At the heart of the labor reform project promoted by the Government is a well-known name in business circles: Julián de Diego. Labor lawyer, reference for large companies and advisor to Rappi, his intervention in the official draft raises union alerts and questions about possible conflicts of interest. According to La Política Online, de Diego works ad honorem for the Executive and collaborates with the Secretary of Labor, Julio Cordero, in a scheme that seeks to make agreements more flexible, create a bank of hours and enable negotiations by company.
Your role doesn’t just look forward. It also has a weighty history. De Diego was the author of the ART law, considered the greatest failure of Argentine labor law. The rule sought to limit the amount that companies had to pay for workplace accidents, delegating the risk to insurers. But the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional by invalidating the compensation cap. The result was doubly adverse: the firms, which were obliged to hire only ART, had to cover with their assets the difference between the cap and what the judges set, and the workers were trapped in a system that did not guarantee adequate compensation.
It wasn’t his only setback. He also advised and was a lobbyist for the multinational temporary employment companies Adecco and Manpower, which sought to outsource hiring and dilute labor responsibilities. Once again, the Court intervened and dismantled that legal architecture, striking the scheme it promoted. With this wear and tear, in 2005 two of its partners, Javier Adrogué and José Antonio Zabala, left and opened a new studio.
Today, De Diego once again influences the design of labor rules. And it does so while advising digital platforms like Rappi, a sector that would be left without significant improvements in the official project and that maintains thousands of delivery drivers without an agreement or full protection. For his critics, he is déjà vu: a lawyer for the business establishment behind reforms that, they fear, could once again judicialize the relationship between companies and workers. For the Government, on the other hand, he is an expert willing to “modernize” the Argentine labor system.
