Though activities in the informal sector are often illegal, its growth allows the urban economy to absorb increasing numbers of rural workers migrating to cities.  Larger corporations benefit by subcontracting their work out to a largely female workforce that cannot find other employment.  Low wages and flexibility attract a growing number of multinational and foreign firms to the Mexican informal sector.  According to a 1981 study of women involved with industrial homework in Mexico City, women who participated in the informal sector were paid on the average less than one third of the minimum wage.  In the same study, Benería notes, "[t]o the extent that wages more than compensate for lower productivity, labor costs are reduced and the rate of exploitation is higher" (180).

 Benería goes on to state:
 

From labor's perspective, decentralized production under the circumstances described by our study implies a recomposition of the industrial working class (or a new composition) to include more marginal workers and, especially, more women.  This process takes place in such a way that it intensifies labor's weaknesses rather than its strengths, a situation fostered by low wages, poor working conditions, and a low degree of job stability.  The invisibility to which workers are subject makes them politically, if not economically, marginal.  In fact, this sector is built precisely on labor's general vulnerability.  This is particularly the case for women, heavily represented at the lower echelons of subcontracting and typified by the low earnings and precarious working conditions prevalent in domestic maquila (185).