The amount of aguinaldo, equivalent to 15 days’ salary, “has been totally insufficient”, so “it is urgent and fair that said benefit is increased,” says federal deputy Reynel Rodríguez Muñoz (PRI). The legislator presented before the Lower House an initiative to reform the Federal Labor Law (LFT) to extend the payment of this benefit to at least 40 days of salary.
The global inflationary crisis, derived from the covid-19 pandemic, has caused the salaries and benefits of workers to fall short in the face of the rise in prices, says the deputy in the initiative that will be analyzed in commissions. Millions of people who have been infected with this disease have faced heavy health expenses and, at this point in the year, they will hardly be able to afford the purchase of food and other payments, he says.
The bonus is a labor law established in Mexican legislation. Public servants receive, at leasts 40 days salary. Article 42 Bis of the Federal Law of Workers at the Service of the State indicates that half will be paid before December 15 and the other 50%, no later than January 15.
But for those who work in private companies, article 87 of the LFT orders a payment of at least 15 days of their salary, which they must receive before December 20. This amount applies to people who have been in the workplace for more than a year. Those who have not completed that period “will have the right to be paid the proportional part thereof, according to the time they have worked, whatever this may be,” is specified in said legal order.
The deputy Reynel Rodríguez has proposed modifying said article not only to extend the bonus to 40 days of salary, but also, from the third year of service, male and female workers will receive one more day of pay each subsequent year of service. In other words, in the third year of seniority, companies will have to pay them 41 days and so on.
The bonus and informality
In the second transitory article of the reform project, the legislator foresees that the increase to 40 days will be gradually. However, it does not indicate how and in how long this amount would be reached. The initiative was sent to the Labor and Social Welfare Commission, chaired for the second consecutive time by deputy Manuel Baldenebro (Morena).
Mexico is one of the Latin American countries that has conquered this right, however, where employers pay the lowest amounts. In Guatemala, companies are obliged to pay them at least one month’s salary. The private initiative in Brazil, Colombia, Honduras and Uruguay grants workers a 13th month’s salary at the end of the year, that is, their bonus is also equivalent to a monthly salary.
“Chile is the only country on the continent that omits this payment required, like many Caribbean countries such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, where workers do not have this right ”, according to the report Measurement of the cost of salaried work in Latin America and the Caribbean, of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In the United States, working people do not receive a bonus either, some companies grant Christmas bonuses, but they are not obliged to do so.
And both in Mexico and in the Latin American countries that recognize this benefit, the payment is too tied to formality, which reduces the number of people who could receive it. Many work on their own and others are hired by someone else who does not recognize the employment relationship, has not registered them for social security and will hardly pay them the bonus established by law.
According to the ILO, “the partial recovery of employment (in Latin America and the Caribbean) has been led by the growth of the informal employment. These occupations have accounted for around 70% or more of the net creation of jobs in several countries of the region ”.
In the third quarter of 2019, before the pandemic, 31.2 million people worked in the informal sector, according to the National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE). In the same period, but from 2021, they added 31.3 million people. Only in 2020, the crudest year of the covid-19, that population fell to 27 million, but it was not that they went to formality, but that they could not work even in informality. The informal employment rate for women has been higher.
