Labor Law

Mexican employment is governed by a single federal statute, the Ley Federal del Trabajo, and it starts from a presumption that favors the worker: an employment relationship exists wherever personal subordinated work is performed, whatever the contract says, and dismissal without a legally recognized cause carries a statutory severance. Since the 2021 reform, subcontracting of personnel is prohibited and only specialized services outside the client’s core activity may be outsourced, through providers registered with the labor authority; the cost of getting that wrong lands on the client company, in tax and in labor terms.

The 2019 labor-justice reform moved disputes out of the old conciliation boards into mandatory pre-judicial conciliation and specialized labor courts, and required unions to prove genuine worker support for their collective agreements. Under the USMCA, labor rights at a specific facility can be challenged by a trading partner through a rapid-response mechanism, which has made union relations at foreign-owned plants a matter of trade compliance as well as domestic law.

We draft the employment architecture before the first hire: contracts and internal regulations, compensation schemes that survive an audit, the employer registrations and the specialized-services registry, and the union strategy for the plant. We then run the recurring front: profit-sharing, inspections by the labor authority, individual claims and collective negotiations, with the same discipline as the corporate and tax calendars.

What we cover

• 01Employment contracts, internal work rules and compensation structures
• 02Subcontracting compliance and specialized-services registry (REPSE)
• 03Union relations, collective bargaining and USMCA labor compliance
• 04Terminations, severance and individual labor claims
• 05Labor inspections and workplace-safety standards
• 06Profit-sharing (PTU), IMSS and INFONAVIT obligations