The collapse of employment in Mexico

June is over, and with it comes the first half of 2025, the first year of President Sheinbaum's administration. The economic results are generally poor, but not disastrous. Amid the uncertainty generated by President Trump's tariff policy, Mexico was of course one of the hardest hit, but overall, the Latin American region is reporting moderate growth rates.

For Mexico, practically and everyone assumes that the national economy will remain the exactly the same: zero growth for this year.

While this isn't good news, it's not the disaster some warned of at the beginning of the year with the suspension of the USMCA. Ultimately, the business the United States has with our country in pure imports—that is, what Mexicans buy from the United States—is equivalent to the entire GDP of a country like Argentina.

Of course, Mexico also gains a significant advantage from this trade with the United States, exporting products and services to them for a value similar to Argentina's GDP. In other words, adding what we sell to the Americans and what we buy from them, we have a value twice that South American country's economy.

That volume of business and value creation on both sides of the border is almost impossible to stop. Trump can impose obstacles and tariffs, but in the end, they will always end up hurting their companies and American consumers.

In essence, the Mexican economy resisted, but did not prevent it from being the economy with the lowest growth in the entire Latin American region.

But while the national economy stagn for months, the disaster is presented in another sensitive variable for many: the creation of jobs in the formal economy.

Practically this first semester of the year has been the worst for any year since the pandemic. As soon as 87 thousand formal jobs were created. An average of 14 thousand per month. A disaster

Considering that last year, when the economy was already straining due to excessive public spending financed by debt, just as the presidential elections appeared to be looking strong, job creation was recorded at 295,000 for the first half of the year.

Practically more than triple that of 2025.

Let's not say about 2023, when in the first 6 months of the year jobs was above 514 thousand positions. Almost 6 times more.

While the Mexican economy had seen limited growth, formal job creation has been declining since 2022. When, as a result of the rebound from the economic opening following the pandemic, the economy generated up to one million jobs annually.

This figure gradually fell, always accompanied by the explanation that it was normal for this rate of expansion to moderate. The problem is that this decline not only didn't moderate, but continued and continued.

By 2024, the decline even accelerated, taking us from one million jobs per year to a dismal 6,222 new positions per year by June 2025. In other words, Mexico went from generating one million jobs annually to just 6,000—about 166 times fewer.

Little by little, the labor market is becoming increasingly tight, with all its consequences. Of course, this situation isn't the same in Tijuana as it is in Tapachula, but the downward trend is widespread nationwide.

For example Jalisco, which went from generating 90 thousand jobs a year in 2023 to only 21 thousand new jobs in May this year.

The economy is paralyzed, investments are frozen, a Plan Mexico that never took off, the federal government is short of resources and under pressure to spend on social programs and the pharaonic projects of the previous six-year term that continue to devour large amounts of good money, only to continue being burned.

Time continues its march and the screw has just taken another turn to tighten the economic conditions of the Sheinbaum government.