Projections are that the 2015 Ciudad Juarez labor market is poised for expansion.

Despite the fact that close to 3000 jobs were eliminated in the city’s maquiladora sector in the closing months of 2014, the 2015 Ciudad Juarez labor market is poised to replicate, or exceed, last year’s overall positive performance.

According to figures published by INDEX Ciudad Juarez, (INDEX Juarez is the local chapter of the Mexico’s National Maquiladora Industry Association), at the end of 2014, the maquiladora industry in the city employed a total of 253,433 workers. This number included 27,128 individuals that were added to the maquiladora industry’s workforce during the preceding twelve months of the year. In considerable part, it is maquiladora industry employment that serves as the locomotive that will pull the 2015 Ciudad Juarez labor market forward.

Last year’s numbers stand in stark contrast to those registered during the depths of the recession of final years of the last decade, when, in 2008, the Ciudad Juarez labor market suffered significant job losses that included 52,637 maquiladora industry positions. Annual job loss/gain totals returned to the black in 2010. With the exception of a dip evidenced in 2012, renewed economic growth has had a positive affect on job creation on industry in Ciudad Juarez in recent years. Industry experts, such as the current president of INDEX in Ciudad Juarez, Jose Yarahuan Galindo, attribute the amelioration of economic conditions in the city’s industrial sector to stabilization and resumed economic growth in the US economomy.

As a result of the increased level of employment in the city, and the subsequent recent tightening of the Ciudad Juarez labor market, Mexico’s Comisión Nacional de los Salarios Mínimos (Consami), or National Minimum Wage Commission, announced in December that within a geographic zone, which includes Ciudad Juarez, the area’s daily minimum wage would be raised from MX $67.29 to MX $70.10 as of January 1, 2015. This represents an increase of 4.2%. Currentl one Mexican Peso is the equivalent of .069 US dollars.

While INDEX, local economic promotion agencies and private businesses anticipate robust activity in the  2015 Ciudad Juarez labor market, Mexico’s National Chamber of Industries, known by its Spanish acronym, Concamin, expects a nationwide consolidation of economic gains made during 2014. In addition to manufacturing growth, Concamin economists anticipate an increase in activity in the country’s construction, and an accelerated pace of growth in the production of goods destined for export. Much of the gains made in the Ciudad Juarez labor market in 2015, as well as throughout the entirety of Mexico will result from an increase in the value of the country’s non-petroleum exports.