“Sheinbaum has spearheaded an agenda that is a continuation of the labour reforms introduced during the Morena governments.”
In our Red Weekly Column, Fraser McGuire analyses Sheinbaum’s agenda to strengthen workers’ rights, raise wages and living standards, and expand social protections.
At a conference on May 1st, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that the country is going through a “labour spring” with the improvements of workers’ rights and wages. Since her election in 2024 with more than 60 percent of the vote, Sheinbaum has spearheaded an agenda that is a continuation of the labour reforms introduced during the Morena governments.
A stark contrast to the neoliberal economics and “labour flexibility” model which prevailed in Mexico, like much of the Global South, for decades, the country is now one of the most significant examples in the Americas of serious attempts to strengthen workers’ rights, raise wages and living standards, and expand social protections.
The minimum wage has increased by more than 150 percent in real terms since 2018, beginning to unravel the collapse in purchasing power that ordinary people saw under successive decades of privatisation and corporate exploitation. Leverage from trade unions and anti-poverty organisations has catalysed political decisions to make sure wage increases have kept pace with inflation and living costs for the last 8 years.
Another central point of Sheinbaum’s workers’ rights agenda is the reduction of the working week from 48 to 40 hours, an ongoing task which Secretary of Labour and Social Welfare, Marath Bolaños, said will benefit more than 14 million workers.
Union activists have consistently highlighted Mexico’s extremely long working hours and high levels of stress and exhaustion as a result of “flexible” employment that has dominated for so long in many sectors of the Mexican economy. The model of workplace insecurity was allowed to fester by successive Governments, which privatised key industries, undermined collective bargaining, weakened workplace protections, and suppressed wages to attract ‘foreign investment’.
Unsurprisingly, Mexico has also seen the ascendancy of outsourcing and subcontracting models as part of “flexible” employment mechanisms. As in many other countries, companies with the support of favourable legislation increasingly employed workers indirectly and via third-party agencies, allowing reductions in protections and workers’ rights responsibilities for employers, and making trade union organisation more challenging.
Since the 1990s, outsourcing in Mexico has spread beyond manufacturing into numerous industries and parts of the public sector. By the 2010s, millions of Mexican workers were employed under precarious outsourced arrangements. Morena Ministers have called for the elimination of outsourcing, but there is still a long road to undo the impact of decades of insecurity being the norm in employment.
While the future looks bright for a continued programme of vital reforms to workers’ rights and employment laws under Sheinbaum, it must be recognised that many victories have emerged through pressure from unions and worker mobilisation, such as challenges from militant unions to international employers in industries like automotive manufacturing, and widespread campaigning for shorter working hours and fairer pay.
Mexico still faces enormous challenges in the forms of inequality, widespread insecure employment, violence against trade unionists and the fact that women continue to disproportionately be in precarious work or unemployment.
Morena’s victories did not spontaneously appear from above; they have been a result of years of trade union and community resistance to an economic and industrial model designed to benefit capital, domestic and global. Trade unionists will continue to be on the frontline of pushing forward improvements to workers’ rights, pay, and conditions.
British trade unionists should continue to strengthen links with unions and labour organisations in Mexico, and share experiences on the struggle for better working conditions on both sides of the Atlantic, especially given the clear willingness of Washington to disrupt socialist projects across Latin America.
- Fraser McGuire is the Chair of East Midlands Unite Hospitality, Chair of TUC Young Members’ Committee and an organiser for Arise: A Festival Of Left Ideas. You can follow him on Twitter/X and Instagram.
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