Mexico's Labor Market

Macario Schettino points to IMSS as an illustration of Mexican unions' corporatist history, during which the government periodically tossed out goodies that were great at first, but whose value to workers steadily diminished. Which leaves Mexico with the following situation:

It turns out that when someone in the family gets sick, [IMSS] clinics are saturated and they don't attend to patients, sometimes there is no medicine, or whatever, but in the end the benefits aren't that attractive. That's why many people prefer to be hired without IMSS, in exchange for being paid more. And that is the informal economy that we don't measure as such. Today in Mexico, of the 43 million people that are working, 14 million are in IMSS and a bit more than 3 million in ISSSTE, 15 million are informal or underemployed as defined by the ENOE [Mexico's National Employment and Occupation Poll], which leaves us with 11 million Mexicans who are neither formal nor informal (according to the definition of the poll). They are the ones that prefer not to pay IMSS, with the end result of their salary being a bit higher. They aren't street salesman or window washers, they are people trying to solve the labor problem in Mexico.