Employment, Territory and Labor Policies. The case of the City of Río Cuarto

Abstract

The general objective of this paper is to explore the role thatpublic employment policies play in the performance of the local labor market and in achieving higher and better working conditions. In this sense, two ideas guide the investigation: On the one hand, the importance of recovering alternative theoretical approaches that provide new elements to interpret the labor market that structures and behaves in a complex way and, on the other, the consideration that socio-economic phenomena can not be understood outside the geographic space or used territory. To analyze interventions on the labor market in Río Cuarto, interviews were conducted with three key informants who were responsible for the areas of employment in the different political-administrative levels of government (national, provincial and municipal) during the period 2012-2015. Political management experiences shed light on how policy addresses labor market problems based on the previous diagnosis of their performance, the problems that are identified and defined as priorities and the causes to which they are attributed as well as the consideration of the way in which the policy is done, their conditioning and coordination of objectives and interventions with other levels of government.