Inequality that reigns in Mexico, a country of 118 million
people. According to official figures, Mexico’s economically active population
totals 52 million, of whom more than 29 million work in the informal sector.
The official unemployment rate stands at 4.8 percent and underemployment at
seven percent. The current minimum wage of around five dollars a day is the
lowest in Latin America, followed by Nicaragua, Haiti and Bolivia, according to
the Observatory. Article 123 of the Mexican constitution states that “the
minimum wage in general should be sufficient to meet the normal needs of the
head of the family, in material, social and cultural terms, and to provide
obligatory education for the children.” In Mexico, 53 million people are poor,
according to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development
Policies. By contrast, the number of billionaires in Mexico grew from 22 to 27
and their combined income increased from 137 billion to 169 billion dollars.
“The issue of wages is a question of inequality,” said
Miguel López, a member of the Observatory of Wages at the private Iberoamerican
University of Puebla, a city in central Mexico. “Wages can be a mechanism to
mitigate inequality. But there are more workers and they get a smaller piece of
the pie. It’s a problem of redistribution.”
In its 2014 report, published in April, the Observatory
underlined that “the absolute impoverishment of the working class is reflected
in the reduction of the cost of labour, the more intense exploitation of the
working day, and the growing precariousness of working conditions, housing and
living conditions in general.”
But the most worrisome aspect is the enormous wage gap, as
reflected by a 2013 study by the global management consultancy, Hay Group, on
the difference between the pay earned by senior employees and new workers.
According to the report, the base salary of an executive in
Mexico City is 10,000 dollars a month, just 417 dollars less than what an
executive in a similar company in New York earns. But in the United States, the
federal minimum wage is 7.25 dollars an hour, compared to 5.05 dollars a day in
the Mexican capital. The Multidisciplinary Research Centre says the minimum wage
needed to cover a basic diet would be 14 dollars a day, while the Mexico City
Federal District government sets it at 13 dollars a day. The Presidents’
Compensation Study by the international human resources consultancy Mercer
found that in Mexico the CEO of a large company earned 121 times the minimum
wage – the biggest gap in Latin America.
Ernesto C. earns nearly 5,000 dollars a month, plus a
productivity bonus, at one of the largest private banks in Mexico. “The pay is
good, it’s at the same level as other banks in the country and is similar to
what is earned by colleagues from the United States who I deal with,” said the
34-year-old executive, who lives with his girlfriend in an upscale neighbourhood
on the west side of the city. Ernesto drives the latest model SUV and spends
nearly 300 dollars on an evening out, said he obtained financing to study
abroad. “When I came back, it wasn’t like I had expected – it was actually hard
for me to find a good job. But I finally found one and I managed to climb up
the ladder quickly,” he said.
A study by the Multidisciplinary Research Centre (CAM) of
the National Autonomous University of Mexico found that 4.4 million workers in
Mexico earn from one to three times the minimum wage.
The report, “Factory of the Poor”, published in May, adds
that just over two million workers earn from three to five times the minimum
wage. According to the report, the number of Mexicans who earn up
to two times the minimum wage grew nearly three percent from 2007 to 2013,
while the number of those who earned three to five times the minimum wage
shrank 23 percent – a reflection of the impoverishment of those on middle-income.
Alicia Puyana, a researcher at the Latin American Faculty of
Social Sciences in Mexico, says “There has been no in-depth effort to tackle
the causes of the poverty that comes from the poor distribution of income, and
the concentration of wealth and of capital in general. The approach is to
attack the final effects, one of which is wages,” she said. "
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