La disolución de los antagonismos entre el FMI y los derechos laborales

Abstract

There is a large debate in the literature about the antagonisms between the protection of fundamental labour rights and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities oriented at debilitating these rights. Countries find themselves in a situation of ‘normative schizophrenia’: on the one hand, they must follow the IMF’s recipes for the deregulation of the labour market and, on the other, they must respect the states’ international obligations with the International Labour Organization —ILO— and human rights treaties. The literature attempts to resolve this juridical conflict proposing the unity, coordination and coherence between the two regimes (IMF-ILO). However, these efforts have been in vain because the antagonisms between the IMF and labour rights have historically been settled favouring the IMF’s policies. This work argues that the solution to this conflict is political in nature rather than normative. Analysing the Argentine experience, the
paper demonstrates this political nature through a study of the relationship between the state’s promises of labour reform in all Letters of Intent addressed to the IMF and the requests for labour reform by the IMF in the reviews of the Stand by Agreements between 1959 and 2018; with the reforms on wages, collective rights, contract of employment and unemployment’s policies materialized during the same period in Argentina.

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ORCID for Natalia Delgado: orcid.org/0000-0001-7163-2804

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