Summary Of The Labor Situation In Mexico

Five million workers are employed in a variety of settings along the U.S.–Mexico border, yet labor market outcomes on each side often differ. U.S. workers tend to have low earnings and high unemployment compared with the rest of the country, while workers on the Mexican side of the border are often more prosperous than those in the interior. This book sheds new light on these socioeconomic differentials, along with other labor market issues affecting both sides of the border. The contributors take up issues that dominate the current discourse— migration, trade, gender, education, earnings, and employment. They analyze labor conditions and their relationship to immigration, and also provide insight into income levels and population concentrations, the relative prosperity of Mexico’s border region, and NAFTA’s impact on trade and living conditions. Drawing on demographic, economic, and labor data, the chapters treat topics ranging from historical context to directions for future research. They cover the importance of trade to both the United States and Mexico, salary differentials, the determinants of wages among Mexican immigrant women on the U.S. side, and the net effect of Mexican migration on the public coffers in U.S. border states. The book’s concluding policy prescriptions are geared toward improving conditions on the U.S. side without dampening the success of workers in Mexico. Written to be equally accessible to social scientists, policy makers, and concerned citizens, this book deals with issues often overlooked in national policy discussions and can help readers better understand real-life conditions along the border. It dispels misconceptions regarding labor interdependence between the two countries while offering policy recommendations useful for improving the economic and social well-being of border residents.

This important interdisciplinary work makes original contributions to the study of the state-society relations in Latin America and to the comparative analysis of labor's role in regime change. Middlebrook's theoretical framework identifies the principal dimensions of elite control over mass participation in postrevolutionary authoritarian regimes and highlights the most important aspects of Mexican authoritarianism. By demonstrating organized labor's central importance in the formation and evolution of Mexico's distinctive authoritarian regime, Middlebrook also lays the basis for a major reinterpretation of key features of twentieth-century Mexican politics. "Any scholar interested in Latin American social and political questions over the last one hundred years will sooner or later read this book. Mexicanists worth their salt will read it as soon as they can get it. The scholarship is outstandingly sound. It is rigorous in conceptualization and analysis, and in the historical parts as good as the best histories of Mexican labor and politics." -- John Womack Jr., Harvard University

The author addresses the labor markets in rural and semi-urban Mexico. The empirical analyses show that non-farm income shares increase with overall consumption levels and, also, with time. Rural-dwellers in lower quintiles of the consumption distribution tend to earn a larger share of their nonagricultural incomes from wage labor activities. For the poorest, low-productivity wage labor activities are important. The quantile wage regression analysis for rural Mexico shows a rather heterogeneous impact pattern of individual characteristics across the wage distribution on monthly wages. The author's findings reveal that education is key to earning higher wages, and that workers in more dispersed rural areas earn less than their peers in semi-urban rural areas (localities with less than 15,000 inhabitants). The rural non-farm sector is heterogeneous and includes a great variety of activities and productivity levels across non-farm jobs. Moreover it can reduce poverty in a couple of distinct but qualitatively important ways in rural Mexico. The analysis of non-farm employment in rural Mexico suggests that the two key determinants of access to employment and productivity in non-farm activities are education and location.

In this definitive volume on the Mexican labor movement, journalist Dan La Botz concentrates on labor politics, the relationship of the unions to the state, and their relevance to other struggles for union independence. Prefaced by Mexican Congressman Ricardo Pascoe, The Crisis of Mexican Labor outlines the country's economic and political crises. The book also gives a complete overview of the labor movement from 1920 to 1987. La Botz chronicles workers' strikes and their results. He also demonstrates how Mexican union confederations, and their ruling bureaucracies, have clearly depended upon the material, the political, and even the military support of the state. This, the author contends, is the central problem of Mexican workers. They must develop an internationalist, socialist ideology and reorganize independently of the state. To do so will entail restructuring the entire system.