Mexico ignores workers in trying to fix informality
In wanting to formalise work, the government can push people into illegality.
Mexican working-class existence is the game of life played on the hardest difficulty.
Take the employees at a hotel in the resort town of Cancún. Most will never join the tiny proportion of entry-level workers that rise up in the ranks. Besieged with messaging that their success in life is entirely up to how hard they work, most never see their low wages grow.
The disappointed leave the long hours at the hotel for more flexible informal gigs. The desperate find solace in the gold-clad promises of the local cartel. By this point, most are not dipping into the informal or illegal economies to get rich; they’re doing it to make ends meet.
Two weeks ago, The Mexico Political Economist remarked on how narco-salaries were significantly lower than formal sector wages but competitive when compared to what informal workers got paid. Given that about half of Mexico’s labour force works in the informal economy, it was easy to conclude that informality is one of the biggest funnels into organised crime.
But this is only half the story and the plight of the Cancún hotel workers explains how. It is a story repeated across the blurred dividing line between the formal and informal economies and how the government, obsessed with seeing formality as a way to make itself some money, has made things worse.
