Tainari88 wrote:Raising minimum wages is critical to becoming a viable and prosperous economy. Here there are people making as little as $60 dollars a week working twelve-hour shifts every workday. They get paid $120 pesos for a twelve hour day. Again $8 dollars a day won't solve a damn thing for you here. But that is what they pay. In this pandemic businesses feeling the pinch will lay off the $120 pesos a day workers. Where are they going to get unemployment insurance? No where. No food stamps, unemployment insurance. So? they wind up in front of my house trying to sell me dirt that is fertilized for $50 pesos a bag. I don't need dirt. My house is not a farm. But I bought it anyway. He then asks for cast off clothes for his kids and something to eat because he hasn't eaten in two days. He is from a small town named Cholul. They laid off all the lime and orange pickers. He has NOTHING to feed his kids. He got desperate and filled sacks with treated dirt and tried to sell it in town. There are a lot of people like him Wat0n. If there were unemployment insurance, living wages and food stamp programs and baby feeding programs? These people would be able to ride out the pandemic in Latin America and survive. They need socialist programs desperately in Latin America. But that means charging fucking taxes to huge corporations. Walmart finally paid YEARS of back uncharged taxes to the Mexican government. Why? The previous prez had people forgiving taxes from corporations due to corruption and the government doesn't spend on PEOPLE.
It is a vicious cycle. The socialist did force them to pay and was able to go and purchase supplies for the clinics in Mexico so they can help the sick and dying. The difference public funds make. Socialism. Not fucked up capitalist greed only.
AMLO announcing getting Walmart to pay back taxes.
No, raising minimum wages will and does simply generate informal work to evade the law, even more so in a country like Mexico. Or what, you think cops will show up and arrest the business owner for operating informally?
WE Forum wrote:But informality, by contrast, remains largely untackled. Nearly 140 million Latin Americans – about 55% of the working population – toil in the so called “informal” economy. Around 241 million have no access to social protection.
The irony is that, again, the Nordic countries don't have minimum wages for the most part. They are usually negotiated between trade and worker unions, and only in some industries. Instead, the governments will tax workers and businesses heavily to pay for social programs, and much of that redistribution will come from the latter than the former. So why rely on a policy that has in fact already failed?