The rise in the minimum wage in Mexico acts as a brake on formalization and growth. According to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) and the National Minimum Wage Commission (CONASAMI), the number of people earning the minimum wage has nearly quadrupled between 2018 and 2025, increasing from 4.5 million to 16.2 million. As a percentage of the population, Mexico has gone from 16% (2015) to 26.8% in 2026 (more than 10 percentage points). During the so-called Fourth Transformation, the minimum wage has seen a total of eight increases, all of them significant. This group has plummeted, falling from 8 million in 2018 to 2.7 million in 2025. There is a first reading of this data for reflection: employment in Mexico is almost full (we average occupation rates of almost 97% since the 4T), but it is precarious; more people with a minimum wage means that more heads of families cannot afford to support their offspring with their work income (assuming a family of three, the food basket plus non-food items is 14,000 pesos and the minimum wage is close to 10,000). The Mexican business and employer class must get out of the 'minimum wage garden' (this includes not only workers, but domestic workers who work in our homes, for example). In summary, the method consists of taking the current minimum wage, at the time the data is collected, and converting it to the pesos of each historical period, adjusting it with the National Consumer Price Index (INPC); this allows for a comparison over time. But we can also say that, in terms of minimum wage increases, neither the promised paradise nor the diagnosed hell. The minimum wage was 37% of the average wage in 2014 and Morena has increased it to over 75%. This alleviated poverty; the wages of informal workers have also increased, as the new minimum wage makes very low wages socially less acceptable. At the end of President Enrique Peña Nieto's term, the amount was eighty-eight pesos a day; since then, the next eight increases have been double-digit; apparently, that will be the permanent tone, and this is plausible. This number seems more presentable, and it would be worth knowing why the Minimum Wage Commission opted for this formula. Someone might ask: what is the behavior of the population group that earns more than one and up to two minimum wages? The data on concentration in up to one minimum wage reveals a structural phenomenon: the Mexican labor market absorbs labor, but does not integrate it into productivity or protection schemes. The increases allow, to some extent, to settle a social mortgage with the Mexican working class. With this variable of the minimum wage between December 2018 and December 2025, the percentage of the employed population that earns up to one Minimum Wage Equivalent (SME) has been reduced by 5.5 percentage points. We are not facing an economy that does not employ, but rather an economy that perhaps employs poorly. In its latest publication on the state of the economy and the labor market, CONASAMI adapted a novel measurement, that of the 'Minimum Wage Equivalent', literally stating the following: 'To compare the employed population by minimum wage ranges, INEGI developed the methodology of minimum wage equivalents.' This exercise reminded me of an English prime minister, who said that in politics there are 'little lies, big lies, and statistics.' We could assert that the economy has 'withstood' these increases, dismantling the myth of the increase in inflation.
