Income transfer programs and labour policies in Argentina, conflicting strategies?

The paper discusses two central components of Argentina’s welfare policies: conditional cash transfer programs and labour regulations; it examines their design, institutional structure and implementation, identifying their gender and labour market impacts in the 2002-2010 years.

In the height of unemployment in 2002 the Executive designed a CCT program directed to unemployed heads of households with children under 18. With the new administration starting in 2003 the program’s level of transfers stagnated until 2009 when a novel - allegedly universal – conditional cash transfer program was implemented. The program aimed at providing child benefits to informal or unemployed heads of households with children that in return had to prove the latter’s regular schooling and vaccination. During the 1990’s the labour code had been reformed flexibilizing contractual and working conditions, as collective bargaining remained in a stand still. Starting 2003 a set of income policies, the introduction of protective labour standards and the reinstatement of collective agreements became the main components of the Executive’s labour policies.

In the literature as in the official discourse there is a tendency to mix-up broad coverage with ‘universality’ concerning social programs; however, the selection of the type of beneficiaries of the cash transfer programs already introduces selection criteria that contradict universality.

The main hypothesis of the paper is that the division between a set of policies directed to informal workers’ households and children through cash transfer programs, and of labour policies directed to workers in formal jobs, reproduces social and gender segmentation. The analysis attempts to illustrate how the divide between social and work policies is reviving the strategies of delivering ‘targeted’ programs to vulnerable groups under a ‘universal’ guise.