It has been while since my last post. I really cannot explain my absence saying that I had much work to do or that I was mentally unstable to perform my normal functions. However, I am really tired. Since this is my first full time job, and the first time I have not had neither summer nor winter vacations, I am really exhausted. Also contributes the fact that I kind of hate my job. Nevertheless, I am not the only Mexican trapped in this situation: according to Ipsos Public Affairs, Argentina (44%), Mexico (43%) and Hungary (42%) had the highest number of workers saying that their workplaces were not safety neither healthy due to stress, personal conflicts, frustration and lack of feedback. Now that we are talking about work, today I would like to discuss some issues regarding the labor market in my country.
According to the OECD, Mexico is the country with the biggest time invested doing work (home and office), but also, since productivity is very low, there is no other way for Mexicans to finish work than to stay more hours. I can understand that low productivity is representative of the agricultural sector (particularly true in the South) and small businesses; the latter is the predominant model in the Mexican economy. However, productivity is very high in the export oriented sector and other companies. But that does not stop workers in those areas from working longer hours.
In Mexico City, it is pretty normal for an office worker to do (of course, non-paid, thanks for the left) extra hours: my friends who work in the Federal Public Administration are very well paid, but they are demanded to stay longer (around two hours, sometimes more depending on the day), and the same can be said about those in the private sector in the financial district of Santa Fe. People with degrees obtained abroad working in those companies also work longer days, so I guess it is not the lack of good education and low productivity that is prompting qualified workers to stay longer, but the Mexican working culture. Or maybe it could be that trade unionized employees do so little that those not belonging to a trade union should compensate the low productivity of the others. Even foreigners who are working in Mexico City have to follow those labor patterns.
The situation is even worse in the rest of the country. It is very likely that in Mexico City white collar workers will never have to work on Saturdays; however it is pretty common in the rest of the states to work 6 hours (from 8 to 13) with a lower salary than that of their counterparts in Mexico City. Wages are determined by the level of activity, economic growth and cost of living: as one of the fastest-growing economies in Mexico, wages in Monterrey are higher than in Mexico City.
Given the lack of a thick and economically not viable welfare net in the absence of a strong economic growth (as Europe has taught us) and the low savings rate per capita, Mexicans will usually take any job in order to survive, even if it has not social security or good working conditions. Poverty might illustrate this point, since the most disadvantaged states had the lowest unemployment rates: Guerrero (the third poorest state in Mexico) had an unemployment rate of 2.13, and Chiapas’ (the poorest state) was 2.19, both states have been like that for a while. On the other hand, Aguascalientes, Baja California, Chihuahua, Sonora, Tamaulipas, the Federal District, all of them with high human development indexes, the unemployment was above 6 per cent. Although some poor or middle income states were also above the 6 percent mark for the last trimester of 2011: Tlaxcala and Zacatecas. Unemployment in that trimester was of 4.8 percent in the whole country; it used to be around 3 before the 2009 crisis.
Those numbers might not look bad compared to Spain, Greece or even healthy states like Germany, but in a country with high disparities and low economic growth, employment is crucial in order to survive.
