Minimum-Wage Debate Roils Mexico, Where Rock-Bottom Pay Rules Tim Johnson - McClatchy
go to original September 2, 2014

Although many applaud Mexico’s presumed economic growth, the country has the lowest minimum wage in Latin America and over the past decade it has actually dropped in dollar terms. (TeleSUR)

MEXICO CITY — Mexico has the 14th largest economy in the world, a humming manufacturing sector, a newly opened energy sector that’s drawing worldwide interest, and, at $144 a month, likely the lowest minimum wage in Latin America.

“It’s ridiculously low,” says Jonathan Heath, an independent economist.

The wages that Mexican employers pay those on the lowest rung of the country’s $1.3 trillion economy have fueled a national debate this month, drawing demands by parties both to the left and right of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party to impose an increase.

It’s a debate that highlights the inequalities in Mexico – home to a tycoon who competes for the title of world’s richest man – and the struggles of a nation where more than half of workers toil outside the formal economy in gray areas where a minimum wage is merely a theoretical notion.

Read the rest at The Christian Science Monitor

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