confusion Archives - usatoday24

The minimum wage in Mexico has risen in January. This increase is not reaching everyone and is creating confusion

January 16, 2026 by usatoday24

Spain is not the only one considering annual increases in your minimum wage. Starting January 1, the Mexican workers who earn the least will see their salaries increased with a new increase in minimum wage. However, some are beginning to notice that that increase is not reflected on your payroll and is generating some confusion. The trick is that the increase in the minimum wage which has been applied in Januarydoes not imply a general salary increase for all workers, but rather a minimum legal ceiling for salaries. What is the minimum wage and what is it for? As its name indicates, the minimum wage is the legal minimum amount that any company must pay its workers. In the case of Mexico, this minimum wage is established by Conasami (National Minimum Wage Commission) a decentralized body of the Mexican government that is responsible for updating it every year with the intention of protecting those who earn the least. However, the salary increase imposed by this body does not represent a percentage that must be applied to all salaries, but rather the minimum daily amount that employees must receive per day. According to the salary table prepared by Conasami, by 2026 the minimum wage will rise to 315.04 pesos per day in most of the country and 440.87 pesos per day in the Northern Border Free Zone. That implies an increase of 13% for the majority of the country, and 5% in the border area with the United States. Why doesn’t the increase reach everyone? The point of confusion among Mexican workers centers on the erroneous interpretation that this 13% and 5% increase is for salaries, when in reality it would only affect the lowest salaries that are within the legal minimums established in the Federal Labor Law. That is, if in January 2026, a worker continues to receive a salary of 278.80 pesos (419.88 pesos for the ZLFN), which was the minimum wage in 2025, his employer would be violating labor legislation. However, if an employee already earned more than 316 pesos, his or her salary does not have to have increased, since it exceeds (even if only slightly) the minimum limit established by the Federal Labor Law for 2026. Who should see their salary increased. There are three clear groups in which there is a legal obligation to increase the salary when the minimum increases. The first and most obvious, those employees who earn less than what is established by the new minimum wage. The second assumption is for those who were already earning exactly the minimum wage in 2025, since with the update they would be out of legality in 2026. Finally, there is a third group of employees to whom, due to the type of profession they practice, a different scale is applied and, therefore, their salaries must increase even when they already exceed the minimum wage. Specifically they are 60 professional categories that Conasami estimates that, due to their characteristics, they must have a minimum wage higher than that generally applied to other workers. When the salary is “higher” but does depend on the minimum. In Mexico, the minimum wage can also be applied as a reference indicator in contracts. That is, instead of indicating a specific salary, the employment contract indicates that the salary will be, for example, three times the current minimum wage or 350% of that minimum limit. In that case, since it is a reference variable, when the minimum wage rises, those wages will also rise in the same proportion according to what is stated in those contracts. Minimum wage vs. contractual salary. An important factor is to differentiate the minimum wage from the contractual wage. That is, the one that employees agree with the companies at the time of hiring. The first guarantees that no one will be able to charge less than the official figure established each year by the Commission. If an employment contract concluded a few years ago recognizes a salary that is currently below the minimum wage imposed in 2026, the minimum wage will prevail, since its objective is for employees to update their purchasing power. The salary that appears in the employment contract loses its validity. In that case, the salary increase is not a benefit that the company grants to the employee, but rather a legal obligation. On the other hand, if the salary indicated in the employment contract still remains above the minimum wage, the employer does not have to increase it, unless individual or collective increases are agreed upon with the workers. In that case, the increases are the result of voluntary negotiation by the company to improve the working conditions of its staff. In Xataka | Airbnb and digital nomads brought dollars to Mexico City: they have also brought the biggest housing crisis in years Image | Unsplash (Jesus Herrera, Arron Choi)

In full blackout throughout Spain and confusion among the population, an alert system shone for its absence: Es-Alert

April 29, 2025 by usatoday24

Yesterday we attend an unprecedented event in our country. From one moment to another and in a matter of five seconds, 60% of all energy vanisheddisappeared. The entire peninsula ran out of light. The reasons are unknown how it was unknown in certain points of Spain that the blackout had been general. The light fell, ergo the wifi. Telecommunications, mobile networks fell, and networks were saturated. Contact family and friends to know if they were fine was an odyssey, as was accessing to the media and social networks to inform themselves of the last hour. No one knew what was happening, its reach, the reasons or the state of the situation. In such a context, it is worth asking what happened to Es-alertthe emergency alert system. Who is-alert depends on. The Civil Protection alerts system was launched on February 22, 2023 and serves to send notices to all mobile phones within an affected area. It is integrated into the national alert network and, therefore, is managed by the Ministry of Interior through the National Center for Emergency Monitoring and Coordination (CENEM) of the General Directorate of Civil Protection. Notice example received through the ES-Alert system | Image: mobile xataka This system is known as “112 inverse” and is available in “any part of the Spanish territory with mobile telephony coverage, either 2G (GSM), 3G (UMTS), 4G (LTE) or 5G”, as They explained from Moncloa The day of its launch. Civil protection, meanwhile, exposes that “the ES-ALErt system is available to the Emergency Coordination Centers of the Autonomous Communities in the framework of the National Civil Protection System” and that these centers, together with the aforementioned CENEM, are the “responsible, within their area of competence, to define and issue the alerts when the situation requires it.” In a nutshell, that competition falls to the Autonomous Communities. What situations is used? According to Moncloa, Es-Alert is designed for phenomena such as “floods, fires, adverse meteorological phenomena, volcanic or chemical accidents, among other emergencies.” The question is what happens to this system when there is no electricity, when telecommunications are falling and a very high percentage of the population has no coverage. A mobile will not receive the notice if it has no coverage or is in plane mode, although it will do so when you recover the signal The networks worked (a time). The mobile network remained active for a while thanks, in part, emergency generators. VodafoneMasorange and Telefónica They have confirmed that although the blackout had affected telecommunications services and the mobile network, part of the system had supply thanks to electric generators and batteries. Es -Elert depends on that infrastructure to work, the question is whether it would have been effective. Lights and shadows. While it is true that Es-Alert is practically agnostic to the device and the version of the operating system, its effectiveness depends on the fact that there is electricity and that the receiving phones have coverage. Assuming that the ES-Alert system was available (because as we already know, there was no electricity supply), the reality is that an important thickness of the population would not have received the warning at the time because it did not have coverage. They would have received it when recovering the signal in the event that the emergency remained active in the area, but there is no guarantees that, by then, the notice would have been useful. Image | Fré Sonneveld Social networks. Public entities and organizations, which They urged the user to save battery and limit the use of mobilethey made their official communications through social networks such as X. Access not only to this social network, but to the media that echoed this information, it was not always possible due to the lack of coverage and mobile data network. The always eternal radio. The best informed citizen yesterday was the one who had a ancient operational radio thanks to two AA batteries. The radio works independently that there is coverage, mobile network or wifi. Emergency equipment They do not communicate by Walkie-Talkies By custom, but because in a fire in which everything has fallen, the radio will continue to function. If the broadcaster and the receiving device work, there is communication, and that is what happened precisely yesterday. The radios continued to function and counting the last hour of the blackout, which shows that an invention of the late nineteenth century is still important in the middle of 2025. Cover image | Pere Jury In Xataka | Cercanías, Media and Long Distance, High Speed and Metro: This is the situation of trains in Spain after the blackout

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