernization,” and “economic rationality.”
But there is nothing modern about precarizing work.
There is no freedom when jobs lose rights.
And there is no sovereignty when laws are written to reassure foreign investors instead of protecting society.
The fundamental discussion is not only labor-related. It is deeply political. It is a discussion about what place Argentina wants to occupy in the world.
If we accept being cheap labor in an economic war between powers, or if we aspire to a development project with industry, decent work, and autonomy.
Milei chose the first path without debate, consensus, or social mandate.
And that is the real problem: not only the content of the reform but the explicit renunciation of any national project.
In the face of this, the question is no longer whether the labor reform “works” or not.
The question is for whom it works.
And the answer is clear: not for the workers, not for Argentine development, not for national sovereignty. It works for a global order that needs cheap and disciplined territories to sustain its hegemony.
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