Conflict and consensus - Government, congress and interest groups in labor reform during the first Menem administration (1989-1995)

The goal of the article is to analyze the labor reform policy under Menem's first government. We argue that, while the literature points to the demise of concertation mechanisms to formulate policies, the Argentine case shows that labor reforms are passed only when they are concerted with interest organizations. Besides, we contend that in the 1994-95 period the state enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy and political power which was indispensable to organize a concertation space between unions and business peak associations. Finally, our view is that, despite its importance for the government's macroeconomic scheme, the labor reform bargaining process was to a great extent blocked, One the one hand, because, unlike other market reforms, labor reforms give rise to relatively homogeneous class alignments among interest organizations; on the other hand because labor reform directly involves the traditional political bases of peronism, both in symbolic terms and at the level of interests, and hence it affected the general coalition policy of the reformist government.