The first attempt at reform was buried at the end of the last legislative session. Now President Sheinbaum has proposed the need to work on a new text.
She avoided the issue while campaigning, but made it her own as soon as she was sworn in as President of the Republic of Mexico. Claudia Sheinbaum announced that her government will bet on reducing the working week to 40 hours.
“I am sure that we will achieve it. In agreement with employers, we will gradually achieve a 40-hour workweek during this six-year term,” said the president upon reaching number 60 of the 100 government commitments she announced on October 1 from the Zócalo in Mexico City.
Until a few months ago, the focus of the failed discussion was in the Chamber of Deputies, where a hasty ruling approved by the Constitutional Affairs Committee sought to reduce the working day from one day to the next, despite the complaints of employers about the lack of a transition scheme.
This attempt at reform was buried at the end of the last legislature; now a new text must be worked on. In this regard, the Movimiento Ciudadano (MC) bench in San Lázaro has already presented the first formal initiative in this regard. We will have to wait to see how many more join, including those authored by Morena, in the coming weeks.
However, the baton of the 40-hour reform was now taken by the federal government, which was absent from the first discussion, which at the moment seemed to be only a dialogue – if it can be called that – between the author of the project, the then deputy Susana Prieto, and all the actors invited to the analysis tables.
“There are a significant number of workers who already have the 40 hours, and there is another significant number of workers who are asking for them and we cannot say 'that does not exist'. So, what are we proposing? That it be by consensus. That is why I said: gradually... That we sit down at a table and that we can reach an agreement with employers, both men and women, so that this can become a reality in a gradual process,” Sheinbaum Pardo pointed out in her morning press conference last Thursday.
In this context, it will be the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS), headed by Marath Bolaños, that will be in charge of defining the details of the scope of the reform that must include initial changes to Article 123 of the Constitution and subsequently to the Federal Labor Law (LFT).
Currently, and according to the most recent information from the National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE), 40% of the workforce works between 40 and 48 hours a week and 26% more than 48 hours. Thus, a reform of this type would potentially benefit two out of three people who participate in the market.
What are the demands of the various business chambers in the country and the recommendations of international organizations to achieve a good reform of the working day? Basically four:
1. Gradualness so that changes are implemented gradually
2. Flexibility of the standard to meet the reality of each sector and company size
3. Exceptions to the rule in industries with particular dynamics
4. Incentives for companies to invest in more staff
The path to building a consensus-based scheme to reduce the working day with these characteristics is not new; it was successfully followed by the governments of Chile and Colombia in recent years, which developed a gradual, flexible and differentiated formula that allowed them to formalize changes that have already begun to be implemented.
Everything seems to indicate that the new federal administration will take a similar route to implement a model adapted to the Mexican market.
By the way, the same scheme will be followed for the labor reform of digital platforms, which seeks to guarantee access to social security for delivery people and drivers, a project that began to be worked on during the last six-year term. President Sheinbaum has already announced that this particular initiative will be sent to the Congress of the Union this month.
