What Milei said about labor reform

And that is why it decreases more slowly. And the reality is..., then, this very experienced academic economist said: ‘Then there is no reform because, if I look at what is happening, I don't have a problem with the fall in activity, I don’t have a problem in the labor market.’ In fact, we are facing an unemployment rate that is 2% below the average that the Argentine economy has shown.

So, the reality is that there is no reform. And this is very interesting because what we say is that the reform is so large and so vast that it is compensating for all the negative effects of other cases.

In that context, it will be possible to restore the pension system and it will be possible to generate better pensions. And, in addition, with economic growth, it will mean that they will be even much better. That is to say, that they will be pensions much more dignified than the contributions that were made. So, well, we are doing it, but it takes time. But we are going to fix it.

Essentially, what they promote is that people do not form families and then they use that as a shield to open the floodgates to external invasion. It is not even that they bring in workers or professionals who improve the lives of the natives. Far from that, they promote the entry of dependent individuals who, sooner or later, end up living off the taxpayers. Do you want a good example of this? Spain, the theft and corruption policies of Pedro Sánchez. That slogan, that if you do such a thing, you are a leftist, I am a leftist. He should have added: if being a thief is leftist, then I’m a leftist. That would have fit perfectly.

Now the courses are continuously full, the training is given by the companies themselves, and this is interesting too because today Minister Pettovello does not receive people asking for plans. Minister Pettovello receives people asking for work. That is to say, we started to change the mindset, we began to leave the Red Sea behind. We have begun to liberate ourselves. People do not want handouts; they want to earn their living by the sweat of their brow, and that leads us to the good equilibrium, it leads us to productive societies and not only that, the fact that we deregulate makes the equilibrium we can achieve higher in terms of GDP and per capita.

So the question is: If they benefited so many and lost others, how could the businessman have such support? That is the first question. You are in the armchair; you have to make decisions. Moreover, the businessman was not calm; he threatened me to lay off 920 workers the day before we were going to sanction the Labor Modernization Law; this is not child's play; decisions need to be made. If I gain in efficiency and many more benefit than lose, the discussion would be quite clear in electoral terms.

And there, the next link is the labor market, whether for young people to enter or for those who have fallen out of the system to reintegrate. And this, too, has been addressed in various ways in the labor market. The first relates to retraining those who have fallen out of the system so they can return, and our Minister of Human Capital regularly discusses this: before, people asked for social plans; now they ask for work; that is a significant advance.

But not only that, but also thanks to the enormous work of the political table, and especially with our political allies who are not from our party, and who many of them are present and have been part of Argentina Week, we were able to push through many reforms, including labor modernization, so that people could enter the labor market, have a more flexible labor market, and as long as we can continue advancing in the reforms and consolidating them at the polls, meaning that Argentines decide to continue down this path, what will happen is that it will allow for increased formality, and with this, we will be able to resolve the last link in the chain, which is the pension situation.

Four: we approved the Labor Modernization Law, a law that comes to sweep away a delusion sanctioned 50 years ago, inspired by cave-like ideas from 80 years ago, which left half of the workers in the informal market. This is to say, the champions of workers' rights left half of the workers without any rights.

And that, apart from the fact that they left their last government with a situation in which 30% of formal workers were poor. Furthermore, this law will allow the labor market to align with an economy that is witnessing the greatest transformation in history.

We lowered internal taxes on cars and motorcycles, tariffs for hybrid and electric cars, tariffs on cell phones and internal taxes on electronic products and the internal tax on insurance. Now all that’s left is for the provinces and municipalities to do their part, for which we have facilitated a tool to report excessive fees, checking it on a page.

At the same time, we have just approved the RIMI, for partial investments, which will enhance the expansion of a large part of the SMEs in the country, allowing them to quickly amortize the purchase of capital goods. This measure was approved as part of the labor reform, which will modernize for the first time in over 50 years labor regulation in our country, in line with the dynamics of the present.

It is the hour of vision, it is the hour to think as a Nation and not just as a Government. It is time to embrace state policies for the first time in a century so that these policies return to ordinary Argentines the ability to dream of a better future for themselves and their children. This is our true task and our true mandate.

Past governments have destroyed respect for private property in our country. But property is the cornerstone of all economy, and therefore, we will deepen the necessary reforms to safeguard it. Thus, we will fight against this anomie with the reform of the Civil and Commercial Code, the Code of Civil and Commercial Procedure, and a package of laws aimed at protecting the fundamental rights of Argentines from those who only know how to live off others; including the codification that establishes the defense of consumers and competition.

Moreover, we will send to Congress projects that will sweep away a mountain of regulatory chains and unleash investment in industries that are currently dormant so that they can produce, innovate, and generate employment.

But that is not enough. We also need to reform our tax scheme. As we have said so many times, we need lower taxes because the tax system must serve growth; not the collector of the moment. To galvanize all these reforms, we will continue to deepen our approach to economic opening and commercial agreements. We will ratify the agreement with the United States, just as we did with the European Union. We will reform the Customs Code to adapt it to our new challenges. And we will also integrate into the necessary international treaties because we must sit at the table of international trade, until we are so relevant that our interests cannot be ignored.

As politics and institutions are the backbone of growth, we must reform them to support the weight of this future. For too long, politics has been used to weave a kind of mafia, united by a predatory solidarity with the common purpose of living off the producer. That is what you do. It is called social justice, living off the labor of others.

This includes everything from the media to public officials, through businesses and even soccer. Politics, for us, must be put back to the service of society. That is why we need to comprehensively reform our electoral system so that representatives are accountable to their constituents. And this also implies reforming how political parties are financed, to provide transparency to the relationships between business and politics.

It is time to finally assume that if we want there to be less poverty, we need more employment. If we want there to be more employment, we need more companies investing. And if we want there to be more companies investing, we have to stop seeing businesspeople as public enemies. Instead, we must create the conditions for businesses to thrive and make money without feeling that their property rights are threatened.

It is necessary to continue applying a deep chainsaw to the State to remove layers of unjustified spending and truly reduce the State. The chainsaw is not just a government program; it is a state policy that will continue for years and will not stop until it finds the end of the State in the long term.

We need to review every single area of the State, and none is more important than privatizing public enterprises, because although today they are profitable for the first time in fifteen years, they remain a burden for the private sector. While the Framework Law and Decree 70/23 included fundamental elements to take the first steps in reforming the world of work, we need to deepen this path. The labor regime that has prevailed for the last 50 years has become completely obsolete and now only protects with benefits the few people who remain in the formal sector, while expelling millions each year to informality. This is the main reason why formal private employment has not grown for almost fifteen years.

In this sense, only with a dynamic labor market that generates formal employment can we aspire to have a sustainable pension system that decades of mismanagement have ruined. It is also imperative to carry out a structural tax reform, thus reducing the number of national taxes by 90% and having only six taxes, ending the logistical hell that comes with taxing in Argentina.

I also want to conclude with another fallacy, with which we have been lied to for almost a hundred years, namely the topic of the infant industry, an infant that is already at least 90 years old. Or, let's say, the protection of industry X because it generates jobs. That is another lie. Because if, in the process of opening the economy, a product of better quality or better price comes in and bankrupts a company, it is also true that consumers now have more money in their pockets and can spend it in other sectors of the economy. Therefore, employment will be reassigned to sectors where it is more productive and where there are higher salaries and, thus, greater well-being for all. Therefore, enough of the protectionist lie, because underneath it is nothing more than a scam between politicians and privileged businessmen.

We must recover a basic truth of liberal democracy, which is that one’s rights are limited by the rights of others. These are just a few of the many fundamental reform projects we are working on, and in which we will advance as the political dynamics and economic sequentiality require.

Finally, and not for that reason less importantly, to make these projects and the changes demanded by the Argentine people a reality, we are moving forward with an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to be able to finish stabilizing the balance of the Central Bank and definitively exit the currency control this year.

We must make peace once and for all with the idea that what is best for a worker is an entrepreneur who invests. But the only way to multiply the number of companies is by no longer putting our hands in their pockets and freeing them from the hell of regulations, permits, and high costs that private activity faces in Argentina. To reach this point, we have proposed the most ambitious structural reform plan in all of Argentina's history, which began with Decree 70/23, followed by the approval of the Bases Law passed by this Congress, and continues with all the deregulations that we announce daily, adding the bills that we will continue to send to this Congress.

Therefore, to all those who think they are saving the world with a present State, with high taxes, with gender quotas and punishing entrepreneurs, I say: Do you know what is best for workers? That they freely negotiate contracts with their employers. Do you know what is best for women? To stop treating them as victims who need special care. I wonder: Do socialists consider women to be inferior beings to be granting them privileges?

And the truth is that by saying all this, we have put socialists in checkmate, I would say, in a way... for that reason I’ll give one more, I’ll give a bis. Naturally, when one regulates monopolies, regulates companies, what were competitive processes, and simultaneously introduces the concept of social justice, that evidently leads to stagnation. And that stagnation, given the population growth, leads to the gradual impoverishment of that country. And how do they correct this?

As if all this were not enough, this transpires in an economy that has not grown since 2011; and in line with the above, formal employment in the private sector remains stagnant at 6 million jobs, to the madness that at the same time it is surpassed by 33 percent by informal employment; therefore, no one should be surprised that real wages have been destroyed; situated around 300 dollars monthly, which are not only six times lower than those of convertibility, but had the trends of those years been maintained - or as they called it: “the damned liberalism” - today they would range between 3,000 and 3,500 dollars per month. They have ruined our lives; they have caused our wages to fall tenfold. Therefore, it should not surprise us that populism is leaving us with 45 percent of the population in poverty and 10 percent in indigence.