President Javier Milei unveiled a wide-ranging emergency decree on December 20, 2023, seeking to change Argentina's economic rules without waiting for an ordinary legislative bill. The order, known as DNU 70/2023, reached into rental contracts, healthcare, commerce and labour relations. Its breadth made it the administration's clearest opening bid for deregulation, and made the question of who could check an executive decree central to Milei's presidency.
A decree covering daily transactions
The Buenos Aires Herald reported that the 86-page document contained 366 articles. It proposed repealing the rental law, removing restrictions on private healthcare pricing and changing rules governing commerce and public companies. The objective articulated by the government was to remove obstacles it said distorted market prices and constrained private initiative. For a landlord, a tenant, an employer or a patient, however, those abstractions pointed to potentially immediate changes in bargaining power and costs. The reforms could not fairly be described simply as a spending cut: many concerned the terms on which private actors dealt with one another.
The labour provisions were especially contentious. As reported by the Herald, they would lengthen the probationary period for new hires from three to eight months, remove certain penalties for employing unregistered workers and require specified essential services to maintain a minimum level of operation during strikes. Supporters of looser rules argued that Argentina needed to encourage formal hiring and investment; the union movement objected that the decree weakened existing protections and collective action. Those competing forecasts were not established outcomes.
Questions arose immediately about when the order would take effect. The Herald reported uncertainty after the published text did not expressly specify an effective date; its subsequent coverage said the decree came into effect on December 29. That timing matters because an announcement, a published legal instrument and a judicial order are different things. Calling the whole programme either fully enacted or wholly blocked would misrepresent a dispute that developed provision by provision.
A union takes the dispute to court
On January 3, 2024, the National Labour Appeals Chamber temporarily suspended the labour chapter after an application by the General Confederation of Labour, or CGT. Two of the three judges backed an interim stay, the Buenos Aires Herald reported. The government appealed. The ruling did not strike down the entire economic decree; it suspended the contested labour measures while their legal status was argued. The CGT called the labour proposals regressive; government lawyers disputed the intervention and sought another forum.
The confrontation was constitutional as well as economic. Emergency decrees permit an Argentine president to act in exceptional circumstances but can be reviewed by lawmakers and courts. Opponents argued that such an extensive alteration of existing law required Congress rather than an assertion of urgency by the executive. The administration faced an institutional choice: defend the decree's legality, negotiate legislation or do both. The fact that a union obtained an early injunction made a purely executive route less secure.
A larger test of the reform programme
The decree illustrated the tension between the speed of Milei's campaign mandate and the deliberation built into Argentina's legal system. The administration was trying to open markets and rewrite regulations quickly; its critics feared weakened worker protections and higher household costs without legislative debate. Congress and the judiciary could address different portions of the package on different timetables, leaving businesses and workers uncertain about which rules would last.
For the government, the next challenge was not merely publishing ambitious measures but making them durable. For unions, the legal victory was provisional, not an end to the administration's reform drive. The immediate result was a more complicated opening to Milei's deregulation campaign: an emergency order in force in important respects, a key chapter stayed by judges, and a fight over the proper route for changing the Argentine economy.
