If The United Mexican States has a minimal labor wage of around $60.00 (pesos mexicanos) an 8-hour-labor day and some places of The USA have a minimal wage of around $8.00 (usa dollars) an hour, why is that the hand labor worths about the same, the adquisitive power is 10 times bigger in USA?
Your terminology is odd but it sounds like you are asking why the U.S. dollar is valued much higher than the Mexican peso. Is that right? Currency units are arbitrary and float up in down in value depending on the economic health and wealth of of the country. Mexico is fairly poor and the U.S. is rich. U.S. Dollars are one of the big world currencies along with the Euro. A U.S. dollar is simply worth more than a peso just because of what it represents.
so far not enough people from Mexico have been imported into America to force wages for manual work even further down. But our government is working on it. No joke.
As for the related question of why salaries historically rise in advanced countries in jobs where productivity growth has been minimal, one possible answer is Baumol effect - Wikipedia . Another possible answer is wealth redistribution driven by the government, unions, sense of common decency among the corporate management and other non-economic factors. All these factors can be quite powerful at times when society’s overall wealth increases massively due to productivity growth in unrelated fields and so there is plenty to share for everybody whether productive or otherwise, as happened in America in 1950s and again in 1990s.
What exactly do you mean by this? In terms of the minimum wage at least, I was pretty shocked to see that it’s currently $7.25 an hour - not living large by any means, but that’s more than 40% higher than it was when I had a high-school job 8 years ago ($5.15 / hour).
what does minimum wage have to do with actual wages paid to actual people working in America in manual jobs? You don’t suppose all of them make a minimum wage and above, now do you?
Besides, the pushing wages down bit can work perfectly well above minimum wage as well. Like I said - the pushing down wages continues, but it has not yet reached its natural outcome of making wages the same on both sides of Rio Grande.
Also, in response to the OP, notice that rents in Mexico are lower than in America. For a poor manual laborer the two major expense items are rent and food. Food probably costs about the same in both America and Mexico (and if you are willing to eat just rice and beans it costs quite little) but rents are lower in Mexico - so this means that you can subsist in Mexico on a much lower wage. Rents can be lower both via lower cost per square foot per month and also via the willingness to live in much more crowded conditions than is normal in America. The latter practice, incidentally, reputedly has been carried over to here by immigrants.
In Mexico the minimum wage varies by region. But even supposing the MX$60 per day, that’s only (at about 12:1) about US$5 per day, versus our “about” $8 per hour rate in states that choose to adopt the federal minimum wage, or businesses that must adhere to the federal minimum wage (seriously, it’s not cut and dry, and depends on the state except for certain business classes that meet interstate scrutiny).
On one hand, Mexico’s labor markets are much freer than in the USA. The biggest indicator is the minimum wage. In my (American) company in Mexico, we pay at least US$4 per hour (that’s actually livable, given the price of living). Of course, now does livable mean “you have two cars and three big screen TV’s”?
In other respects, Mexico’s markets are forbidden from participating in free trade. There’s the “canasta basica” (for example) that regulates the retail price of certain things, such as tortillas, certain types of bread, certain types of beans, and so on.
So if two evils – a minimum wage and market interference – are put together, Mexico can get along adequately in the short term at an unfree minimum wage with an unfree price control. To contrast, in the USA, there are no price controls (although subsidies do indirectly count) and so in order to maintain an illusion of “social justice” a nonfree minimum wage is instituted (to the detriment of the people in that class of work).