The Argentinean labor market since the mid-1990s in the context of the particularities of its economic cycle

This article aims to study the evolution of the Argentinean labor market over the last three decades in the light of an approach that takes into account the structural determinant of the national economic cycle: the relationship between the lag in international productivity and the availability of sources of compensation for it, at each moment in time, under the different models of accumulation. To this end, the dynamics of different re levant labor variables (employment, wages, the evolution of the urban informal sector, and the quality of employment) are analyzed in stages identified according to the general economic dynamics: 1991-2002, 2003-2011, and 2012-2021. The main conclusion is that only in instances of a particularly high flow of ground rent (2008-2011) a genuine improvement in the employ ment and living conditions of the Argentinean population was achieved, which failed to reverse the pronounced deterioration that had occurred since the mid-1970s. This deteriora-tion was the result of a growing differentiation in the conditions of reproduction of the labor force, which has its correlation in the marked fragmentation that char-acterizes current Argentinean society vis-a-vis that of the early 1970s, which stood out in the regional panorama.