Paraguay: Over 700,000 workers earn below minimum wage

Global labor poverty reduction has lost momentum, with the proportion of workers in extreme poverty falling only slightly between 2015 and 2025. The International Labour Organization (ILO) reported that this rate dropped to 7.9%, a stark contrast to the significant decrease seen in the preceding decade. Extreme labor poverty is defined as earning less than $3.00 daily, affecting approximately 284 million people globally in 2025.

The situation is particularly dire in low-income countries, where both extreme and moderate labor poverty have increased. Moderate labor poverty, defined as earning less than $4.20 daily, means that nearly 68% of workers in these nations struggle to meet basic needs. This trend highlights persistent income insufficiency for a substantial portion of the employed population, even amid post-pandemic labor market recovery.

Informality in the global labor market has also risen, increasing by 0.3 percentage points between 2015 and 2025. The ILO projects that 2.1 billion workers will be in informal employment by 2026. This rise is largely attributed to increased labor participation in countries with high levels of informality. Women have been disproportionately affected, with their global informality rate climbing from 54.8% in 2015 to 55.9% in 2025, while men's rates saw a slight decrease.

Paraguay's labor market faces similar challenges. Data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) for 2025 indicates that only 15.5% of salaried workers, or 269,485 individuals, earned at least the legal minimum wage. Conversely, approximately 40.2% of salaried workers, totaling about 701,776 people, received incomes below the minimum wage. These disparities are more pronounced in certain sectors, with only 3.6% of domestic workers earning the minimum wage, compared to 19.8% in the private sector and 5.6% in the public sector.