Businessweek: Julio Don Juan makes $400 a month working at a noisy, cramped call center in Mexico City that counts major American companies among its clients. The 37-year-old hasn’t had a raise in three years, he says, and was forced to pull his son out of a special-needs school because he could no longer afford the tuition. “Because costs keep rising, I’m actually getting a pay cut each year,” says Don Juan, who lives with his parents. “We’re scraping by.”
The plight of millions of Mexicans stuck in similarly low-paying jobs is a major campaign issue ahead of a July 1 general election. Since 2005, wages in Latin America’s second-biggest economy have risen at an annual pace of just 0.4 percent adjusted for inflation, according to the International Labour Organization. In Brazil, wage growth averaged 3.4 percent over the same period. Read more.
The MexicoBlog of the Americas Program, a fiscally sponsored program of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is written by Laura Carlsen. I monitor and analyze international press on Mexico, with a focus on security, immigration, human rights and social movements for peace and justice, from a feminist perspective. And sometimes I simply muse.
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