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To understand the impact of the change in the working day in Mexico, from 48 to 40 hours, we must analyze the working conditions of millions of Mexicans.

In Mexico there are 59 million employed people, of which 32.1 million – more than half, 54.3% – work informally. The issue is that even among informal workers, around 6.4 million of them are in the legally constituted formal sector .

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This is evident from an analysis of the figures from the National Survey of Occupation and Employment of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) for the first quarter of 2025, included in the 10th edition of the Economic Analysis Bulletin of the ITESO Business School, which, using a Hussmanns matrix, reveals the seriousness of the problem of informal employment in the country.

“Labor informality is one of the most important problems in Mexico, because it has very significant social and economic implications . You have more than half of the population that has no rights "And although the government has managed to patch things up with social programs, this ultimately segments the population and families into two groups with different rights," explained Mireya Pasillas, the newsletter's editorial director.

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A particularly relevant finding made through the matrix designed by specialist Ralf Hussmanns, which is an analytical tool that allows identifying different forms of labor informality, is that this category is not limited to the informal sector, but is also present within the formal sector of the economy, because it was detected that, on a national scale, 23.8% of people in an informal situation work in formally registered economic units, that is, in companies, governments or institutions .

In turn, 16.4 percent of these 32.1 million people work in agriculture, 6.8 percent in paid domestic work, and 53 percent in the informal sector. Of that total, 50.1% are salaried workers, who theoretically should have benefits. .

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"This tells us that, up to now, public policies have been ineffective because they don't understand where informal employment lies. They offer partial solutions, which is like putting a Band-Aid on someone who's bleeding. While there's a slight downward trend, this is something that hasn't been resolved for decades," Pasillas added.

During the first quarter of 2025, Mexico's informal employment rate (54.3%) decreased by 5 percentage points compared to the first quarter of 2005 (59.3%) . However, while this downward trend may seem encouraging, the pace of reduction has been slow, occurring over a period of two decades. Informality continues to be the predominant employment condition for more than half of the working population. .

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"This decline in informality actually indicates a decline in the Economically Active Population (EAP), meaning people aren't entering the labor market. Informal employment has declined not because people have moved into the formal sector, but because the labor market is no longer providing them with opportunities," he explained.

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OA