With the full participation of its member organizations, on Wednesday, October 29, CASIA engaged in a vigorous and constructive debate, as the country faced a complicated moment, following the results of the mid-term legislative elections held the previous Sunday, which favored President Javier Milei.

This renewed support has emboldened Argentina’s far-right president, who is ramping up his onslaught on workers’ rights with a new labor reform bill.

In a statement, CASIA noted that “the national government and business sectors are intentionally revealing to society that competitiveness in industry is achieved, almost exclusively, through labor precarization, by curtailing rights and lowering wages to reduce costs.”

The government’s intention, the statement continues, “is to further a highly concentrated and centralized liberal economic model, indiscriminately opening up the economy, reducing production exclusively to raw materials, and promoting the sustained expansion of financial speculation.”

The Confederation stressed that workers in the food sector are “concerned about the implications of this economic model, which does not support industrial production as one of the main foundations of economic growth and income distribution.”

Moreover, “indiscriminate food imports pose a serious threat to national industry.” In this sense, CASIA highlights the great number of company shutdowns, suspensions, and layoffs.

The period spanning from November 2023 to July 2025 saw 18,083 companies going out of business and 253,700 jobs lost, with 49,700 of them in the industrial sector.

De noviembre 2023 a julio 2025 se registró el cierre de 18.083 empresas y la pérdida de 253.700 empleos, perteneciendo alrededor de 49.700 al sector industrial.

With respect to the proposed reform, the Confederation—in which a large number of our Argentine affiliates participate—underlined that “the precarization of labor and wage conditions goes against improvements in industrial production systems, leading to poverty and social breakdown.”

“For all of these reasons,” it stressed, “we defend the need to support collective bargaining by branch and/or industry as a leading instrument for social dialogue and discussion of wages and production and labor conditions. We will continue to fight in defense of wages, employment, labor conditions, and the national industry.”

CASIA also defends the need for unity of action among workers.

The statement closes by declaring: “Only a united labor movement will be able to defy the intentions of the powerful and protect the social and labor laws that are the heart of social justice and the fundamental driving force of a just and equal society.”