Record Informality: Nearly 10 Million Undeclared Workers Under Milei Era

Javier Milei’s Argentina presents a labor market picture that is mind-boggling: there are more employed people, unemployment remains stable, but nearly 250,000 registered jobs have been destroyed and 600,000 informal jobs have exploded. This was calculated by Luis Campos, researcher at the Institute of Studies and Training of the CTA Autónoma, based on official INDEC data.

The figures are stark: in the first quarter of 2026, unemployment stood at 7.8% (practically unchanged from a year earlier), but informality jumped to 44.2%, more than two percentage points higher than in the same period of 2025. In the 31 urban agglomerations surveyed by the EPH, that amounts to nearly 6 million people. Projected to the entire labor market, the figure approaches 10 million undeclared workers.

For any other Latin American country, these numbers might be relatively acceptable. But for Argentina, it is a dramatic picture: the very structure of labor relations is being altered, and worse, the worker’s link with union organizations is being broken. The social subjectivity regarding political and union representation, a distinctive feature of Argentine society, is being rapidly transformed.

The Center for Argentine Political Economy (CEPA) reported that from the time Milei took office until March 2026, 26,448 companies closed. The number of registered employers fell from 512,357 to 485,909, a rate of 31 companies per day. The continuation of policies that degrade the productive and labor fabric is expanding the informal economy like a cancer.

What happens to political representation when a growing portion of the workforce remains outside union organizations and, therefore, outside the pension and health coverage network? The informal worker has less predictability; daily urgency prevents them from projecting the future. Politics, understood as intervention in the immediate environment to change reality, becomes something alien. Collective organization becomes increasingly difficult.

It is worth recalling French sociologist Robert Castel, who described labor informality as one of the clearest expressions of the contemporary crisis and a symptom of the destruction of social protections. Castel noted that the transition from servitude to free wage labor was achieved with two pillars: labor law and social protection. In the so-called postwar wage society, having a formal contract not only meant an income but also provided identity, rights, and certainty about the future. Formal work was the main support of the individual, giving them independence and capacity for action.

With the advance of neoliberal policies since the 1990s, Castel warned that deregulation destroyed stability and encouraged informality and precariousness. Informal work and unemployment push workers into a zone of vulnerability or precariousness. In that state, they lose the protections that structure their lives and are left to instability.

The risk of normalizing informality and flexibilization, as promoted by Milei’s Argentina, is that it pressures workers to give up their rights in exchange for survival income. Castel warned that when informality becomes structural, the process of social disaffiliation worsens: the individual loses their insertion in the formal labor market and, at the same time, their community ties weaken. Informality is not just an economic problem; it is a rupture in social belonging.

Argentina has a history of high-density unionism that sets it apart from other regional experiences. But the deliberate weakening of union organizations by the political representation of economic power, currently exercised by Milei, and also by the complicity of some union leaders, is defining a structural transformation.

The labor society of the establishment imposes that having a job does not imply stability or the possibility of projecting a better future. It only offers the chance to seek immediate income for subsistence. The possibility of a collective project loses ground to individual survival.

A large part of those who lose formal employment do not go directly into unemployment but become trapped in so-called refuge employment. This is especially prominent in jobs linked to platforms like Uber, Cabify, Rappi, or PedidosYa. Labor statistics record them as employed, but the quality of these jobs is lower.

According to the latest INDEC report, the Institute of Thought and Public Policies explains that in the last three years, self-employment through odd jobs has expanded, while formal jobs have decreased, consolidating a deterioration in labor insertion conditions. Self-employment rose from 22.0% to 24.2% between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2025, the highest level in recent years except for the pandemic.

A report by EDIL, from IIEP-UBA-Conicet, coordinated by Roxana Maurizio and Luis Beccaria, points out that economic activity is recovering in some sectors but without generating formal employment. Compared to 2023, the employment rate fell by 0.2 percentage points. INDEC reported that the economy grew 2.3% in the first quarter of this year, with declines in industry and construction, and advances in primary sectors, financial intermediation, and hotels and restaurants.

The economy is growing a little, but it is growing without generating quality jobs. Here one of the objectives of the liberal-libertarian program appears: in addition to lowering labor costs, the central focus of the official strategy is to alter the balance of power between capital and labor. To consolidate this scenario, labor informality functions as a tool to design a flexible, low-cost labor market without the union protection network.

The labor debate is therefore political. With nearly half of workers in informality, a precarious and weak labor market is taking shape, unable to negotiate conditions and wages. The dismantling of the productive project by Milei’s model leads to the decline of registered employment. Deindustrialization, the closure of SMEs, and the fragility of the domestic market, with depressed wages and weakened unions, are the material conditions for redesigning Argentine society to resemble that of Peru or Ecuador more than the Argentina of past integration and upward social mobility.

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