Abstract

COSCIA, Vanesa. Labor reforms of the ’90s in Argentina: a study from mass media dynamics. Trab. soc. [online]. 2020, vol.21, n.34, pp.51-60. ISSN 1514-6871.

How is labor flexibilization and precarization represented in the public sphere, what are the media attributions assigned to the labor reforms of the 1990s, what is the place of trade unions, employers and workers in news coverage? These are some of the questions that this study attempts to answer, from an interdisciplinary approach and through the analysis of media dynamics.

To this end, the debates of specialists in labor studies are reviewed and a group of news published by the main Argentine newspapers, Clarín and La Nación, on the reforms of 1991 and 1995, which opened and deepened the path to labor flexibilization in the country, is analyzed. We consider that the cultural disputes that try to impose certain ways of thinking about work, trade unions and labor reforms in neoliberal contexts are fundamental when approaching this issue.

In recent years, various labor reforms, sanctioned in Latin America and around the world, have been eroded the historic rights of workers. For this reason, this study attempts to contribute to the identification of "ways of narrating" that are reproduced, with their nuances, from the mass media of different countries.

Keywords : media representations; labor reform; flexibilization; precarization; neoliberalism.