Squeezed at both ends: young Argentines drop out of work as retirees go back

Argentina’s workforce has been changing shape over the past two years: fewer young people are entering the job market, while more retirees are being pushed back to make ends meet. The trend, laid out by the Instituto Argentina Grande (IAG) in one of its latest reports, is moving at two speeds. The number of Argentines aged 66 and over going back to work climbed 12% in the past year. Over the same stretch, youth unemployment rose sharply, from 14% to 18%. For young people, the picture is doubly grim. Fewer Argentines between 18 and 26 are looking for work at all and those who are find fewer jobs waiting for them. The pool of job seekers has shrunk, but landing a job has gotten harder, not easier. Young men are giving up on the job hunt faster than young women. Labor force participation among women in that age bracket fell 2.4% over the past two years, while among men the drop was 3%. “In general, when you see both unemployment and inactivity going up, it has to do with the persistence of unemployment,” Candelaria Rueda, a sociologist and the lead researcher on the report, told the Herald. According to Rueda, “participation falls because people get discouraged in the face of very high unemployment and very low wages.” A third factor compounds the problem. “Most 18 to 26-year-olds aren’t running a household. So without the pressure of being the breadwinner, there’s more room to step back,” she added. Wages in free fall The shift is also showing up in workers’ paychecks, with wages among the hardest hit by President Javier Milei’s economic program. According to the latest report from CIFRA (Center for Research and Training of the Argentine Republic), registered wages those paid in formal jobs with better working conditions have lost ground because of “higher inflation, a ceiling on collective bargaining and weaker union negotiating power.” The average wage has lost 9% of its purchasing power under Milei, according to figures through February 2026. The drop could be as deep as 13% when measured against an inflation index that better reflects the cost of a current basket of goods and services. The two big losers are national government workers, whose wages have fallen 37.2% since Milei took office, and the minimum, vital, and mobile wage the benchmark commonly used for those starting out in the workforce which has plunged 35%. To put that in perspective, the CIFRA report highlights that in March of this year, the minimum wage “reached its second-lowest monthly value in the past 32 years, barely above the historical low of June 2002.” That date is no accident: it came just a couple of months after the collapse of Convertibility, in the depths of the worst political, economic and social crisis in the country’s modern history. Pensions shredded by the chainsaw As fewer young people take their first steps into the labor market, older Argentines are being forced out of retirement to find ways to top up their income. According to the IAG report, the number of men 66 and older working off the books rose 39%. Among women, that figure climbed 34%. “The rise in retirees working in poor conditions reflects the deterioration of their incomes, largely driven by disproportionate price hikes in items that weigh heavily on retirees’ budgets, such as medicine and health insurance, but also by the broader crisis hitting households where they often act as supplementary earners,” the study warned. CIFRA estimates that the purchasing power of the minimum pension has fallen 18.8% under Milei. A separate consultancy reached the same conclusion using a different yardstick. According to MATE (Observatory on Labor and Economic Affairs), retirees on the minimum pension have lost the equivalent of 7.4 monthly payments in purchasing power since Milei took office.