Abstract

MESSINA, Giuseppe Manuel. The Labor‐centric Illusion: Contradictions in the Argentine Welfare Regime under Kirchnerism. Trab. soc. [online]. 2017, n.29, pp.583-610. ISSN 1514-6871.

This article discusses the contradictions in the Argentine Welfare Regime, which have emerged under Presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández. In particular, it deals with the scope of the expansion in non-contributory social policy, which aimed at the universalization of a minimum social protection floor for the previously excluded sectors, but failed to narrow the gap with the traditional contributory social security system. Through an analysis of the phases in which this political experience unfolded, we observe at first a reconstruction of the wage relationship, imbued with the rhetoric of “development with social inclusion”, which led to a reinstatement of a labor-centric approach to social integration. However, this process was incomplete because -among other things- the existence of an irreducible nucleus of labor informality, which reinforced the fragmentation of social protection, inherited from previous decades into multiple systems -public and private- according to income and employment status. Hence the hypothesis that guides this essay is that these contradictions are the result of a mismatch between the observable continuities in the regime of accumulation and the incomplete attempt to reestablish a mode of regulation with similar features that those existing at the time of the industrialization period and the genesis of the Argentine Welfare State.

Keywords : Social policy; Welfare Regime.

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