The construction of the minimum wage and nutrition in Mexico in the early 20th century

Abstract

La fijación de un salario mínimo vital puede no ser, como ya se habrá ido viendo, cosa de capricho, de cálculo, "a ojo de buen cubero". Hay bases bastantes en qué apoyarse para establecerlo de un modo científico" 1 . Francisco Zamora, 1933Abstract. Objective/Context: This article follows some of the debates around the creation of the minimum wage mandate in Mexico during the 1930s. I focus on how different actors used science to justify their demands, especially the need to use physiological and nutritional information to know the population's requirements. As a result, the heterogeneous way to fix the wages at the local (municipal) level changed with the proclamation of a federal mandate in the 1930s, using the most recent cost of living surveys, which included the nutritional requirements for the workers. Methodology: Following the methods used by the history of science, this article gives a panoramic view of the problems that existed before the federal minimum wage mandate and concerning the use of science as a legitimizing tool of the post-revolutionary state. Originality: This article makes a brief historical reconstruction of the minimum wage in the 1930s, and its federalization, which is absent from historiography, and proposes to articulate the history of science and its influence on economic and social accounts. Conclusions: This article shows how political and social projects-like the definition of a minimum wage-depended on science to obtain authority and, in turn, how these social projects provided inputs for the construction of specialized scientific lines of research.

Sense and Sensibility: a History of the Early Brazilian Cost-of-Living Indexes in Pursuit of a Minimum Wage, 1935–1939

“…Argentina took forty-two years to do so-despite the provincial experience of San Juan, in 1923 (p. 135). Mexico, in 1934, after enacting minimum wage legislation in 1917, seems to be the only Latin American country to have enforced the minimum wage before Brazil, in 1940(Vargas Domínguez 2023.…”

“…The closest exceptions are Berlinck (1964) and Del Vecchio and Diéguez (2008), which scrutinize the exercises of Davis and Lowrie within narratives about the early years of the ELSP, and Wells (1983aWells ( , 1983b, which rely on Davis's and Lowrie's estimates to evaluate the living standards of São Paulo's industrial workers between 1930 and1975. Alternatively, this article focuses both on the contributions of Davis, Lowrie, and Rudolfer to the measurement of the cost of living in Brazil and on their connections with the search for a minimum wage in the country, paying heed to the broader historical context and to the theoretical influences in action. This effort fits into the growing body of literature in the history of economics aimed at understanding the use of index numbers to observe and measure the cost of living, both in developed countries (Tooze 2001;Stapleford 2009;Searle 2015;Touchelay 2015;Jany-Catrice 2018) and in Latin America (Sember 2013;Lanata Briones 2021;Pohl-Valero and Vargas Domínguez 2021;Vargas Domínguez 2023).…”