Overview
- President Claudia Sheinbaum and Labor Secretary Marath Bolaños presented the initiative after extensive consultations, framing it as overdue clarity on weekly limits not explicitly updated in more than a century.
- The government designates 2026 as a preparation year, with the first two-hour reduction scheduled for January 1, 2027, followed by gradual steps until reaching 40 hours in 2030.
- The proposal adds an electronic employer registry to log each employee’s start and end times and requires companies to provide this data to labor authorities upon request.
- Overtime rules would change by lifting the weekly cap from 9 to 12 hours, limiting triple-rate overtime to 4 hours per week, prohibiting minors from exceeding 40 hours, and protecting salaries from reduction.
- Labor and legal specialists warn of roughly 30% higher labor costs—particularly in manufacturing—and caution that systematic reliance on overtime could undermine the reform and trigger inspections and legal risks, while some opposition figures criticize the plan for keeping only one mandatory weekly rest day and delaying the reductions until 2027.