Argentina Offers Buyouts to Cut 20,000 More State Jobs

Argentina’s government wants another 20,000 public-sector workers off the payroll and is offering them cash to leave. Decree 1203/2026, published in the Official Gazette on Monday, creates a voluntary redundancy scheme on top of the more than 77,000 positions cut since President Javier Milei took office in December 2023. The state budget will permanently lose every job vacated through the scheme.

The unions reject the word “voluntary.” Rodolfo Aguiar, general secretary of the ATE state-workers’ association, put it bluntly on X: “This is not voluntary redundancy, it is coercive dismissal. We totally reject this decree.” ATE has announced a demonstration against the scheme.

What the Decree Offers

Payouts can reach the equivalent of 25 gross monthly salaries. An employee’s age, length of service and pension status determine the amount, with separate arrangements for people nearing retirement. The scheme covers permanent staff and employees on indefinite-term contracts in the centralised national administration. It excludes temporary workers and staff at decentralised agencies, including the ANSES social security agency, which runs its own scheme.

There’s a long catch. Workers who accept the money can’t return to national public-sector employment for eight years. The ban covers management positions, advisory roles and contracts. University teaching is the sole exemption.

The Government’s Case

Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger cast the move as a budget tool. “We continue to look for ways to reduce public spending so we can keep cutting taxes,” he wrote on X. Milei calls his spending cuts the “chainsaw,” and the public workforce has suffered some of the heaviest blows. Figures Sturzenegger released in September show that 21 percent of jobs in the national public administration have disappeared since Milei took office, or 77,500 positions.

The Wider Jobs Picture

Work has vanished outside the public sector, too. Official figures show Argentina has lost as many as 241,000 private-sector payroll jobs since Milei took office. The think tank Fundar says the number of private-sector employers has dropped to 482,000 companies, its lowest level since 2007.

Sturzenegger points to roughly 400,000 jobs created. His figures, though, count informal employment and self-employed workers. Informal employment has climbed by three percentage points over the last three years and now stands at around 45 percent. Nearly half of Argentina’s workers, in other words, work without the protections that come with formal payroll jobs.

James Grainger, Editor-in-Chief of Buenos Aires Times, reported the article, which carried the credit “TIMES/AFP/NA.”

Why This Matters: Public-sector jobs often provide stable, protected employment, and this scheme erases them for good rather than putting them on hold. Workers who take the payout face an eight-year ban on returning, while the personal cost falls on them and the savings go to the budget. The wider figures sharpen the concern: private-sector payroll jobs have fallen by as many as 241,000, employer numbers have sunk to a level last seen in 2007, and informal work has risen to around 45 percent. Informal workers typically lack the safeguards that formal employment provides. The question isn’t just how much the state saves; it’s who absorbs the shock and whether people leaving the public payroll have a credible path back to secure work. The union’s charge of coercion, set against the government’s tax-cutting rationale, frames a live debate over how far the state should shrink and who pays for it.