Hard work - No Reward

According to an OECD report, Mexicans are the hardest-working people in 29 of the world’s more advanced economies. Mexicans work an average of 595 minutes a day – five minutes short of 10 hours. Of this time, 253 minutes (four hours and 13 minutes) are unpaid – time spent on cooking, cleaning and other everyday chores. In contrast, the average OECD workday is 480 minutes – eight hours. Why the difference? In part, it’s because much of women’s work is unpaid. Mexican women work four hours and 21 minutes a day more than men on unpaid work – compared with two hours and 28 minutes for the average OECD woman, one hour and 42 minutes for the average North American woman. The U.S. escapes much work by not cooking. Americans spend only 30 minutes a day preparing meals and cleaning up after them – the lowest percentage of any country in the OECD survey. They also spend the least time eating: one hour and 14 minutes a day, on average. The consequences of so much fast food, alas, are grim: Americans are also the most obese – 34 per cent of the adult population (compared with the OECD average of 17 per cent).
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/does-hard-work-pay-off-ask-the-mexicans/article2152478/

Does hard work pay off? Mexicans may not always think so. Their country has the highest level of relative poverty, according to this survey: one person in five. The OECD average is one in 10. In 2010, Mexico had 53 million people living in poverty, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology. Half the country's population lives in poverty and almost 20 percent in extreme poverty. Some estimate that there are more workers in the economy's informal sector than in the formal one. Even for those working, according to the Bank of Mexico, 95 percent of the 800,000 jobs created in 2010 paid only $10 a day. Yet, in a Tijuana or Juarez supermarket, a gallon of milk can cost even more than it would on the US side. In five years, the number of Mexicans in poverty has grown by ten million, that working income has dropped by a third and that three million more people find themselves jobless. The crisis has hit especially hard at young people, who are the fastest growing segment of the population. Seven million of them can't find work and have no money to go to school. According to UNICEF, there are 24.7 million children under the age of 17 living in poverty in Mexico. According to research by MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo nearly one out of every 14 Mexican children dies before his or her first birthday — a rate as bad as the Ivory Coast's. 50,000 dead, mostly innocent civilians, over the last five years in a politically motivated war on drugs.

The bottom fifth of the country earns about 4 percent of the income while the top tenth controls 41 percent, according to the World Bank. In a recent diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, the US government admits, "The net wealth of the 10 richest people in Mexico - a country where more than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty - represents roughly 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product." Carlos Slim became the world's richest man. Forbes calculated that the 71-year-old Slim had a net worth of $74 billion, beating out Gates by $18 billion. To put that in perspective, $18 billion is enough to extend wireless broadband to 98 percent of Americans or equal to the entire wealth of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. The absolute poverty cutoff in Mexico is 79 cents a day. More than 3.5 million people in Mexico lived on less than that in 2008, according to the World Bank. So the money Slim lost in the first few days of August with the stock-market declineis equivalent to more than seven times the yearly income of all 3.5 million people in Mexico living in absolute poverty. Slim is only managing to make an annual return of 2 percent off his wealth. He's still collecting $360 million a year more in income than his nearest competitor in the wealth rankings. Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who owns TV Azteca, is now worth $8 billion, and Emilio Azcárraga Jean, who owns Televisa, is worth $2.3 billion.

Adapted from here

Already by 1993, the income of the poorest region, Oaxaca, was less than one-sixth that of the Federal District that includes Mexico City — reflecting considerably worse education, health, and infrastructure alongside the poor quality of local institutions.

"We planted our seeds, but the earth is no longer productive. We've had too much rain, even more than last year, and the harvest was ruined," says Ermelinda Santiago of the Me'phaa indigenous people. The 25-year-old woman is one of thousands of native people who migrate every year from the municipality of Tlapa and its surroundings in the southern state of Guerrero, to pick fruit and vegetables in the north of the country. "We have to migrate, because there is no food, and no money," said Santiago
Tlapa, one of the poorest places in Mexico, is ravaged by deforestation, intermittent drought and torrential rains, so that farming is not an economically viable occupation for local people. ogether with factors like poverty, lack of job opportunities and high crime rates, environmental degradation has become an additional element driving migration, both within the country and abroad. Every year some 500,000 people emigrate from Mexico to the United States, where some eight million Mexicans are living without the necessary legal documents, according to specialist agencies. The National Institute for Statistics and Geography reports that the areas receiving the largest numbers of internal migrants are Mexico City, the western state of Jalisco, Baja California on the border with the United States, and the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, while the centre, south and mid-west of the country are the major sources of migrants. Meanwhile Shuaizhang Feng, Alan Krueger and Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University in the U.S. state of New Jersey concluded that a 10 percent reduction in crop yields in Mexico leads an additional two percent of the population to emigrate. By approximately the year 2080, they estimated climate change would induce 1.4 to 6.7 million Mexicans to emigrate to the United States, because of declines in agricultural productivity.