The CGT labor federation is refusing to rule out a general strike over Argentina’s minimum wage, after the Wage Council broke up almost immediately and the government signaled it will set the new floor by decree.
Who Gets Crushed
The minimum wage stands at 376,600 pesos, about US$253, a month, and university researchers calculate that it has lost more than 40 percent of its purchasing power since late 2023. That loss lands on workers first. It lands on the people who already have the least room to absorb another round of official austerity.
The CGT and both CTA centrals want 911,202 pesos, about US$611, immediately and 993,300 pesos, about US$667, by December. Employers proposed 1.8 percent for September and 1.7 percent a month after that, a path that would take the minimum wage to 468,000 pesos, about US$314, only by April 2027. The numbers aren’t close. They’re a map of who gets to wait and who doesn’t.
Three days after walking out of the Wage Council, the CGT now openly declines to rule out a new general strike. Its leadership meets next week to decide a “plan of struggle”. On Saturday, CGT co-secretary general Cristian Jerónimo said on Radio Con Vos, “They offered us 468,000 pesos only in April next year. We are not going to rubber-stamp it, we are not going to the plenary and they will not have quorum.”
What They Call Negotiation
The Wage Council, the body where government, business chambers and unions are meant to agree on adjustments to the Salario Mínimo, Vital y Móvil, met on Friday for the first time this year by video call, against the unions’ wish for an in-person session. It broke up almost immediately. The CGT and the two CTA federations rejected the employers’ proposal as “irrisoria”, derisory, and left the call, denying the council its quorum.
Jerónimo said the format itself was part of the problem. “There is no excuse not to meet face to face and build a much more credible debate,” he said. “Otherwise we keep feeding a show the government wants to mount, in which nothing is really discussed or debated.”
The deadlock is structural. The Wage Council has not produced a single agreement since Javier Milei took office in December 2023. Each failure ends the same way: the government fixes the new wage by decree, as it did in November 2025 with a schedule of monthly increases that ran through August of this year. The Human Capital Ministry has already confirmed the sequel: “Given the impossibility of reaching an agreement between the parties, the national government will proceed to issue its award.” Officials told local media the decree takes about five days.
The Machinery of Control
The SMVM is more than a floor for formal paychecks. In a country where roughly four in ten workers are informal, it anchors unemployment benefits and serves as the reference price for millions of off-the-books jobs. When it falls behind prices, a large share of Argentine society falls with it.
The Interdisciplinary Institute of Political Economy at the University of Buenos Aires calculates that the minimum wage lost more than 40 percent of its purchasing power between November 2023 and July 2026. Social organizations note that the official poverty line for a typical family was measured at 1,276,649 pesos late last year, more than three times the minimum wage.
Jerónimo also crossed swords with Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger, who had celebrated on social media the creation of more than 500,000 jobs under Milei. Jerónimo called that a “parallel reality” and countered with his own figures: 180,000 jobs destroyed, more than 30,000 companies closed, and new work pushed into informality. Independent analysts describe a two-speed economy in which export sectors boom while domestic employers struggle.
He also seized on a recent remark by President Milei, who suggested that many indebted households had borrowed to buy a television to watch the World Cup. “It is madness,” Jerónimo said. “A large part of our society goes into debt to eat, not to buy a luxury.”
Two clocks are now ticking. The first is the decree: within days the Casa Rosada will publish the new wage floor, and the distance from the employers’ offer will signal how much the government wants to spend on social peace. The second is the CGT’s leadership meeting next week, which will decide whether the strike warning becomes a date.
Argentina has already lived through four general strikes since Milei took office, and the minimum wage has been a recurring trigger. The most recent stoppage, in February, paralyzed transport, banks, schools and flights for 24 hours against the government’s labor reform and ended with clashes between protesters and police outside Congress. A fifth strike over pay would land as annual inflation still runs above 30 percent — and as the government insists the worst of the adjustment is over.
The Turnaround They’re Selling
Separately, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva met Argentina’s Economy Minister Luis Caputo at the G20 finance summit in Asheville, North Carolina, and praised what she called Argentina’s “impressive economic turnaround, the result of good policies and solid implementation”. Caputo wrote on X that they talked about Argentina’s economic agenda and the progress being made to consolidate stability and strengthen growth.
The meeting took place on Sunday afternoon at the Omni Grove Park Inn, the historic mountain resort where the two-day G20 summit is being held. Georgieva posted a photo with Caputo and said it was “Great to catch up with Caputo on Argentina’s impressive economic turnaround, the result of good policies and solid implementation”. The encounter continues an unusually warm relationship. A month ago Georgieva made her first official visit to Argentina as IMF chief. She spent 48 hours between Buenos Aires and the province of Neuquén, where she toured YPF’s flagship shale operation in Vaca Muerta. In January, the two had already met informally in Davos, after which Georgieva highlighted Argentina’s reserve accumulation.
Earlier on Sunday, Caputo had spoken in the summit’s panel on global growth, introduced by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh. The session, closed to the press, gave each speaker three minutes. Caputo used his to present Argentina as proof that macroeconomic stability comes first.
His figures, according to the Economy Ministry, start with spending. Since Javier Milei took office in December 2023, Argentina has cut public spending by 30 percent in real terms. It has eliminated both the fiscal deficit and the central bank’s quasi-fiscal deficit. And it has reduced taxes by the equivalent of 3 points of GDP as part of a deep deregulation drive.
Caputo also highlighted the labor reform passed this year and the lower house’s approval of a new charter for the Central Bank, which strengthens its independence and formally bans it from financing the Treasury. He pointed to the results of the RIGI, the incentive regime for large investments, and predicted that Argentina will grow in per-capita terms this year for the first time in 16 years.
Argentina is midway through a US$20 billion IMF program agreed in April 2025, its twenty-second arrangement with the Fund. Each review unlocks disbursements and signals to markets that the Fund stands behind the government’s financial plan. That plan, presented by Caputo in July, maps out how the Treasury will cover foreign-currency maturities through the end of Milei’s mandate in 2027 without a forced return to debt markets.
The numbers behind the turnaround label are real but debated. Inflation has fallen from triple digits in 2023 to below 2 percent a month. The Central Bank has bought more than US$13.5 billion in the currency market this year, lifting gross reserves close to US$49.5 billion, a near seven-year high. The IMF projects growth of 3.5 percent for 2026 and 4 percent for 2027. Yet activity data show a two-speed recovery concentrated in export sectors, and Gita Gopinath, Georgieva’s former deputy, called the stabilization impressive but incomplete in an assessment published this weekend. Fund staff are watching tax collection, the fiscal result and rising household loan delinquency, and the IMF keeps reminding Buenos Aires to shield the most vulnerable from the adjustment.
The Bessent meeting, expected during the summit, is the other pillar. The US Treasury sealed a US$20 billion currency swap with Argentina last October, at the height of pre-election market turbulence, and Washington remains the Milei government’s most important international ally. A visible renewal of that support would strengthen Argentina’s hand before the next IMF review.
The Asheville meeting, hosted by Bessent at a resort that has welcomed ten US presidents, prepares the G20 leaders’ summit scheduled for 14 and 15 December at Trump National Doral Miami, which Milei is expected to attend. Bessent told his peers that growth is the “only way out” of the global debt cycle. But the dominant theme is elsewhere: Washington’s financial pressure campaign against Iran, dubbed “Operation Economic Pariah”, six months into the Middle East war. Bessent said Tehran is “taking the sanctions very seriously”. The summit also produced a surprise: Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov attended, his first G20 since the invasion of Ukraine, and met Bessent on the sidelines.