CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Domestic jobs represent a significant part of the women employment in Argentina. Job quality (wages, welfare, working conditions) remains often very bad. The improvement of the situation of workers is at the heart of the concerns of many national and international regulations (including Convention No. 189 and No. 201 recommendations adopted by the ILO in 2011). The willingness to incrementally transform the "servants" as regular workers is frequently claimed. This aim has taken most often the path of strengthening regulations governing the particular employment relationship (minimum wage, formalization of the employment relationship, extension of social rights, recognition of social partners and collective bargaining, encouraging the development of service providers, etc.). In this context, the new law recently implemented in Argentina is presented as an advance in terms of protectionsfor domestic workers. For the first time, the law recognizes as workers all domestic workers regardless of number of hours they work per week. However, (and this is the hypothesis on this paper) lack of recognition of a specific employment status -employee status- results in fragmentation within the system. The extension of social protection to all domestic workers does not mean access to the same labor and social rights. The law gives less protection to domestic workers who are more exposed to social risks: domestic workers who work only a few hours for different employers. Through the analysis of regulation and parliamentary debates, the aim of this paperis to analyze the consequences of the new law in terms of social protection.