Global Talent #56

Brought to you by Lundi: we design, hire, and run international teams.

🔥 Opening Shot

Somewhere in a drawer you have a spreadsheet with country names down the side and an hourly rate next to each one. It was accurate the day someone built it. That was the last day it was accurate.

Three stories this month make the point. Colombia raised the Sunday premium to 90 percent on July 1, then cut the legal workweek to 42 hours two weeks later. Same salaries, fewer hours, richer weekends: the per-hour math moved almost five points in one month. Ukraine, four and a half years into a full-scale war, grew IT exports again in the first half, with America as its biggest customer. And the companies that cut people for AI last year? Gartner expects half of those cuts to be quietly reversed by 2027, and plenty of the rebuilt roles will not land where the old ones sat.

The lesson never changes. A talent market is not a price list. It is a moving system, and it rewards whoever operates it and punishes whoever photographs it.

The rate card tells you where an hour was cheap last year. It does not tell you what that hour costs after a labor reform, which market keeps producing under stress, or where the boomerang roles should land next. Those answers change quarterly. Someone on your side of the table has to be watching, or you are not doing strategy. You are doing archaeology.

This Week's Number: 90% — the premium an employer in Colombia now pays on every Sunday and holiday hour, as of July 1. Next July it becomes 100%.

📌 On the Radar

1. Colombia repriced the weekend and the workweek in the same month.
On July 1 the surcharge for work on Sundays and holidays rose from 80% to 90% under Law 2466 of 2025, the third step in a published schedule that reaches 100% in July 2027. Two weeks later, on July 15, the maximum legal workweek dropped from 44 to 42 hours under the 2021 workweek law, with salaries untouched. Fewer statutory hours on the same pay means the base hourly cost of every monthly-salaried employee just rose almost 5% by arithmetic alone, before the weekend premium even enters the picture.

Colombia is still one of the best builds in the Americas: the time zones overlap with every US office, and the talent is real. That is not the issue. The issue is that the statutory cost of the same team moved twice in fifteen days, exactly as the law said it would, and most foreign employers I meet are still planning off a rate card from January. Employing people compliantly through a partner from day one is the right first move; it keeps every paycheck legal while the rules move. But redesigning shift patterns, weekend coverage, and overtime architecture under a 42-hour cap is operating work, and that is the half of the job an invoice never covers. The map did not just move. It moves again next July, on schedule, and the good operators are planning for that step now.

2. The market everyone wrote off grew again.
The IT Ukraine Association reported on August 6, on central bank data, that Ukraine's computer-services exports reached $3.34 billion in the first half of 2026, up 4.1% year on year. The United States is the biggest buyer at $1.23 billion, up 8.7%, and now takes 36.9% of the total; Poland's purchases grew 10.4%. The association's CEO says the sector has "moved beyond the survival stage and returned to a development trajectory."

I started Lundi in Kyiv, and I have watched people write this market off more times than I can count. Four and a half years into the war, the teams are still shipping, and the most demanding buyers in the world keep increasing their orders. There is a reason: the operating discipline that war forced on these companies, backup power, relocation plans, redundant connectivity, distributed leadership, is exactly the discipline most vendors never build in peacetime. The riskiest market is not the one in the headlines. It is the one you have not looked at since the headlines. Judge markets by their operating record, not their news cycle.

3. The AI layoffs are boomeranging. Watch where the roles land.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, half of the companies that attributed customer-service headcount cuts to AI will be rehiring for similar functions, often under different job titles; its own survey of service leaders found only 20% had actually reduced staffing because of AI in the first place. The summer's survey data points the same direction: outplacement firm Careerminds found roughly two-thirds of employers that cut for AI are already rehiring, with a third spending more on restaffing than the cuts saved, and Forrester expects many rebuilt roles to reappear offshore or at lower salaries.

The layoff got a press release. The rebuild happens quietly, under new titles, and increasingly in other countries. Here is the part that matters: the roles coming back are the judgment roles, the escalations and edge cases the automation could not hold, which means the rebuilt team needs to be better than the one that was cut. A company gets one inexpensive chance to rebuild that function properly, in the right market, with real employment and someone accountable for quality. Most companies are about to spend that chance improvising.

📊 Chart of the Week

Caption: Employer cost of one Sunday or holiday hour for a monthly-salaried employee in Colombia, holding salary constant, indexed to July 2024 = 100. Lundi calculation from the statutory schedules in Law 2101 of 2021 (workweek: 46 → 44 → 42 hours) and Law 2466 of 2025 (rest-day surcharge: 75% → 80% → 90% → 100%).

Two published schedules, one compounding effect. The workweek shrinks while the weekend premium climbs, so the same Sunday hour that cost 100 in mid-2024 costs 119 today and reaches about 125 next July. Nothing about this was a surprise; both laws printed their timetables years in advance. That is the real story for a CFO: this cost curve was knowable, plannable, and is still being discovered by finance teams one payroll cycle at a time.

🚀 One More Thing

I keep a live version of this country math for every market we operate in, because it goes stale faster than anyone expects. If your international plan still rests on a spreadsheet from January, bring it to a strategy session and we will mark it against reality: what an operated team actually costs now in the markets that fit your roles, and what changed this summer while nobody was watching. No pitch. Just insight from someone who has been there.

📖 New here? My book, Winning the Global Talent War, is the full playbook behind this newsletter.