World unemployment: two cases Mexico City: A wait that never ends

Press, 28 August 1980, Page 16

World unemployment: two cases Mexico City: A wait that never ends

By the Mexico City correspondent of the “Financial Tinies,” London.

Fidencio Garcia Morales stands nearly every day amid dozens of other unemployed workmen outside Mexico City’s' main cathedral, hoping someone will offer him work. Sometimes he is lucky and he gets a job for a few days — enough to make a few hundred pesos to bring back to his wife and five, sons at San Miguel, a village in Puebla state 70 miles from the capital. More often he returns empty-handed to his shared room in one of the slum areas near the. Zocalo, the city’s central square. Mr Garcia, a 41-year-old building labourer who has been searching for work for much • of the past 15 years, is one of an estimated 8M Mexicans out of'a permanent job.

below the minimum wage of about 86.50 per day. There have never been enough jobs to go round in Mexico and the State still provides no unemployment benefit, so the choice for the out-of-work is usually between being supported by the family or eking out a living,.usually in one of the more menial service industry occupations that now absorb 41 per cent of the 18M work force.. - ' ■ 1 \

Like most of the BMhe is classed as underemployed, a term that means he makes, a subsistence living working sporadically, producing little and earning overall well

The streets of Mexico City and the other big towns are full of s the • underemployed making just • enough, to . subsist by peddling gum, playing solitary. trumpets’,, “watching” parked cars or. similar activities.- - ’' ’ Mr Garcia is better off. Although unemployed for three quarters of the year, he manages to stick to his chosen trade 'and:- supplements the family.- diet with vegetables grown on a small plot. Mexico’s unemployment

figure of 6 per cent —- again an estimate because there are no comprehensive official statistics — is deceptively' low and successive governments have treated 'the problem as. one of mass i v e . .' underemployment affecting about 40 per cent of the work force. With it's oil-fuelled economic “take-off,” Mexico has avoided the harshest consequences of the world recession, and the administration of President Jose Lopez Portillo would appear to have- a good chance.. of success in’,its job creation programme — the main goal, of its . development strategy — so. far as it goes. Under its three-year development plan, the Administration is seeking to create 2.2 M new jobs by the end of 1982, but according , to the most recent estimates, that figure will just about absorb the. effect of about 1 800,000 young people entering the labour market each year.

Three-of Mr Garcia’s sons .will be among that number. The 1 family would be far better off with the boys bringing home steady wages, but Mr Garcia, himself one of a large peasant family, has little faith in President Lopez Portillo’s optimistic pronouncements : that the unemployment problem ; is showing' a "clear tendency to diminish.” “I can’t see how it's going to get better: They talk, about ojl, but we don’t see any of it. Life is just getting more expensiy-,” he said. Mexico’s current annual inflation rate is 24 per cent and the purchasing power of the 1 minimum! wage has dropped 10-per cent since 1976. According to Government studies malnutrition has risen to affect over 40 per. cent of the 70M population.

Mr Garcia complains about a recent 100 per cent rise in the price of sugar and the accelerating cost of such basic food as the maize

tortilla pancake, a staple of the Mexican diet. Even Mr Fidel Velazquez, Mexico’s veteran union boss who is closely allied to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party has begun to talk of a “dangerous explosion” if basic commodity prices continue to rocket beyond wages.

As in other Latin American countries, worsening rural misery is driving people off the land in search of better conditions elsewhere. Hundreds of thouands — nobody knows the real figure — head north each year to join the army of illegal Mexican immigrants working in the southern United States. These “braceros” provide a major safety valve for the Mexican economy. More often, the poor make for the over-crowded big cities to scratch out a living in the ranks of the underemployed. .Some 1000. new inhabitants arrive by the day in Mexico City, a polluted sprawling metropolis of about 14M” already bursting at the seams.

The lucky ones find steady work, usually in menial jobs as maids, waiters and market porters. The others make ends meet in any way possible, frequently taking to the streets. Drivers stalled in Mexico City’s unnerving traffic jams are regularly assailed by trinket vendors, performing fire-; eaters and by ragged child* ren who clamber on to cars uninvited to wash the windscreen with a bucket of dirty water.

Mr Garcia gave up the struggle to make a living working his family’s smallholding in 1965 and brought his wife to the capital where he found work on building sites and had his first children.

Jobs gradually became scarcer and he sent his family back io the village where the boys went to primary' school and learned to read and write — skills he himself does not possess. He now needs a minimum of 5000 pesos (about $245) a month to feed the family, but rarely manages to come up with it.