Abstract
The Argentinean real wage has suffered a profound deterioration since the mid-1970s. Simultaneously, there was a structural increase in women’s labor market participation. Consequently, looking at individual wages as indicators of the household’s reproduction conditions might be misleading. Here we put those two phenomena together under a new reading of Marx’s value of labor power concept within an understanding of the specificity of capital accumulation in Argentina. Transformations in the global organization of production led to a change in the concrete expression of the value of labor power, which is now divided into the wages of more than one household member. This expresses itself in the increased participation of women’s income in household income and the latter’s more favorable evolution compared to the individual one.
1. Introduction
The Argentine economy has suffered profound changes in almost every aspect since the mid-1970s. The characteristics of labor force participation in the process of social labor have not been an exception. Within the wide range of transformations that have taken place, we focus here on two of them: the long-term deterioration of real wages and the increase of female participation in the labor market.
Both of these have been studied extensively. In the first case, the literature has focused on the declining evolution of the average real wage, highlighting its role as an extraordinary source of surplus value (Iñigo Carrera 1998; Kennedy 2018; Cazón et al. 2017). When it comes to the second, the increase in the number of women who sell their labor power is usually explained as a household strategy used to compensate for the deterioration of the main earner’s wage—the so-called “additional or secondary worker effect.” Following this line of reasoning, the analysis then shifted to the differential conditions women faced in the labor market compared to those of men, considering the type of jobs in which they are hired, as well as the working conditions and wage levels prevailing in them (Castillo et al. 2007; Águila 2018).
In these two cases, however, the literature has focused on the evolution of individual traits. Without denying the importance of those studies, and in a complementary way, we argue here that, in order to understand the decline of real wages and the increase of female participation in the labor market, we must analyze them together, focusing on the household as the unit of analysis.
In a previous article, we took a first step in placing these two phenomena together by bridging them under a new reading of Karl Marx’s concept of the value of labor power and Juan Iñigo Carrera’s contributions regarding the specificity of capital accumulation in Argentina (Águila and Kennedy 2016). We showed that the entrance of women into the labor market was not the result of a temporary household decision due to income deterioration, but the consequence of transformations that had been taking place since the mid-1960s in the global organization of production, leading to a structural change in the concrete expression of the value of labor power. From that moment on, the value of labor power ceased to be almost exclusively embodied in the adult male and began to distribute itself, albeit unevenly, amongst the income of every adult household member.
In the case of Argentina, these changes expressed themselves in an increase in female income participation in total household income, which grew from 28 percent to 37 percent between 1974 and 2013. Because of this, the purchasing power of household income grew to be 12 percent higher than that of the individual wage. Therefore, looking at individual earnings as representative of the evolution of the labor force reproduction conditions ignored the increasing relevance of a joint determination of household income and, thus, overestimated its deterioration. 1
This article improves those findings in three important ways. First, the theoretical foundations of the research have improved greatly after many discussions that followed the earlier version. Consequently, some sections have been dropped altogether, while others have been greatly modified.
Second, this article expands its results by including five additional years: from 2013 to 2018. This is particularly relevant because 2015 was the last year of kirchnerismo then followed by the presidency of Mauricio Macri. 2 Thus, the new series allows us to get a full picture of the kirchnerismo and to offer a preliminary analysis of the Macri administration (2015–2019).
Third, the previous article considered only wage earners and self-employed. However, since the type of company owners captured by the Encuesta Permanente de Hogares—the Permanent Household Survey, the main source of information for this article—are small owners whose working conditions are not very much different from those of wage earners and the self-employed, this article incorporates small company owners in the data series.
The purpose of this article is to study the theoretical determinations of the value of labor power, and to measure its concrete expression in Argentina, further deepening a very rich line of inquiry. In the first section following this introduction, we provide our reading of Marx’s concept of the value of labor power, discussing the change in its concrete expression, which went from considering only one wage to more than one, resulting from the massive incorporation of women into the labor market. We highlight the increasing relevance of household income as an indicator of the conditions of reproduction for the labor force. In the third section, we briefly review the main elements of the role of real wage deterioration in the process of capital accumulation in Argentina and the increase in female participation as labor-power sellers since the mid-1970s. In the fourth section, we analyze the formation of a household income in Argentina in the period under study, looking at both its gender composition as well as its evolution in terms of purchasing power over time. In the final section, we offer our conclusions and discuss future lines of research that arise from our results.
2. The Transformation in the Expression of the Value of Labor Power
In capitalism, the immediate goal of producers is not the production of use values for the satisfaction of human needs, but the never-ending valorization of value, that is, the accumulation of capital. 3 At the core of this process lies the quantitative increase of the initial magnitude of money, allowing to set in motion a greater capacity to command social labor once the process is repeated (M–C–M′). The necessary way to achieve this is by purchasing the only commodity that owes its singularity to the fact that it creates more value than the one necessary for its own reproduction. This commodity is labor power. At this point, we face the question of what determines the value of labor power.
Like the value of any other commodity, the value of labor power is determined by the amount of socially necessary abstract labor time performed privately and independently required to produce and reproduce the commodity. Thus, the value of labor power involves two dimensions: the reproduction and the production of labor power.
On the one hand, the reproduction of labor power consists of the consumption of the means of subsistence required to ensure that the worker will be able to put in motion the labor capacity required by the production process the next workday. 4 Therefore, the value of labor power consists of the value of the basket of means of subsistence required to replenish the worker’s expenditure of brains, nerves, and muscles.
On the other hand, there is a need to continuously produce labor-power sellers in order to satisfy the demands imposed by the permanent valorization of capital. This can be analytically considered in two dimensions: first, the need to produce human beings that embody labor power, this is, the species’ biological reproduction and, second, the need to produce labor-power sellers with a determined productive subjectivity, meaning the production of individuals with the capacity to put a certain kind of work in motion—of greater or lower complexity. This division is meant merely for the purpose of exposition, since there is no human being without determined characteristics, and there are no characteristics without an individual embodying them.
Regarding the former, the biological reproduction of the species is not left undetermined by capital. In a passage of volume 1 of Capital often quoted by Marxist feminists, Marx argues that a worker’s consumption is twofold: her/his productive consumption and her/his individual consumption. When looked at individually, it appears that the worker’s individual consumption belongs to herself/himself since she/he is using her/his money to buy the required means of subsistence to perform necessary vital functions outside of the production process. However, when looked at from a class perspective, by assisting them in the reproduction of their muscles, nerves, bones, and brains, and allowing them to bring new workers into existence, the worker’s individual consumption also provides new labor force for capitalists to exploit: It is the production and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the worker. The individual consumption of the worker, whether it occurs inside or outside the workshop, inside or outside the labor process, remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital, just as the cleaning of machinery does. . . . The fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant. . . . The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and of propagation. (Marx 1976: 717–18)
Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas (1984) argue that the biological reproduction of the species could not take place inside the factory due to the time-extensive, continuous, and physically demanding requirements of production that make nursing impossible, the absence of alternative ways to replace it, the unhealthy factory conditions that are harmful to women and children, and the lack of provisions for pregnant women and infants in the workplace. Additionally, having children was practically mandatory and the available means of contraception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not very reliable. But even if this had not been the case, having more people in the household meant having additional sources of income, which was necessary for the family’s survival. All these factors combined to create high fertility rates, as well as high infant mortality rates. As a result, capital progressively forced women out of the realm of paid work. This trend was expressed in different forms, such as factory laws, protective legislation, skilled-trades exclusion, opposition to women working in some unions, social policies biased toward the male breadwinner/female housewife, and others.
Because of this, human beings needed to reproduce somewhere else, away from the realm of paid work ruled by the individual capitalist. This place turned out to be the household, where workers privately carried out their individual consumption guided by their own “drives for self-preservation and propagation.” The absence of planning, in this case, of biological reproduction is not a problem for capital, which can confidently trust the worker with this task without further supervision. In other words, the production of new generations within capitalism is typically performed privately, based on relationships of personal dependency within the household (Mies 1986; Iñigo Carrera 2004). As a result, the use values consumed by working-class children are part of the value of labor power of that family’s labor-power sellers.
When it comes to the production of subjective productivity, during the early stages of the capitalist mode of production the education of the labor force took place mainly within the household. With the development of the productive forces, the formation of productive attributes acquired a socially general character, and formal education was created, although still without fully dispensing with the role played by parents in the education process. This task was imposed mostly on women, who were assigned a role as caregivers and educators of their children. At the same time, education expenses began to be a part of the value of labor power of parents, since it was not enough just to have children, but children with the capacity to put a specific kind of work in motion once they become adults. According to Marx, the reproduction of human beings never takes place solely in a biological sense, but under specific social conditions that, in our society, mean creating human beings who can behave in certain ways once they are part of the workforce (Brown 2012).
Complementarily, in chapter 15 of volume 1 of Capital, Marx argues that, when the material process of production was still centered on the manual skill and strength of the worker and not scientifically controlled, the socially-constructed body of men was more suitable for certain tasks. Because of this, men were the almost sole labor-power sellers. Paid employment for women was relegated to commodities produced in the household and feminized activities, which were mainly different forms of paid domestic and care work.
However, and despite the ideological nature of the male breadwinner/female housewife model, it became fully realized only in certain places and for a limited portion of the population. Nancy Fraser calls this brief period state-managed capitalism, and it occurred around the 1950s when the family wage model was extended (Fraser 2016).
All things considered, the nuclear family based on a sexual division of labor was constituted as the historically specific area for biological reproduction and the formation of productive attributes. Therefore, the means of subsistence required by women in order to reproduce themselves in their historically specific roles as wives and mothers, as well as those of working-class children, enter in the expression of the value of labor power of that family’s labor-power sellers—i.e., the real wage—which were mostly adult men.
As one reviewer correctly pointed out, our understanding is different from that of the Wages for Housework movement led by Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa in the 1970s. According to them, housework is a “free gift” for capital because the use values produced by houseworkers without getting paid allow capital to reduce the value of labor power (Federici 2012). As a result, they argue that housework should be directly remunerated. Our stance, on the contrary, is that houseworkers’ domestic and care work does not create value in the capitalist sense, given that it is immediately social. The implication is that it cannot be directly remunerated since there is no value of labor power that needs to find expression.
However, this does not mean that their labor is outside of capital. On the contrary, as social reproduction theorists have shown, it is essential to it (Bhattacharya 2017). Furthermore, we argue that this work is specific of capital, and is included in the value of labor power, even when paid to another labor-power seller. If it were not indirectly paid, it would not be possible for houseworkers to reproduce themselves. In this regard, the authors of the Wages for Housework movement do not explain where families get the money they need to buy the means of subsistence for their reproduction. One is left to assume that it comes from the wages of a household member who has paid work, but if this were the case, she/he would be paid more than what she/he needs, which is the equivalent to arguing that capital pays workers sums that are greater than what they require to cover their needs. In other words, what capital appropriates for free from unpaid workers, it “gives for free” to paid workers, but this would go against capital’s drive for profit maximization.
Nevertheless, the Wages for Housework movement has made important contributions, and we agree with them in the recognition that the indirect payment of housework carries negative consequences for women, insofar as it restricts their autonomy by making them dependent on the wages of their partners.
In our interpretation, the value of labor power and its expression is not determined at the individual, but at the family level, regardless of how many labor-power sellers there are in the household. This is more clearly seen in the family wage proper to Fraser’s state-managed capitalism, but not in today’s globalized financial capitalism (Fraser 2016). However, we argue that what changed was not the essential determination but its form of expression, now carried in the wages of more than one family member after the massive entry of women into the labor market.
As Marx (1976) showed, every leap forward of productive forces profoundly alters the sexual division of labor. The system of machinery and large industry transforms the material process of labor, deepening the differentiation of productive attributes demanded of the working class: on the one hand, the progressive simplification of the tasks performed by workers in charge of manual labor, transforming them into appendages of the machine; on the other, the increasing complexity of the productive subjectivity of the workers in charge of the development of the objectified control of the natural forces and the regulation of the productive process. In this way, the role played by physical strength and manual dexterity in the production process is increasingly eliminated, both due to its simplification, as well as its increasing complexity. What is particularly relevant to us, from the standpoint of the materiality of the labor process, is that gender differences become less relevant.
The process described in the previous paragraph entered a new phase beginning in the mid-1960s when a New International Division of Labor came about. These transformations became the general material basis upon which women massively become labor-power sellers on a worldwide scale (Federici 2012; Mies 1986).
For the same reason, the formation of productive attributes inside the household loses importance—the concrete expression of this was the expansion of formal schooling to the entirety of the working class, as well as the extension of the number of years a fraction of them spends in the school system—which progressively frees women from their traditional role as educators. 5
Whereas in Fraser’s state-managed capitalism, the normal determination of the value of labor power was expressed in the average wage of the adult male worker, from the moment in which women progressively become labor-power sellers, the working family’s value of labor power increasingly began to distribute itself amongst more than one member. From the standpoint of the utilization of labor force, this process generates a reduction of the individual wage—at an equal level of complexity—and, thus, if the extension of the workday is taken as a given, results in a greater production of surplus value.
Given the private form under which the labor-power purchasing/selling process takes place, the normal way to regulate labor force reproduction is to do it indirectly, erasing singularities by imposing a norm in the form of an average. More precisely, when there was a relatively greater number of adult males who behaved as labor-power sellers, their average wage was greater than that of women because it presupposed the maintenance of women and children, who in general did not work; whereas the latter did not presuppose the maintenance of men, who generally did work. Additionally, the state placed a series of direct regulations to alleviate the problems of indirect regulation. For example, additional income granted to workers with wives—and not spouses, thus making the regulation a male benefit in an era without same-sex marriage—and the different length of maternity leave compared with paternity leave, among many others.
This slowly began to change when the participation of women in the “active” working population increased. From that moment on, the typical situation increasingly became one in which women had paid work, thus requiring a distribution of the value of labor power among more than one member of the household. However, this process did not happen in an egalitarian way, given that it started with a huge gender wage gap, which is diminishing very slowly over time.
In this way, the typical situation became characterized by a working family where the two adult members were labor-power sellers, 6 and where the family would receive the full value of labor power only if the two adults had paid work; a family in which only the adult male was a labor-power seller would receive an amount a little below the full value of labor power; and a family in which only the adult female acted as a labor-power seller would be far from getting the amount required for its normal reproduction.
Finally, from the standpoint of labor force reproduction conditions, this process implies that individual wages lose importance as an indicator. Attention should be paid instead to household income and its evolution. With this, we reach the relevant conclusion for the purposes of this article.
3. Real Wage and Female Participation in the Labor Market since the Mid-1970s in Argentina
The characteristics of the entrance of women into the labor market depend on the specificity of the national space of capital accumulation under study. Therefore, to understand how this process came about in Argentina, we now turn our attention to the role the country plays in the global process of capital accumulation.
3.1. Real wage deterioration as a structural condition of the Argentine economy
Capitalism is not a globally homogeneous system. 7 On the contrary, it carries an immanent necessity to differentiate itself into separate national spheres, producing an international division of labor (Starosta 2016). Thus, the global substance of capitalist accumulation is not realized immediately as such, but under the form of nations relating themselves in the global market as fragments of society’s total labor. Here, individual countries are not units in themselves, but forms of total global capital. Therefore, the capitalist mode of production is a global process in content and a national one only in form (Grinberg and Starosta 2015; Caligaris 2016).
Hence, to explain the characteristics of a particular country we must start by taking into account the role that that national sphere of capital accumulation plays in the global unity. As previously mentioned, historical processes give a concrete expression to the global unity in a certain international division of labor. The origin of this process is the expansion of “classic countries.” 8 Then, the search for cheapened agrarian or mining commodities plays a key role because it allows the reduction of the value of labor power—without affecting the basket of goods—consequently freeing surplus value for further increases in the accumulation scale. This search gives birth to national spaces of capital accumulation as worldwide providers of those commodities. One of these countries is Argentina.
The cheap nature of agrarian and mining raw materials in national spheres based on their production is due to relatively favorable natural conditions. The production of these commodities is characterized by the intervention of forces that are not reproducible by human labor in a given moment in time (fertility, rain patterns, and temperature, among others). Particularly in Argentina, there are vast extensions of land in which labor has a far greater productivity than the one prevailing in other parts of the world where the same kind of commodities is produced. Given that the land with the lowest productivity is the one that sets the price, the extra productivity of labor in Argentine lands produces additional profit in the form of ground rent. In other words, commodities produced in countries specialized in the production of agrarian and mining commodities are bearers of ground rent.
Therefore, when Argentina sells these commodities in the world market, their commercial prices carry a flow of ground rent toward the country, that falls in the pockets of landowners. Since ground rent does not have a counterpart in human labor—a primary condition for the exchange of commodities—it becomes a “false social value” used in the consumption and saving of a class that, from the point of view of the valorization process, is no more than a social parasite. As such, the payment of ground rent, which is ultimately done with profit from industrial capitals, represents a deduction of the mass of surplus value from the general accumulation of capital, contradicting the very nature of this mode of production. As a result, industrial capitals try to recover at least a portion of lost profit from the landowners.
Thus, from the mid-twentieth century on, in addition to the steady supply of agrarian commodities into the world market, a second particular characteristic of capital accumulation in Argentina has been the existence of industrial capitals that produce non-ground rent-bearing commodities with a scale restricted to the domestic market, a fact reflected in their unanimously acknowledged low relative productivity (Graña 2015).
As a result, the Argentine productive structure is characterized by the existence of small capitals of different sizes that produce on a restricted scale, and at lower productivity compared to normal capitals, thus having higher costs. In theory, this would imply that they cannot appropriate the general rate of profit. However, a portion of the individual capitals operating in Argentina can appropriate the general rate of profit because they are compensated for their higher costs with transfers of ground rent through different mechanisms.
As a result, both the scale of social production, as well as its cycles, have a general determination in the magnitude and evolution of ground rent (and its appropriation mechanisms) relative to the magnitude and evolution of the need for ground rent to compensate the lag in productivity. Therefore, the expansion of ground rent allows the growth of the scale of capital accumulation in Argentina to go beyond the limits imposed by the productive capacity of local individual capitals; whereas a relative contraction of ground rent expresses itself in the stagnation or contraction of the scale of accumulation. For the same reason, a greater influx of ground rent provides an “extraordinary” impulse to production, which propels a demand for labor and thus, growth in wages; whereas, when ground rent stagnates or contracts, the opposite happens.
Since the mid-1960s, a new social division of labor in the global unity of capital accumulation has made the general scheme described in the previous paragraphs more complex (Starosta 2016). Due to a revolution in the material conditions of labor processes, and the development of automatization and telecommunications, classic countries have become increasingly characterized by the presence of complex labor, while simpler labor relocated to Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central America, where capitals can find labor force equally able to perform the required tasks for substantially lower wages.
In this context, Argentina did not transform its role in the international division of labor. However, the changes in the global organization of production did not leave the country unaltered. The shift in the technical basis allowed a leap in worldwide labor productivity, something that did not happen in Argentina. Therefore, the ever-existing productivity gap widened, and thus, the amount of compensation required by Argentine capitals to appropriate the normal rate of profit increased (Graña 2015; Cimoli et al. 2005). In addition, the import of cheap manufactures from low-wage countries presented an additional need for compensation for individual capitals in Argentina, which kept producing with relatively higher wages. This happened in a period where, up until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the level of ground rate was, on average, similar to previous years (see graph 1). A greater need for compensation, with a similar amount of ground rent, resulted in the stagnation of the economy.
GDP per capita (left axis), ground rent per capita (right axis), and annualized income from main occupation (left axis), 1974–2018. In pesos purchasing power of 2018.
The increased need for individual capital compensation is the foundation of a trend of profound deterioration of the average real wage that has taken place since 1974. Nonetheless, this significant transformation has not implied a change in the specificity of capital accumulation in Argentina, insofar as the country has not become a platform for exporting low-waged industrial goods. On the contrary, the deterioration of the real wage became an additional “pillar” of the Argentine specificity, turning into an additional source of compensation together with ground rent (Kennedy 2018). Because of this, when the mass of ground rent expands, the real wage grows. Conversely, when the mass of ground rent contracts or becomes insufficient for the normal reproduction of the economic cycle, the real wage falls. 9
As seen in graph 1, ever since the bloody military dictatorship of 1976 took office, real wages entered a phase of growing instability, reinforced by the 1982 debt crisis and the hyperinflation of 1989. During the convertibility plan (1991–2001), they settled at 40 percent lower than pre-dictatorship levels. 10 With the sudden collapse of the currency board in 2002, real wages fell an additional 35 percent and were only able to recover the average purchasing power they had during the convertibility plan 7 years later.
A marked expansion of the mass of ground rent flowing into Argentina due to the rise in world market commodity prices, and an increase of the country’s primary production, allowed for an expansion of accumulation, an increased demand for labor, and a growth in real wages. This production and wages expansive phase took place under the first two Kirchnerist governments (2003–2011).
After 2012, first, a period of stagnation, and later a contraction, of the inflow of ground rent into the country imposed a consequent stagnation in wages. This brought on a decline which, from 2018 onward, has not yet found a “floor.” Wage stagnation happened under the third government of kirchnerismo (2011–2015), and the first half of the Macri administration, while the decline took place during the second half of the latter’s government starting in 2017.
The decline of real wages should be conceptualized as the sale of labor power below its value, and not as a drop in the value of labor power. Two reasons sustain this claim. First, in general terms, real wages follow a similar evolution than that of the general productivity of the Argentine economy and that of real wages in the United States until the 1970s—without considering its profound oscillations. After that it decouples, implying that real wages in Argentina started to fall below the value of labor power. Second, on average, there was not a massive process of deskilling of the labor force during this period. Therefore, we can conclude that the fall of the purchasing power of wages since the mid-1970s is an expression of the sale of labor power below its value for the average population with different intensities at different moments in time (Kennedy 2018; Cazón et al. 2017). 11
However, the distribution of the value of labor power in the wages of more than one family member, starting from the massive increase in the participation of women as labor-power sellers, allows us to think that the sale of labor power below its value might be to a lesser extent than what it would seem by only looking at individual wages. We consider this process in two steps. In the following subsection, we focus, first, on the historical evolution of female labor supply and demand within a broader overview of the labor market. Then, we shift our attention toward the transformation that those changes implied in the level and composition of household earnings.
3.2. The incorporation of women into Argentina’s labor market
As previously discussed, Argentina did not substantially change its participation in the international division of labor and added the sale of labor power below its value as a new pillar of its specificity. This is the scenario where female incorporation into the labor market took place.
When comparing the basic configuration of the current labor market with the scenario of the mid-1970s, one of the most evident changes are the higher levels of the participation rate—a synthetic indicator of labor supply—and employment rate—a synthetic indicator of labor force demand—as well as the wider gap between them, which translates into higher unemployment. 12
As shown in graph 2, the participation rate was 40.7 percent of the total population in 1974, whereas after 2003, with one exception, it stayed above 48 percent. The increase occurred mainly during the 1990s. Meanwhile, the employment rate grew from 39.7 percent in 1974 to a peak of 45 percent in 2013, and then fell to 43 percent at the end of the series. Unlike the participation rate, the increase in the employment rate took place during the twenty-first century. Specifically, employment growth reflects greater labor demand, which is due to the impulse the increased inflow of ground rent gave to capital accumulation. At the same time, its stagnation, and later contraction, show the previously mentioned limitations to that process.
Participation and employment rate, by gender, Greater Buenos Aires, 1974–2018 (in percentages).
When we disaggregate the two trends discussed in the previous paragraphs by considering gender, the results are much richer. As shown in graph 2, the male activity rate, with some oscillations, shows practically the same level at the beginning and the end of the series—around 57 percent. On the contrary, the female activity rate was around 25 percent in the mid-1970s, whereas in the new millennium it was around 40 percent. In other words, the female activity rate expanded by 60 percent in a forty-year period. As expected, and considering what was previously stated, this process took place mainly during the 1990s.
In addition, the male employment rate shows a small drop during the period, from 57.3 percent in 1974 to 51 percent at the end of the series. Thus, the average long-term growth of the employment rate can be explained only by the big burst of female employment, which rose from 24 percent in 1974 to 36 percent in 2018. As we can see in graph 2, this growth took place mainly in the new millennium.
In conclusion, the long-term growth of the participation rate—which took place mainly during the 1990s—and employment rate—which took place mostly after the currency board was abandoned—are the exclusive reflection of the behavior of the female labor force. In this sense, we can identify two broad stages in the rise of female participation in the labor market: during the 1990s, there was an increase in the supply of female labor force; whereas, after the end of convertibility, that supply was transformed into employment.
As previously shown, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the scale of accumulation stagnated, and real wages consolidated at a low level. The increase in female labor force supply during this period can be understood as a reflection of the “additional worker effect” but, since there was no employment creation, it did not translate into an increase in the levels of female employment. This changed after the end of the convertibility plan in 2002. With the expansion of ground rate, there was an increase in the scale of accumulation, which implied a greater labor demand, and growing wages. Nevertheless, far from seeing a withdrawal of women, we see a rise in female employment. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that female participation in the labor market was not a momentary phenomenon. Rather, the “additional worker effect” constituted the vehicle through which women consolidated themselves as labor-power sellers.
The transformations discussed in this section have consequences in terms of the value of labor power. First, because the rule ceased to be that only adult males work in Argentina. As a result, the content of the value of labor power ceases to express itself exclusively in one wage and begins to split into more than one. The classical division of labor, the material basis for the expression of the value of labor power only in the wage of the adult male, starts to vanish. For this reason, we see a rise in female wages simultaneously with a reduction in male wages, which in turn combine to make up for the same household income. In the next section, we analyze the empirical results regarding the evolution of household income, and the participation of female income in it.
4. From Individual Wage Determination to Household Wage Determination: General Characteristics of the Argentine Case
4.1. Brief methodological considerations
Before discussing the empirical results, we briefly summarize the methodological criteria adopted in this article. The main source of information is the Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (Permanent Household Survey, EPH), and the analysis is restricted to Greater Buenos Aires (GBA). This decision is based on the fact that it is the only region that allows us to produce a long-term comparable series. First, because the 1974 survey was only done in that region. Second, because the EPH was progressively enlarged to incorporate other regions, so “national” measures are not comparable across time. Nevertheless, considering that the evolution of the GBA and other agglomerates after the 1990s is similar, it is reasonable to assume that the relationship between them before this point in time was also similar, and thus the evolution presented here is representative of the entire Argentine labor market. Additionally, GBA is the largest region in the country: in the last data point of our series, it amounted to 54 percent of the total population captured by the EPH, representing almost 15 million people (around one-third of the Argentine population).
Before 1986, we present data only for 1974 and 1982—due to database incompatibilities—but this information should suffice to give us an idea of this timeframe. Until 2003, the EPH was published twice a year, in May and October. The methodology changed after that, and it started to be conducted on a quarterly basis. Even though we processed the information for every data point available—i.e., biannually and quarterly, respectively—we present the results for the October survey and the third quarter respectively, due to comparative reasons, and also to avoid stational fluctuations. In the graphs, we denominate them “year_0” and “year_3t.” A blank space separates the two series in the graphs. In addition, there is no information for 2007 and 2015, because data for the third quarter of those years were not published.
Finally, in the previous article, we restricted this analysis to wage earners and self-employed. Our goal was to reflect how income has changed for the sectors of the population whose reproduction is strictly tied to the sale of their labor power. However, we are now including the wage income from the category of owners category into the data series. The inclusion is justified since they effectively put their labor power in motion within the productive process, even if they do not work under contract, and employ at least one person who earns a wage. Aside from this, we must take into consideration the fact that the proliferation of self-employment and small enterprises is a consequence of the impossibility of Latin American economies to create decent work for the entire active population. Therefore, these owners are not the prototypical figure of a capitalist. In fact, their income is not higher than that of a certain segment of wage earners.
In order to construct a household income, we obtained self-reported income values from the individual databases of the EPH for wage earners, owners, and self-employed who had a labor income greater than zero living in the GBA region. 13 We then classified their income into three categories: labor income from the main occupation, total labor income, and total income—i.e., both labor and non-labor. We differentiated the information according to gender for all three categories. We then added up the individual income of people living in the same household and we averaged that number by the number of households (N). As a result, we now had information on household income from three individual income sources, and we could disaggregate this information by gender in order to build female average participation in household income. Therefore, for each type of income, the average household income and female income participation are constructed as follows:
The results for each type of income are shown in graph 3 and explained in the next subsection.
Female participation in the employed population. Female income participation in household income with homes that have at least one wage earner, a self-employed person, or an owner, by type of income (main occupation, total labor income, and total income), Greater Buenos Aires, 1974–2018 (in percentages).
4.2. The evolution of female participation in household income
The marked increase of the female employment rate identified in the previous section brought about a sharp transformation within the structure of the employed population. As we can see in graph 3, whereas women represented 31.7 percent of the total employed in 1974, that proportion grew permanently, reaching 42 percent in 2003, where it remained until the end of the series. This represents an increase of 30 percent when compared with the initial value.
This transformation is also seen in the evolution of female income participation in household income, which shows a marked increasing trend throughout the period. Graph 3 shows that, whereas in 1974 female income participation in household labor income—both with source in the main occupation as well as total labor income—was only 27 percent, and their participation in household total income was even less—22 percent, the participation in the three types of income reached 36 percent in the last year of kirchnerismo with available information (2014). In the Macri administration, this trend presents a sharp leap, reaching 40 percent. This is explained mostly by the growth of female employment relative to male employment, but also by the increase in female earnings relative to male earnings.
If we consider that female participation should be 0 percent in a scenario marked by a strict classical sexual division of labor, and that in the opposite case it should be 50 percent in a heterosexual household with two working adults, the information presented in this section allows us to conclude that, since the mid-1970s, there is a continuous trend toward the dissolution, at least partially, of the classical sexual division of labor.
Finally, the results presented in this article should be considered in light of international evidence. Nieuwenhuis, van der Kolk, and Need (2017) present an analysis of eighteen OECD countries and show that, between roughly 1980 and 2010, the female income share of total household earnings presents a similar trend to the one observed in Argentina, rising from around 20 to 40 percent during the period. This is due to the rise in female labor force participation, but also the partial closing of the gender gap and women working more hours and in better-paid occupations, all of which are consistent with the evidence of the Argentine case.
4.3. The evolution of real household income in Argentina
Graphs 4 and 5 show that, until the end of convertibility, the evolution of the individual income from the main occupation, and household income based on main occupations, were practically identical. After that, the recovery of the latter, right from the start, was faster than the former. As a result, in 2011 household income represented 74 percent of what it used to be in 1974, whereas personal income was only 63 percent of what it was in the same reference year.
Real income based on the main occupation of wage earners, self-employed, and owners. Households with at least one wage earner, self-employed or owner real income, by type of income (main occupation, total labor income, and total income), Greater Buenos Aires, 1974–2018. Evolution. 1974 = 100.
Real income based on the main occupation of wage earners, self-employed, and owners. Households with at least one wage earner, self-employed or owner real income, by type of income (main occupation, total labor income, and total income), Greater Buenos Aires, 1974–2018. In pesos purchasing power of 2018 (left axis).
The previous result has two implications. First, in a strict sexual division of labor scenario, there would be no difference between individual and household income, since only the adult male would receive labor income. On the opposite end, and considering a household with only two adults, if both of them sell their labor power, and there is no wage gap, household income should be twice as high as personal income. In 1974, household income based on the main occupations in Argentina was 1.46 times the individual one; whereas, in 2011, that ratio was 1.71. Analysis of the previous sections allows us to infer that the increase in household income relative to individual income is due to the increase of women who sell their labor power. In other words, this presents additional evidence of the gradual dissolution of the classical sexual division of labor. 14
Second, the gap between household and individual income shows that, when we look at the household as a unit, the real income of the working population is 11 percentage points higher than what we would observe if we only took into account the evolution of individual wages. The increase in female labor power participation meant a relative improvement in household conditions, compared with what we would see if we restricted the analysis to the evolution of individual wages. By no means do these findings imply a reversion of the process of the general deterioration of the reproduction capacity of the working population, only that it is less pronounced than what we see in terms of individual income. In other words, our results do not challenge but support the idea that labor power is sold below its value in Argentina.
Nevertheless, we should add qualifiers to these conclusions. After the previously referred peak in 2011, the gap slightly declined, up until the end of 2014, when household income based on main occupations represented 1.63 times the equivalent individual income.
In the last years of the series, the distance fell to 1.48 in 2018. Unfortunately, these results are not comparable with the previous trend. This decrease is explained by changes in population estimates introduced in the EPH between the two governments, which greatly increased the population covered by the sample and, with it, the number of households. However, since the weights are defined at an individual level, and there are no external measures of the number of households to act as an anchor, we cannot retroactively change the weights to make them comparable.
Additionally, after 2003, household total labor income shows a more favorable evolution than household income based on the main occupations. Specifically, as we can see both in graph 4 and graph 5, the two paths were already diverging at the beginning of the kirchnerismo. This shows that, in later years, people are increasingly working in more than one job. On the one hand, this tells us that the population is better off income-wise than what it would be if we only considered the main occupation income. On the other, the multiplication of the number of jobs per person impacts negatively on her/his reproduction conditions, given its consequences on the length of the working day, increased informality, and others.
If we consider non-labor income—for example, payment of interests, rents, social plans—the evolution of household total income is very similar to the one presented by household total labor income. The gap between the two is practically the same until 2001 when non-labor income collapses, and the difference disappears, and it reappears again slowly from 2005 onward.
In any case, even ignoring the previously mentioned negative effects, the information presented in the graphs shows that, always on average, the Argentine working family has not been able to counterbalance the deterioration of their real income for over more than four decades, even allocating an increasing number of household members to employment, and with them working in more than one job.
5. Conclusions
In this article, we attempted to put together two widely studied phenomena that characterized the Argentine economy over the last forty-five years: the long-term decline in the real average wage and the remarkable increase in the participation of women as labor-power sellers.
Concerning the first point, the average wage in Argentina has suffered a profound deterioration since the mid-1970s, which amounts to almost 40 percent, considering the 1974–2018 timeframe. Based on Iñigo Carrera’s analysis of the specificity of capital accumulation in Argentina, the literature has understood this decline as evidence that the sale of labor power below its value is a new structural condition of the Argentinean economy.
Regarding the latter, there was an expansion of female activity rate, from 25 to 40 percent, whereas the employment rate grew from 24 percent in 1974, up to 36 percent in 2018. This implied an increase from 32 to 43 percent in female employment over total employment during the same period.
Building on Marx’s concept of the value of labor power, we argued that it was possible to understand the two processes together. During the classical sexual division of labor, the always familiar value of labor power embodied itself in the individual wage of the adult male. The transformations in the global accumulation of capital that led to the new international division of labor allowed a massive entry of women into the labor market, which progressively transformed the concrete expression of the value of labor power, now carried in the wages of more than one member of the household. As a result, looking at the evolution of the average individual wage overestimates the deterioration of the reproduction conditions of the working family in terms of income.
Consequently, we constructed a household income and analyzed its evolution. In particular, we asked up to what extent it is possible to understand the fall of the individual wage as an expression of a transformation in the concrete form of the value of labor power, now embodied in the income of more than one household member.
In this sense, the main finding of this article—restricted, as mentioned, to GBA households with at least one wage earner, self-employed, or owner—is the increase in female income participation in household income, which grew from 27 percent in 1974 to 40 percent in 2018. As a reflection of this, the evolution of household income purchasing power based on the main occupation was 11 percentage points higher than that of an individual income based on the main occupation in 2012, and then declined until it disappeared at the end of the series. The latter is also shown by a growth in the gap between household and individual income, a difference that grew from 46 percent in 1974, to 71 percent in 2011, later diminishing to 63 percent in 2014, before making the series incompatible.
In addition, we have seen that the process of women entering the labor market only partially offsets the sale of labor power below its value in the Argentine national space of capital accumulation, given that the purchasing power of a household income in 2018 is below what it was for a household in 1974, regardless of the source, although its decline is less severe than individual income. This difference becomes truly important during kirchnerismo when female employment grew the most.
All things considered, the results add evidence to the theoretical process that we described, namely a slow and gradual dissolution of the classical sexual division of labor, and the increased expression of the value of labor power in the wages of more than one household member.
In any case, these conclusions open a series of questions that constitute a fertile foundation for future lines of research. In particular, changes in household composition and structure should be considered. Second, we need to separate the average results of this article by income brackets, because the average evolution might be hiding marked differences across the population, especially considering the differences between formal and informal employment. Similarly, deepening the study on second occupations could shed additional light on the matter since total labor income shows a better evolution than the main occupation, which might be reflecting an increasing role of secondary occupations during the period. Finally, attention should be paid not only to income as a reflection of the conditions of reproduction but also to time use and social expenditure.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors want to thank Agustín Arakaki, Magalí Brosio, Facundo Lastra, and the three reviewers for thoughtful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.
Authors’ Note
This article was done under the Proyecto UBACyT (Modalidad II—Programación 2018) 20020170200090BA, entitled Las condiciones de reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo en la Argentina reciente en perspectiva histórica y su vínculo con las particularidades de su proceso de acumulación de capital, directed by Dr. Damián Kennedy.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1
We are talking about deterioration only in terms of income. This should be complemented by analyzing the increasing load in terms of paid hours worked by household members, which worsens their conditions for reproduction as well.
2
The word kirchnerismo denominates the government of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and the two terms of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2011 and 2011–2015).
3
The first part of this section is our own (very short) synthesis of the work of Iñigo Carrera (2013) and 
. What we express here is a result of our own research and cannot be attributed to those authors.
4
The means of subsistence needed by an individual are not limited to subsistence in a strict sense, as classical economists thought, but are determined by the development of the productive attributes of a particular worker, and by the type and technical conditions of the work that is done. Therefore, the value of labor power incorporates a historical, cultural, moral, and geographical dimension, which differs depending on time and place.
5
The transformation of women into labor-power sellers carries profound transformations within the family structure. Among them, the size of the working family is progressively reduced—also due to rises in life expectancy and reductions in children mortality rates—marriages become less frequent, and their duration is shortened.
6
We are abstracting from other changes that took place in the family structure, such as the increase in unipersonal, single parenthood, same-gender couples, and extended households. The analysis of these changes will be the object of a future article. However, these transformations do not change the conclusion of this section, which is to say that attention should be paid to family income, and not individual income.
7
8
The term “classic countries” is in reference to those in which “normal capitals” produce the majority of commodities; by this we mean capitals that have a scale that allows them to produce on the edge of the development of productive forces and, thus, actively participate in the formation of the general rate of profit. The concept of normal capital is similar to that of “regulating capital” in Anwar Shaikh’s work. In his view, a regulating capital is one that, within any given industry, represents the best generally reproducible conditions of production in said industry—meaning lowest cost. Because of this, regulating capitals become price-leaders. Between industries, competition leads to an equalization of the rates of profit of regulating capitals, while competition within an industry leads to differential rates of profit determined by the higher costs that other capitals have relative to the regulating one ().
9
The inverse relationship between ground rent and real wage is also present in the import substitution period, albeit within a context of a positive trend of real wage growth. The same can be said about the role of foreign indebtedness, which became another pillar of capital accumulation in Argentina, providing an additional source of compensation in given moments of the cycle (for example, during the 1990s and the Macri administration).
10
The government of Carlos Menem (1989–1999) passed the Convertibility bill in 1991, which established that the circulation of Argentine pesos had to be backed by an equivalent reserve in US dollars, fixing the exchange at a 1 to 1 rate with that currency, thus overvaluing the peso.
11
Albeit with a marked differentiation within the labor force, particularly between formal and informal workers (Arakaki 2015; Cazón, Kennedy, and Lastra 2016).
12
Due to limitations in the source of information, the referred data correspond to the region of Greater Buenos Aires (GBA). This point is later explained in more depth in section 4.1.
13
A person that did not meet any of the former requirements was considered to have zero income, and remained in the database. The reason for their inclusion is that, if we excluded them, female participation in household income would be overestimated.
14
An alternative possibility would consist on an increase in the gap between household and individual income, explained by a multiplication in the number of wage earners in the household, since there are more adult male labor-power sellers. However, this was not the case in Argentina. First, because the size of the family has been reduced in the period under analysis, so there is no possibility of a “size effect.” Second, because of the massive increase in female participation in the labor market seen in previous sections that supports the alternative hypothesis, which could be considered a “composition effect.”