Proposing a 15% proposing a 15% increase in Mexico’s minimum wage
Authorities have reported that they are proposing a 15% increase in Mexico’s minimum wage as part of their improvement policies.
Increases to the minimum wage have shown decisive results to defend one more increase, the last one of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration.
The Executive’s proposal for 2024, to seal a six-year term of increases, will be 15% in Mexico’s minimum wage.
In an interview, Luis Felipe Munguía, president of the National Minimum Wage Commission (Conasami), explained that the proposal is for a 15% increase in the minimum wage by 2024.
At least this is the federal government’s aspiration for the negotiations that will soon begin with business and labor representatives to define the benchmarks for 2024.
The proposal has a solid defense since the increases to the minimum wage between 2019 and 2022 reduced by 23.7% the number of people in poverty, according to the most recent study conducted by Conasami to know the results of “one of the most important policies of this six-year term”, according to Munguía.
In 2018, when the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office, the minimum wage for the entire country stood at 88.36 pesos per day.
During the previous three decades it had lost 75% of its purchasing power because increases were below inflation.
The new government sought to raise its value to at least above the income poverty line and created the Northern Border Free Zone (ZLFN), where the minimum wage was doubled “as part of a regional development strategy and to curb migration,” recapitulates the report The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Poverty, published by Conasami.
Since then, each year the Council of Representatives of Conasami – made up of government, labor and business sectors – has approved increase after increase.
-15% increase in Mexico’s minimum wage-
By 2023, the minimum wage reached 207.44 pesos for most of the country and 312.41 pesos for the ZLFN.
“I am about to receive the members of the Minimum Wage Commission, because in December we will decide how much the increase will be,” commented President López Obrador yesterday morning at the daily press conference.
But he only said: “it will be a considerable increase”.
Conasami‘s Technical Directorate has already conducted an analysis and concluded that by 2024 the increase should be at least 15%.
“We in the government have a goal: that the minimum wage achieves a 100% recovery above inflation,” Munguía ratified.
